Cresa Hires Former JLL Broker and WeWork Director Cara Trani to Lead Growth of San Francisco Operations

This article was originally published on CoStar News.

Global tenant representation firm Cresa hired Cara Trani, a former WeWork senior director and longtime JLL broker, as its market leader for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Trani, whose first real estate job with was Colliers International’s Sacramento office in 2005, spent about a decade at JLL’s occupier advisory group in San Francisco before joining WeWork as senior director in 2019.

She will lead the development and execution of the company’s growth in the key Bay Area market, including overseeing the company's Silicon Valley office formed in 2018 as an extension of Cresa’s office at 260 California St. in San Francisco, which also oversees Cresa's East Bay operations. Cresa has more than 1,000 employees in more than 80 offices globally.

Trani’s 15 years of real estate experience includes a stint in 2019 as senior director with coworking company WeWork’s real estate group. She handled business strategy and operations for the company’s Headquarters by WeWork initiative, which allows member firms to set up customized private locations under their own brand and staffing, and worked with agency brokers to represent WeWork as a tenant in master-lease negotiations with office landlords.

“While WeWork had brokers that would represent us, a lot of times we also either self-represented or took a front seat in the negotiations and discussions with the landlord,” Trani told CoStar News.

WeWork employees often had to learn about the high-profile failure of its initial public offering and other challenges from news reports rather than from company leadership, she said.

“My takeaway stepping out of WeWork and getting back into the brokerage side of the industry is that whatever happens to WeWork as a whole, the coworking piece of the industry is going to continue to have a giant impact,” Trani said. “It’s going to be a top-line decision in a lot of clients’ considerations. They’re going to be looking at flex space models and how they stack up against traditional leasing models.”

Recruiting and retaining talent will be a top priority for Trani, with the goal of expanding Cresa’s Bay Area footprint significantly in the next few years, Cresa Chief Executive Jim Underhill said.

"She brings tremendous talent and a wealth of client-centric experience to the firm," Underhill said in a release. "we are confident she will be a strong driver of future growth plans while also serving the expanding needs of our clients."