Steffen Kammerer's career evolution of late is aligning with the artificial intelligence surge that's driving a real estate rebound in California and beyond.
Kammerer joined CBRE, the world's biggest real estate services firm, from Colliers as a senior managing director in Silicon Valley back in 2023. That was in the depths of the post-pandemic real estate reset that hit the San Francisco Bay Area especially hard.
But Kammerer is a big-picture guy. He reasoned that when the market inevitably turned around, CBRE was best positioned to ride the wave of the region's next tech boom. Kammerer, a onetime web developer, has since been promoted twice and is now taking on his biggest role yet to help advise deals that go beyond the scope of AI.
As executive managing director for Northern California, Kammerer will oversee the strategic direction and performance of CBRE’s leasing, sales, debt and structured finance, valuation and property management across 10 offices spanning the Bay Area, Sacramento, the Central Valley and Reno, Nevada.
He's also representative of executives across corporate America who are benefiting with a digital background and expertise as AI assumes more importance. AI is clearly the "topic of the hour" driving growth in these regions and beyond, Kammerer acknowledged, but a diverse array of tech companies and industries is feeding that expansion. That includes innovative energy firms devising new ways to power data centers as well as robotics outfits, semiconductor manufacturers, financial service providers and law firms.
"My role is to find the opportunities to capitalize on an improving market," Kammerer told CoStar News.
His new job comes as AI companies — ranging from giants Anthropic and OpenAI to smaller startups — are leading real estate activity in San Francisco. That boom has also spread throughout the Bay Area to bolster advanced manufacturing hubs such as Fremont.
Beyond Silicon Valley, a scattering of deals has pushed the growing sense of optimism that tech companies, after years of dormant leasing activity, are gradually returning to the national office landscape and helping send leasing volume to levels that finally match the activity seen before the pandemic.
Kammerer's region is broader along with his daily duties. This is a different job than focusing on deals and day-to-day broker issues. But even local markets don't operate in silos, he said.
"A submarket in the Central Valley is not a standalone beast," Kammerer said. "It's tied to the activity we're seeing in San Francisco and Silicon Valley."
Digital developer start
Kammerer comes from a real estate family. His father, Craig Kammerer, is an executive managing director at JLL.
Upon graduating from the University of Washington, the younger Kammerer did a three-year stint as a developer for the digital consulting firm SolutionSet. Then he opted to follow in his father's footsteps into the real estate industry, joining JLL. He spent more than a decade there, leading the firm's national technology practice group. In 2021 he jumped to Colliers, where he led the company's San Francisco Bay Area market operations until almost three years ago.
Now, a flurry of deals among a spectrum of established companies and fast-growing startups has resulted in the global tech capital reporting its highest quarterly leasing volume since 2022, according to CoStar research.
Last summer, Kammerer stepped into a role overseeing 100 brokers across the nation's tech hub from CBRE's San Jose office, involving advisory services in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto and Burlingame.
Joe Wallace, the firm’s president of advisory services in Northern California, said at the time that Kammerer had made "a tremendous impact in a short period while leading one of the highest performing offices in CBRE’s global network."
Now Kammerer is taking over for Wallace, who's moving east to assume another role.