The Enterprise
Cresa, a Boston-based firm that is the largest company in North America to represent only tenants in commercial real estate transactions, has entered the Utah market with an office in Salt Lake City. It becomes the only company of its kind in the Beehive State.
Two established industry veterans have combined to launch Cresa’s office at 1240 E. 2100 S., Suite 300. Paul Anderson, founder of Work/Place Solutions LLC, Salt Lake’s only tenant advisory boutique, has joined forces with Paul Skene, who brings 24 years of commercial real estate experience, formerly at CB Richard Ellis and Cushman & Wakefield. They will be co-managing principals of Cresa Salt Lake City.
“Paul and I were partners at CB Richard Ellis, so we have a track record of working together and I think the world of his skill set and his experience in this market,” Anderson said. “We’ll bring something to the market that I wasn’t necessarily able to provide with Work/Place Solutions, which I’m folding into Cresa. It’s just me and Paul at this point, but we anticipate some growth.”
Anderson said the two biggest reasons he thinks Cresa will flourish in Utah are that fact that it is conflict-free and that it can offer a host of integrated services to tenants of all sizes.
“Every large or medium sized brokerage company here represents both landlords and tenants,” he said. “We are completely unconflicted. We can in a very unbiased way represent the interest of the tenant only. With Cresa, we have fully integrated services; we can help tenants with everything from strategic planning to site selection to transaction management to post transaction project management. We offer facilities management. We’re not property managers; what we’ll do is help companies that manage their facilities do that better. There are tenants with triple-net leases. We have experts in that field within the organization. We offer workforce and relocation planning, we do a lot of lease administration for larger companies with a lot of leases that want to make sure everything gets paid on time and they’re not overpaying for operating expenses, etc. We have some capital markets capacity. Sublease and disposition is the only time we’d ever have a listing because we don’t do any agency work. But if we have a tenant that needs to dispose of space we have the capacity to market and sublease it.
“Salt Lake is a fast growing marketplace for commercial real estate for tenants. There are an incredible number of inbound tenants from outside this market. We’re seeing that particularly in the south end of the valley, Point of the Mountain, where you’ve got a lot of large tech companies, particularly from the Bay Area, moving here. Salt Lake is really on the radar screen of so many companies, and it’s not just inbound business but companies based here. Real estate is an important component of the operations of a company.”
Anderson said he expects to be “fairly aggressive in marketing and educating the community that we exist. Paul and I see the vast majority of the growth in business that we are able to procure here in Salt Lake. Obviously, Cresa is going to have some requirements coming into Salt Lake, but we certainly don’t see that as a major piece of our revenue. We really see organic growth in this market as the big driver to our revenue.”
He added that Cresa agents are traditionally compensated by the fee generated by transactions.
With the addition of Salt Lake City, Cresa now has 57 North American locations. Through its partnership with Savills, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate services firms, Cresa covers more than 255 locations in 40 countries. The company was formed in 1993 and employs more than 800 people.




















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