Justin Lossner is quick to point to his dad, Rodney, for being his chief role model and instilling in him the value of hard work. 

“He’s the epitome of a hard worker and just roll up your sleeves and not complain and go get it done,” Lossner said of his father.

Lossner, 43, has been named the 2024 Iowa State University Ivy College of Business Commercial Real Estate Professional of the Year by the Business Record. He will be honored at the Business Record’s Commercial Real Estate Forum on April 25 at the Hilton Des Moines Downtown. .

The award is designed to highlight an outstanding CRE professional from Central Iowa for their professional accomplishments and community engagement.

Lossner has spent about 20 years striking deals on commercial real estate, the last 10 at JLL in Des Moines. He also spent time with the commercial real estate arm of Principal Financial Group, working on deals in New York City and with R&R Realty Group.

In nominating Lossner for the award, Bob Vogelgesang cited Lossner’s achievements despite the turbulent national market.

In his letter of nomination, Vogelgesang cited Lossner’s role in the largest lease transaction at 801 Grand with F&G, the sale of 225,000 square feet of 909 Locust Street to Federal Home Loan Bank and the largest mixed-use transaction in Des Moines with the West Glen portfolio.

Lossner was also involved in the sale of 180,000 square feet by Dotdash Meredith to MidAmerican Energy Co., and the sale of more than 500,000 square feet for Wells Fargo in West Des Moines.

According to Vogelgesang’s letter, Lossner was involved in the closing of 1.47 million square feet in office transactions, totaling $145 million in 2023, co-leading the JLL brokerage office to record year with 238 transactions covering 5.28 million square feet of space, totaling more than $400 million in transaction volume.

“Justin has undoubtedly made a significant impact on the real estate industry with his accomplishments,” Vogelgesang wrote.

Lossner, who founded JLL’s Des Moines office with his business partner, Marcus Pitts, said his career path has validated his choice to pursue commercial real estate as a student at Northern Iowa.

It was there he met commercial real estate broker Darin Ferguson, who spoke at the university during an event.

“Immediately, I was like, that’s it. I’m doing that,” Lossner said. “When I went for finance, it was like, do I get into financial planning, stocks or whatever, but when Darin came in, I was like that’s me 100%.”

Lossner would go on to interview and work for Ferguson for a few years before moving onto Principal.

“He and I both grew up on the south side[of Des Moines], so we just hit it off and he immediately became a mentor to me,” Lossner said.

But Lossner saw friends who had moved onto the bigger companies who were involved in complex, massive transactions.

“And I felt like exposure to that would be beneficial in the long run,” he said.

He received a call from a friend at Principal about an opening the company had on its real estate team that worked on projects in New York and New Jersey, and he jumped at the opportunity.

When the market crashed in 2008-09, he came back to R&R Realty Group, where he worked with Dan Rupprecht, before making the move to open JLL’s office in Des Moines in 2014.

In addition to a host of professional accolades, Lossner has been a strong presence in the community.

According to nominating materials, he has served as president of the Iowa Commercial Real Estate Association, as real estate director of the Make-A-Wish Foundation and served with the Des Moines Social Club. He also ran a “Man of the Year” competition for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Iowa, and sits on the Des Moines Supportive Housing Collective, the Greater Des Moines Partnerships Downtown DSM Board and  on the board of the entrepreneur organization EO Iowa.

The Business Record sat down with Lossner to learn more about his view of the Des Moines commercial real estate market and its future. His responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

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AT A GLANCE

Age: 43
Hometown: Des Moines
Family: Married, three children: one son and two daughters
Education: Degree in real estate finance, University of Northern Iowa
Activities: Traveling, attending children’s sporting and dance events, snowboarding, following the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Contact: Justin.Lossner@jll.com

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What drew you to commercial real estate as a career?

It’s a lot of factors. No. 1, I’m an architect nerd. I just love architecture. Historic. Modern. Everything in between. I’ve always had a strong interest in architecture and history, so to me, that’s the framework of what’s been done in the past and maybe more uniquely what can be done in the future. So from that perspective, I’ve always had an interest in office space and how we occupy office space. It’s always just interested me. It’s a critical piece of a company’s culture and how they attract employees, but it’s not the world they live in every day, so I’ve always loved taking what I’ve seen and examples of how things have worked and then coaching our clients to say, “Maybe you should think about this.”

What’s changed in the commercial real estate sector, particularly office space, since you started your career?

Traditionally you had the C-suite, the big offices and specific space for the executive admin team. It was this hierarchy you saw play out, which can naturally create a little division in how leadership communicates with the workforce. So that’s changed over the past 10 years. We’ve gone away from that to where it’s not completely unheard of for us to have a CEO sitting in a cube next to the sales team or whatever. The way leadership and the rest of the workforce occupy space has changed. Historically, an office was a dense work environment, which is not efficient and frankly doesn’t promote a lot of collaboration. I’d say about 10 years ago, that’s when we really started to see traction led by tech companies. I give a lot of credit to how some of these young entrepreneurial companies thought about occupying space, and it was just completely different than the old guard. I think a lot of that flexibility in where you work had already been happening. I don’t know if a whole lot new came out of the pandemic except for the fact it sped up a lot of the stuff.

Do you see that trend reversing and people wanting to return to a cubicle environment?

Part of what I’ve started to see is this rubber band effect of everything’s open and there’s no walls and you can fire communication across the office. You go put people in their home offices, for some cases multiple years, and you get used to that privacy, that flexibility. We’re starting to see that influence a bit in how people return to the office today. I just had a phone call on an office deal I’m working on, and the leadership team’s comment to us was we want to feel like someone’s home has been brought into the office. And then if they need that privacy and those walls and they need to retreat somewhere, they have the opportunity to do [so], but we still want the culture, we want the collaboration, but that’s not happening in a 6-by-6 cube. It’s happening in a soft setting. So it’s interesting to see the changes there.

What do you think the biggest challenge is moving forward?

We talk about occupancy strategy daily. Part of it is balancing the desire people have for privacy and people that are kind of in the middle or on the extreme of craving interaction outside of the Teams call and they’re excited to get back. Now they still want that flexibility, right? So is it  three days or is it four days? That’s the great debate. It’s probably not five, but it’s probably not zero. That’s the biggest challenge as a company. How do you look at the functions of your staff? Every industry is different, and companies are different. That’s the challenge. How do you weave that narrative?

Do you see a continuing trend of Class B tenants upgrading to Class A space?

Definitely the flight to quality will continue. There’s two different conversations there. I think about markets like Chicago and New York, where the heartbeat of those markets is the downtown core. There are different challenges for those markets. Des Moines is still a good-sized market but small enough to where you can get anywhere pretty efficiently. Downtown Des Moines has some challenges that I think are better than they were in 2020 and 2021, and part of it is driven by foot traffic. I think the discussion going forward is really finding that balance of access to amenities, the traditional stuff but also the real estate itself. Can someone just unplug and go hang out in the lobby for a change of scenery? Do they have access to a rooftop or patio, or walk across the street to grab coffee or whatever? It goes back to, can I bring the house to the office feel? What I haven’t seen overwhelmingly is people just outright terminating space. I know there’s examples, but I don’t think that’s 100% pandemic-driven. It just sped everything up, good, bad and otherwise. Our market is very stable, and the suburban markets have fared better because of some of the challenges downtown. When our average deal size is 3,000 to 5,000 square feet and they want a flight to quality and access to amenities, there are just more opportunities like that in West Des Moines than there are downtown. The floor plates that have come back are huge floor plates. You can’t put a 5,000-square-foot tenant in a 32,000-square-foot floor space efficiently. It lowers the amount of quality space that is accessible by some of the smaller tenants, and that is something we need to figure out downtown so they can compete again.

How do you do that?

The answer is these major institutional owners, which is a large part of the space downtown. They’ve got these big floor plates, and if you wait for a 30,000-square-foot deal to come along and solve that issue, you could be waiting years. Des Moines is still a small enough market, you don’t see 30,000-, 50,000-, 100,000-square-foot users daily. There’s a handful a year. So if you’re now competing with stuff downtown, there’s a lot of competition for those larger deals. So the suburban markets have stayed much healthier as they have those 3,000- to 5,000-square-foot spaces. There is an appetite for users to locate downtown, but it’s got to be quality space and it has to have access to retail.

Retail isn’t as strong downtown today as it once was. How do you balance that with the desire to be close to retail?

It’s like the chicken or the egg thing, right? Office occupiers want to have access to all those things, and then the retailers say we can’t do that until all the occupiers get down here. So we’ve seen a lot of creative negotiations between retailers and landlords and how they partner together. A lot of landlords in the core market look at retail as an amenity as opposed to a profit center. If you have a sandwich shop on the first floor of a 350,000-square-foot building, the return for the landlord is going to come from the office user, so what a lot of people have smartly done is partner with those retailers to keep them humming along as we continue to see that foot traffic go up.

What keeps you up at night?

As I’ve gotten older, I pay more attention to the things that are not in my control, like civil unrest in other parts of the world. No one would have dreamt in 2020 as people left for spring break that they’d worry about getting home. In my 20-year career, I’ve seen a lot of crazy ups and downs and bubbles, but the pandemic was a different one and it has left a lasting impact. More than just on how people occupy space. Our team is still doing more deals for therapists than any other category right now. We see where the trends are, who’s active, and when for the last couple of years the most active users have been therapists, to me that’s concerning. I don’t know the answer to it. I know there’s a need for it and there’s a demand for it and if you talk to people in that industry, it’s not being met. I think coming out of the pandemic, there’s just a lot we haven’t unpacked yet. From a real estate perspective, you have all these people who don’t want to go back to the office and rather sit at home and stare at the screen. In my opinion, it’s not healthy. It’s just like anything in life. If there’s no balance, it can lead to issues. There are signs that technology and isolation are not healthy for us.

Knowing what you know today, what would you tell your 22-year-old self?

I would reiterate that hard work will outlast any challenge. So just working really hard to know everything you can about your industry and all the pieces that make it successful. Do the work.

Tell me about your mentors.

I’ve had a lot of mentors. My dad first and foremost. He owned a printing company with our family on the south side growing up. He’s the epitome of a hard worker and just roll up your sleeves and not complain and go get it done. He’s probably my most important mentor, and still is today. Darin had a massive impact on me. I credit him 100% with me finding real estate as a career and just helping me build the early skills to make it a lasting career. And in a big way, Marcus, my partner now, is a mentor of mine. He’s always been one of the hardest-working guys I know. He believes very much in knowing the market and building the right team. So when he and I came to work together, a lot of things aligned in a really cool way and they still do.