"I missed it," he tells GlobeSt.com. "I have a lot of great relationships in Downtown San Francisco with owners and lenders and brokers and I missed interacting with them on a daily basis."
Collenette says he also was away a lot on business, taking care of property investments throughout the West, and is enjoying the prospect of staying close to home for a while. Through Portico and other vehicles, Collenette was a general partner in over 20 western regional limited partnerships.
Collenette still has interest several apartment buildings in Las Vegas and Phoenix, as well as 211 Sutter, an 11-story, 40,000-square foot office-over-retail building in San Francisco. Loehmann's, a retailer, recently renewed its lease for the ground floor of the building for 20 years, while Collenette has been keeping an office in the penthouse.
Now, however, his focus is on Colliers. Collenette says he will look to grow the company's market share in the retail, multifamily and biotech/life sciences sectors, among other things.
"[Ownership] sees San Francisco as one of their major markets wherein they need to be the market leader," Colenette says. "My job is to help them accomplish that and we've got a great nucleus [of senior vice presidents that will make recruiting easier]. It's not as if I'm dealing with an operation that's not doing well and needs to be taken from scratch."
Collenette, a UK native, came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1984 to lead the regional office of Knowlton Realty. He ascended within Grubb & Ellis after it acquired his firm--Stubbs, Collenette and Associates--in 1996.
Collenette replaces former Colliers SF managing director Tom Lawwill. Lawill relocated back to his home town of Portland, OR, and is no longer with the Colliers organization.
Colliers San Francisco is part of CMN Inc., the largest franchisee in the the Colliers organization. CMN in turn is part of commercial real estate arm of First Service Corp. The publicly held conglomerate's CRE unit also includes FirstService Williams, PGP Property Valuation, PKF Hospitality Consulting, and MHPM Project Management.
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