As San Francisco continues its AI-fueled post-pandemic real estate comeback, CBRE has promoted broker duo Mike Taquino and Kyle Kovac to head the real estate services firm’s office capital markets team in the Bay Area.
Taquino and Kovac will serve as co-heads of the regional platform, guiding its strategic growth while continuing to advise institutional investors, developers and owners on office, R&D, life science and land assets.
CBRE recruited the pair in 2018 from what was then Newmark Knight Frank to help bolster its capital markets business. During the city’s last tech boom, Taquino and Kovac had become known as some of San Francisco’s most successful office, retail and development site brokers, with a hand in numerous big-ticket sales of downtown office buildings.
Both are members of CBRE’s National Office Partners platform, which consists of some 40 dedicated office professionals across 22 major markets. Altogether, they have advised clients on more than $30 billion in commercial real estate transactions over nearly two decades, according to CBRE.
They’ve since been behind “many of the region’s most significant commercial real estate transactions” and maintain deep relationships with both domestic and international investor networks, the firm said in a press release.
Mike Taquino (CBRE)
This year, Taquino and Kovac were tapped by lenders Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase to handle the sale of the shuttered nine-story downtown mall now known as the San Francisco Centre & Emporium, a 1.2-million-square-foot retail property that closed this year after suffering a long demise. Two developers, Presidio Bay Ventures and the Prado Group, were awarded the exclusive right to purchase the mall, which hit the market back in November as a “blank canvas” for some sort of mixed-use redevelopment project with homes, hotels, education and entertainment.
CBRE pitched the 1980s-era mall as a “unique platform for large-scale reinvention” that Kovac described as “uniquely positioned to anchor the next chapter in downtown San Francisco’s recovery.”
In 2021, PG&E tapped their team to sell its 1.9 million-square-foot San Francisco office campus, which ultimately traded for $800 million, marking one of the largest property sales in the city’s history.
San Francisco is starting to sparkle again with the onslaught of artificial intelligence startups and workers returning to the city center after several years of economic doldrums.
“The San Francisco Bay Area has long been the global epicenter of innovation and technology, and the rise of artificial intelligence only further reinforces its importance,” Kovac said in a recent statement. “We’re excited to continue growing CBRE’s Capital Markets platform while helping our clients capitalize on opportunities across this incredibly dynamic region.”
Taquino and Kovac, both executive vice presidents, will also continue working closely with CBRE’s regional debt and structured finance leaders, Brad Zampa and Mike Walker.
“Mike and Kyle are highly respected leaders in the Bay Area investment market, and their combined expertise and long-standing client relationships make them exceptionally well-suited to co-lead our institutional sales platform,” said Joe Wallace, president of CBRE’s advisory services in Northern California and Reno, Nevada. “Their leadership, coupled with the expanded team, positions us to deliver even greater value for clients navigating a dynamic capital markets environment.”