CBRE has promoted a member of its San Francisco Bay Area technology team to vice chair, a title reserved for the firm’s most productive brokers.
As a member of the executive committee of CBRE’s Technology and Media Practice Group, formed to address the needs of fast-growing companies in those high-profile sectors, Luke Ogelsby has worked with startups as well as Fortune 500 companies, according to a company statement.
Ogelsby, who joined the firm more than 20 years ago as part of a real estate training program, has since become one of its most productive brokers in the Bay Area. He has been ranked among the top five professionals in San Francisco and a top 10 producer in the Bay Area. His work has been “at the center of establishing San Francisco and the Bay Area as a global innovation hub and magnet for tech talent,” said the firm.
“His ingenuity, creativity and commitment to excellence has consistently resulted in outstanding client outcomes,” said Executive Vice President Darin Bosch in a post on Linkedin.
Ogelsby has handled both landlord and tenant representation, working with office and industrial properties. In 2022, he represented payment management services provider Finix in its move to a new headquarters at 631 Howard St. in San Francisco. More recently, he was on the team that represented cloud-based data storage company Snowflake in one of the region’s biggest office expansions of the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the firm agreed in December to sublease a three-building office campus in Menlo Park, California, from fellow tech giant Meta.
That deal fed a growing sense of optimism that tech companies, after years of dormant leasing activity, are gradually returning to the national office landscape. Total leasing volume in the fourth quarter of 2024 in San Francisco topped 3.5 million square feet, the second-highest quarterly amount since the pandemic's 2020 onset and the highest since the third quarter of 2021, according to a CoStar analysis, as firms such as Robinhood and Lyft signed or renewed leases.
The tech industry accounted for almost 20% of the total office leasing activity nationwide during the first three quarters of 2024, according to CBRE.