Commercial real estate Q&A

Jeffrey Gage has worked for commercial real estate brokerage and services firm CBRE Group since 1985, and spent many years in its Stamford, Conn. office. Today, he is a senior vice president and in charge of the company's Naples operation, which serves Southwest Florida. Throughout his career, Gage has negotiated sale or lease transactions involving in excess of 8.5 million square feet, deals that have also carried a market value of more than $2 billion.

What's the state of the Southwest Florida commercial real estate market from your perspective? How would you describe it at present?

There are a couple of interesting things we're noticing currently. CBRE specializes in connecting global capital to local markets, and what we're finding is that investors are looking increasingly for emerging markets like Southwest Florida, and it makes sense: Wages are growing, population is growing, and when you compare the region to the rest of Florida, the Southwest portion of the state has a lot of attractive attributes. For instance, the workforce here is growing by a little less than 4%. Well, in Connecticut, where I came from, the workforce is actually on the decline. Those are some of the fundamentals that attract global capital.