Bay Area Commercial Brokerage Teams Switch Sides

Colliers boosted its East Bay team with the hiring of a four-person salesforce at the Oakland office. The new team of Charlie Allen (executive vice president), Anthony Shell (executive vice president), Amber Merrigan (senior vice president), and David Goldberg (associate vice president) will focus on landlord representation in the East Bay and tenant representation both regionally, nationally and internationally.

The team brings a collective total of 60 years of commercial real estate in various sectors. Prior to joining Colliers, Allen, Shell, Merrigan and Goldberg led the Oakland office for Avison Young. Their specialities include corporate office space consulting, brokerage services and office workspace and hybrid work strategies.

Allen specializes in corporate office space consulting and leasing services, as well as East Bay agency representation, while Shell focuses on representation for office and life science tenants, as well as institutional landlords throughout the Bay Area.

Merrigan specializes in consulting and advising clients on the development and implementation of workplace strategy for office and R&D/flex users, as well as agency branding and leasing. Goldberg specializes in both tenant and landlord representation across multiple property types.

➤Kidder Mathews bolstered its Bay Area presence with the hiring of former Marcus & Millichap executives. Louis Kwok and Gabriel Sahagun have joined the brokerages’ Pleasanton office, and Ed Vergara has joined the firm in Silicon Valley. The team specializes in multifamily investment sales throughout the Bay Area.

Vergara joins Kidder Mathews as first vice president, and has more than 25 years in the business. Also joining as first vice president, Kwok has nearly a decade of experience specializing in multifamily properties with a focus on the East Bay and Silicon Valley. Sahagun, an associate, focuses on multifamily properties in San Francisco and the East Bay.

➤Deniz Kahramener, a residential agent in San Francisco and founder of Atlasa, has teamed with a tech firm to offer a “Brokerage-as-a-Service” model for agents.

Pinnacle Realty Advisors, established in 2020, is a cloud-based real estate brokerage company that offers the BaaS service. The firm provides brokerage services and agent support, on a subscription-based financial model. Pinnacle just entered the California market after primarily focusing on Southern states.

Kahramener’s team was the first to join Pinnacle in California and is ranked 11th in San Francisco with a sales volume of $90 million in 2022.

➤Newmark is shaking up its leadership team with the hiring of Christina Clark as vice chairman at the San Francisco office. Clark will assist in expanding tenant representation globally.

She will take over for Liz Hart, who was recently promoted to head of leasing for North America.

Prior to joining Newmark, Clark was a managing principal at Cresa, where she focused on representing tenants in the tech sector. Her past clients include Meta, Airbnb and Headspace. While tech will remain a focus for her, her client base will now include the financial, legal and biotechnology sectors.

➤TMG Partners has brought on Matt Luna as a senior associate. He will participate in due diligence and financial analyses of TMG’s real estate projects with a focus on acquisition and disposition strategies.
Before joining TMG, Luna spent three years at San Francisco-based Eastdil Secured focusing on office and life science equity sales, participating in the closing of more than $11 billion across various disciplines and property types. He also has experience at Northmarq where he specialized in debt and equity placements for multifamily, office, retail, and industrial.