JLL industrial broker Patrick Wood recalls the foreboding he felt at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when he sensed a downturn approaching that would bring his thriving business to a halt.
Wood and a young associate were driving back to the office after a meeting as a winter storm battered Southern California on a day in mid-March. The stock market had just plunged several hundred points amid worry about the spreading virus. San Francisco's London Breed became the state's first mayor to order all residents to stay at home, a move followed days later by California's first statewide lockdown.
"It was visceral," Wood recalled. "The stock market’s tanking, the state and the whole country are shutting down, it’s pouring rain. The atmosphere was perfectly matched to what was going on."
Wood remembered telling his young employee and others back at JLL's Inland Empire office in Ontario, California, not to panic.
"I told him, 'You’ve got to keep your head down,'" he said. "'Keep in mind that things are never as good as people say they are, and they're never as bad as they say they are.'"
Things were pretty bad. The men arrived in Ontario to find emails from JLL corporate headquarters that all offices were to be closed until further notice. Senior brokers were trying to comfort junior brokers and younger staff in the office.
Wood thought they'd be shut down for a week, maybe two weeks max.
"Obviously, we were all very wrong," he said, noting his biggest goal was to help the younger staff in the office hold off the inevitable feeling of insecurity.
"It really did feel like an atomic bomb had exploded, with a huge, big mushroom cloud of fear and uncertainty over your head," he said.
Except the blowup never came. As the 17-member staff began working from home and holding regular Zoom meetings, they began to see the cloud gradually dissipate. Activity slowed, but it did not stop, especially for large corporations with real estate deals in progress.
Three or four weeks later, "the market just took off," Wood said.
Record Year
Wood's team of seven senior brokers has since been riding the wave of steady demand for industrial space nationwide. Companies rushed to lease warehouses as business lockdowns and stay-at-home orders caused a larger-than-expected spike in home deliveries.
The activity has continued through the holidays and helped turn 2020 into a record year for Wood and his colleagues.
For instance, Wood and JLL colleagues Michael McCrary and Peter McWilliams recently worked with Daum Real Estate to lease a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Ontario, California, according to CoStar. The lease to high-end furniture retailer Restoration Hardware ranks as one of the five largest industrial leases in the Inland Empire this year, CoStar data shows.

That wasn't the case in the lean years not too long after Wood started out in industrial real estate with CBRE in the summer of 2006, his first job after graduating from college. In 2007, the United States fell into one of the worst recessions in history.
"I had six or seven deals blow up because corporate America hit the pause button in the Great Recession," he said. "I spent my first several years as a commission-only broker working through a brutal real estate market."
The experience during the pandemic has been a lot different, he said.
"No one hit pause because this is critical business for large multinational companies," he said. "Projects continued to move forward. That’s when we started to feel like this time, maybe it was going to be OK."
Wood recalled talking in April with the chief financial officer of a multinational company that was in the middle of an expansion and relocation, a client he can't name because of a confidentiality agreement.
"He said, 'We still have customers to serve and long-term objectives to meet. While this pandemic is causing disruption and distraction, we won’t let it cause us to lose sight of our bigger picture,'” Wood said.
The JLL team finished the deal for that client in November.
Southern California's Inland Empire, one of the nation's top industrial markets, set a record for the amount of warehouse space leased during a single quarter in the three months ended Sept. 30. That came as e-commerce sales reported by the U.S. Census Bureau surged a staggering 45% in the first half of 2020, according to JLL's latest market report.
That's quite an achievement in a market where companies have leased more than 50 million square feet a year on average for the past several years, according to CoStar.
Looking back at the beginning of the year, Wood noted he had no idea what to expect, but couldn't have predicted anything like this.
"Nobody knew how long this was going to last, what the effect on our business and lives was going to be," he said. "I think cutting my teeth in the business during the Great Recession taught me to not take the good times for granted and don’t panic during the bad times."
Now, his team's biggest professional worry is that they will run out of available space to sell or lease next year as companies snap up warehouses faster than developers can build them.
"Everyone’s workload is not quite but almost unmanageable," said Wood. "We’ve probably never been busier over the past decade on all sides of the business."