CBRE has promoted a onetime web developer to a senior position overseeing a team of more than 100 brokers in the Bay Area's tech hub as Silicon Valley starts to show signs of a real estate rebound.
CBRE, the world's second-largest real estate services firm by revenue, said Steffen Kammerer will take over as executive managing director in its San Jose, California, office, adding oversight of the company’s offices in Palo Alto and Burlingame. Kammerer also will oversee several business lines in the region including leasing, property sales, capital markets, and debt and structured finance, the firm said.
Since joining CBRE two years ago, Kammerer has expanded the firm’s Silicon Valley office and industrial real estate teams. He has developed new management tools and shaped key business initiatives, CBRE said.
“Steffen has made a tremendous impact in a short period while leading one of the highest performing offices in CBRE’s global network," said Joe Wallace, the real estate services firm’s president of advisory services in Northern California, in a statement.
Kammerer comes from a real estate family. His father, Craig Kammerer, is an executive managing director at JLL.
After a three-year stint as a self-taught developer in the technology industry, Steffen Kammerer opted to follow in the elder Kammerer’s footsteps, joining JLL. He spent a decade there, where he led JLL's national technology practice group. In 2021 he jumped to Colliers, where he led the firm’s San Francisco Bay Area market operations.
He joined CBRE in 2023, just as Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay Area endured soaring office vacancy rates and depressed commercial real estate sales amid rising interest rates and tech giants' mass shedding of workers and space.
Comeback on horizon
Kammerer told San Francisco Business Times at the time that when the market bounced back, CBRE was poised to do well as one of the leading firms in the market and that the opportunity to work for the firm was “too good to pass up.”
“When the market inevitably shifts, it will prove to be a gold rush for those focused on growth,” he told the publication.
Two years later, there are some signs that the Silicon Valley market is starting to stabilize as companies such as Apple, LinkedIn, Walmart and Amazon commit to larger blocks of space for longer periods as they appear more willing to return to their pre-pandemic days of real estate expansions.
LinkedIn, for example, recently closed a $75 million deal to purchase a 120,000-square-foot property in Sunnyvale. Walmart last month inked one of the San Francisco Bay Area's largest post-pandemic office leases. And Amazon has rapidly ramped up its partnership with coworking operator WeWork to add roughly 141,000 square feet to its Silicon Valley footprint.
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.
Leasing by tech companies across the United States rose by more than 21% through the first quarter compared to the same period in 2024, according to CBRE data. The spike was centered on nearly 8 million square feet of deals and represented a roughly 16.5% share of total office leasing volume nationally, according to CBRE.
The activity builds on the momentum tech companies generated last year when their leasing accounted for about 18% of all U.S. leasing. That was up from a little more than 14% of the total national leasing volume in 2023, according to CBRE, a possible signal of the industry's renewed demand for office space.