CBRE’s Laurie Lustig-Bower and Tim Bower have enjoyed a long journey through L.A. commercial real estate, but the trip is coming to an end.
The married couple will retire together this month from CBRE’s Century City office where they met 33 years ago, according to the brokerage.
Lustig-Bower leads a seven-person multifamily investment sales team that has handled $12 billion in deals over the past two decades. On a few deals over the years, she joined forces with her husband, a senior vice president specializing in West Los Angeles retail development and leasing.
“Now I can focus on smelling the roses,” Lustig-Bower said. “I want to spend regular time with family. Or maybe I’ll see if there’s a hobby I can do.”
Real estate romance
Lustig-Bower has participated in the ups and downs of the Southern California commercial market. For example, she sold the former Robinsons-May department store at 9900 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills not once, but twice. First, it traded for $500 million in 2007 to London-based Candy & Candy. Then, as the market emerged from the 2008 financial crisis, Lustig-Bower brokered a deal with Wanda Group, a Chinese investment firm, that bought the same property in 2014 for $420 million.
As a broker, she almost never stops working, even at the hair salon, she grudgingly admits.
The couple met in front of the elevators outside CBRE’s office in 1991. That year marked the beginning of a tumultuous decade for the L.A. market. The Rodney King riots in 1992, followed by the savings and loan crisis, hit Southern California commercial real estate hard.
And Sears had recently sold CBRE — then known as Coldwell Banker — to Carlyle Group. The new owners hastily consolidated the firm’s Los Angeles locations, uniting husband- and wife-to-be in the same office.
There, Lustig-Bower was a rising star, and would soon be at the helm of the top-producing team in the brokerage’s private capital group.
Bower, for his part, had to go through 16 interviews before CBRE hired him in 1984. It started him down a similar path as his father, a veteran property manager for Coldwell Banker’s Beverly Hills office.
But instead, Bower took an opening to become what he described as “a retail guy.” He went on to pioneer mixed-use development in Hollywood and Koreatown in later decades.
Meanwhile, the firm plucked Lustig-Bower from relative anonymity in 1988 after she decided to switch careers. She’d proven adept at selling hospital lab equipment for healthcare giant Baxter International, her first job after graduating from the USC Marshall School of Business.
But she had her heart set on selling real estate.
“CBRE matched the culture that I was coming from,” Lustig-Bower explained. “It was very much a blue chip, suited-up atmosphere with a great reputation and a global platform.”
She worked for three years under David Norcott, a high-powered broker with no qualms about inviting a woman to join his team.
It was a crucial opportunity for Lustig-Bower, since young women in commercial real estate had just one main role model in Southern California at the time: CBRE’s Darla Longo.
“I remember meeting Laurie when she was starting her career,” Longo said. “We sat down, and she asked a lot of questions. She wanted to know, ‘how did you do it?’”
Lustig-Bower was “one of those people who listened,” Longo said. “Don’t let the noise around you stop you from what you should do. That was always my attitude, and she took that to heart.”
What Longo didn’t know was that Lustig-Bower had waited patiently for a year before making the trek to the Inland Empire — where Longo still works in the industrial market — for that lunch meeting.
The wait would ensure she “could ask proper questions,” she explained.
“My goal was to be on whatever list Darla was on,” she said. “She was a real inspiration.”
The couple married in 1999 and continued building their career momentum.
Land deals
Lustig-Bower moved into the land market as values rose in the early 2000s and attracted foreign buyers. In 2014, she sold the 6.3-acre Metropolis development site in Downtown Los Angeles to Greenland USA, a Chinese megadeveloper, for $150 million.
And she’s no stranger to the luxury multifamily market. In Santa Monica, Lustig-Bower arranged the $70 million sale of 301 Ocean Avenue in 2021, fetching $1.8 million per unit.
Bower meanwhile has brokered sales of such L.A. icons as the Hollywood Palladium and the El Capitan Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Despite divergent specialties, the couple has teamed up on a few deals over the decades. They include the sale and redevelopment of the 75,500-square-foot former House of Blues site in West Hollywood, where Pendry Hotel & Residences opened in 2021.
It’s harder to sell development sites in Los Angeles in the current according to Lustig-Bower.
“It’s so expensive to build right now that we can’t always make the numbers work,” she said. “Even if the land is empty and there’s nothing on it, it’s really a challenge to sell land right now. The costs are so high.”
Interest rates are the other impediment, and Bower said he expects investment sales to remain muted until cap rates rise enough to offset the negative leverage many prospective buyers experience in the market.
Lustig-Bower will officially pass her mantle to Kadie Presley Wilson and Kamran Paydar, first vice presidents on her seven-person sales squad, but she will continue in an advisory capacity as needed.
As for the immediate future, the couple is headed to New Zealand for some fun.
“We’ve got lots of travel plans,” Bower said. “We like weekend getaways, and now we’re going to be able to do those on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. If we want to go to Antarctica, you know, it’s not out of reach.”