JLL has hired broker Gregg von Thaden as it continues to look to the artificial intelligence industry to rejuvenate Silicon Valley's post-pandemic office market.
The veteran broker has joined the firm as an executive managing director working out JLL's Menlo Park, California, office as well as at its newest location at San Jose’s popular mixed-use Santana Row project, which it opened last summer. Von Thadden will focus on leasing and sales for office and research and development properties in the region, the company said in a press release.
Von Thadden joined JLL from Avison Young, where he helped establish the firm's Silicon Valley outlet, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he spent 26 years at Colliers. He has more than 30 years of experience in the Silicon Valley market, where he gained "vast experience working with high tech companies, on both the leasing and purchase acquisition of real estate," JLL said.
The move marks the company's ninth new hire in Silicon Valley since last summer. JLL, the world’s second-largest brokerage by revenue, is looking to gain a foothold in representing artificial intelligence start-ups, an industry that has been a real estate bright spot in the San Francisco Bay Area. The region's office markets have registered some of the nation's highest vacancy rates in recent years in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and job cuts by tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
In October, the global brokerage acquired Raise Commercial Real Estate and its tech-powered leasing platform, including 84 employees and 25 brokers at Raise's corporate headquarters in San Francisco as well as offices in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto, Denver, Los Angeles and New York City. The acquisition added seasoned brokers as well as software engineers who built and operate Raise’s lease management platform.
Raise made headlines in 2023 by representing OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in its deal to sublease two buildings totaling a half-million square feet at 1455 and 1515 Third St. in San Francisco from rideshare giant Uber. OpenAI has since expanded to occupy about 1 million square feet in the city.
The company's JLL Technologies division last year rolled out JLL GPT, a custom-built platform that the brokerage said is the first large-language model built specifically for the commercial property industry. The firm also boosted its Silicon Valley presence by leasing two floors at 356 Santana Row for its new San Jose office and hired seven new brokers to work there, including executives from Colliers and Cushman & Wakefield.
The news of this latest hire comes as San Jose shows signs of leading a nascent recovery in the Bay Area’s office market, according to a recent CoStar analysis. While the vacancy rate remained little changed from 2024 in the first quarter of the year at 15.3%, the office availability rate in the region declined to 17.4% in the first quarter after peaking at 19.1% at the end of 2023. The reduced availability suggests that San Jose's office sector is ahead of San Francisco's office market, where the availability rate has flattened over the past year but has yet to fall, wrote Nigel Huges, a senior director of market analytics at CoStar.