After spending 13 years executing debt and equity transactions for JLL in San Francisco, broker Chris Gandy has moved to Salt Lake City to lead the firm's investment sales and financing team in a city that has seen a drop in transaction volume in several property types.

JLL said it appointed Gandy, a senior managing director, as head of its Salt Lake City capital markets team. He's relocated to the Utah capital from San Francisco, where he worked the past 13 years for HFF and then JLL after it acquired HFF in 2019. In his new role Gandy oversees the investment sales and debt and equity advisory businesses across the Salt Lake City region and reports to Jody Thornton, president of JLL capital markets for the Americas.

Thornton said Gandy has been "a prolific producer in our San Francisco office" and that he will play a key role in growing JLL's capital markets operation in Salt Lake City. "We look forward to significantly growing this business in the years to come," she said in a statement.

Gandy begins his new role in a market that has seen investment sales and debt transactions decline, as they have in regions across the United States as economic uncertainty continues to swirl. The country's capital markets remain tight, especially as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Late last month, the central bank increased the federal funds rate for the 11th time since about 18 months in an attempt to reduce inflation and reduce liquidity in the financial markets.

Salt Lake City's multifamily market has been hit particularly hard, with only a handful of properties trading so far this year, according to CoStar data. Utah is a non-disclosure state, so sales prices of commercial property transactions are not made publicly available. "Salt Lake City typically draws investor interest from across the country, but rising interest rates have cooled this trend here and in many other markets," a recent report from CoStar Market Analytics said.

Sales of office properties in the Salt Lake City market, which cooled greatly in 2022, have started the year at similarly to last year's lower levels, according to CoStar. "Work-from-home and rightsizing trends have dampened office investment across the country, even in an outperforming economy with a wide base of office-using employment like Salt Lake City," the report said. "Although Utah's non-disclosure status tends to cloud the investment picture, at least $102 million worth of office assets have traded in the past 12 months."

However, sales of industrial properties in Salt Lake City show signs of a rebound as second-quarter sales increased to $61.5 million, up 50% from the $41 million of properties traded in the first quarter, according to estimates from CoStar.

Gandy, who's completed commercial property transactions with an aggregate volume of more than $12 billion in transactions during his 15-year career, said he looks forward to building JLL's capital markets business in Salt Lake City and the U.S.' Intermountain West region. In a statement, Gandy said he is energized "by the opportunity to lead the JLL capital markets team in one of the fastest growing markets in the country."