It’s been just under one year since Angela Aman took the reins of Sawtelle-based real estate development and management firm Kilroy Realty Corp., yet the new commander is already looking forward.

Aman, who joined Kilroy after eight years as president and chief financial officer of New York-based Brixmor Property Group, replaced John Kilroy Jr., the longtime leader of the company and son of John Kilroy Sr., Kilroy’s founder. Aman’s hiring marks the company’s first female chief executive, as well as its first outside the Kilroy family.

She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a degree in both real estate and finance.

“The publicly traded real estate industry is pretty small,” Aman said. “I’d followed Kilroy for a really long time, so I was very familiar with the company and the platform.”

Kilroy, which owns more than 17 million square feet of real estate primarily across the western U.S., develops and operates mostly office properties, although it has a growing life sciences and mixed-use portfolio as well.

“Kilroy has an extraordinary portfolio,” Aman said. “The company’s really been very intentional over time at prioritizing quality of the portfolio and things like amenitization of the assets that’s critically important, especially in a period of time like we’re in right now with the office market…it’s been a real gift to inherit something from somebody like John that is as well positioned as Kilroy is both in the portfolio side and on the platform side.”

Preliminary reforms

Since joining in January, Aman said her biggest task to date has mainly been acquainting herself with the entirety of Kilroy’s portfolio, including its team, core markets and specific assets, as well as understanding the firm’s overall position in the market so that it can continue to stay competitive amid a large executive shift.

“I started Jan. 22, and I think our first earnings call was like 11 days later,” Aman recalled. “I tried to get out to see as much of the portfolio as I could in those 11 days.”

And while Kilroy has been relatively quiet from a development standpoint due to a challenging real estate environment – characterized by high interest rates and some marketplace distress – Aman has instead used this past year to refocus the company’s overhead, including some leadership and platform changes.

“We had one person who was wearing both the chief investment officer and chief financial officer hats; we split that role, I brought in a new CFO,” Aman said. “I promoted somebody internally to general counsel, hired new senior leadership for the leasing team in the San Francisco market. Really just filling in the platform where I felt like there were gaps or places that we could have more senior level attention and focus on.

“I think one of the gifts of a big leadership change during this period of time is not coming in with a lot of long-term or institutional biases about the assets of submarkets or anything like that and really being able to just start with a fresh sheet of paper and just understand where we are today and what the path forward is,” she added.

Office optimism

While some developers are swearing off office products, selling at less than below replacement costs just to shed themselves from its troubles, Kilroy continues to have faith in the asset class.

“There will always be a place for Class A, well-amenitized office buildings in markets like the ones we operate in,” Aman said, adding that the West Coast is more slowly returning to in-person operations compared to the East Coast. “The job is just really making sure that we continue to keep and maintain and add to our portfolio of office assets that are in that segment of the market and continue to operate them the way they need to be operated to attract and retain that tenancy.”

Within L.A., the company owns 13 office buildings – including Westside Media Center, Tribeca West, Aero, Blackwelder and more. Aman said the company’s three properties in Hollywood – Columbia Square, On Vine and Sunset Media Center – have been its most challenging assets.

“The investment thesis is really just focusing on risk adjusted returns and finding opportunities across our markets where we can put capital to work and earn a return in excess of our cost of capital and focus again on durability and growth of the portfolio, cash flow stream over time,” she said. “It’s not any more complicated than that.”

Adding her flair

Looking forward, Aman said Kilroy is looking to expand its footprint and will likely increase its acquisition quota, as opposed to developing. These assets will mostly be office and life science properties.

“Given how challenging the market has been over the last few years, we do think that we are going to see some interesting opportunities come out of that disruption or distress in certain markets,” she said. “There are certain markets we operate in today that do have sort of an outsized share of new development properties that are going to be completing and delivering over the next few years and, against the sort of operational backdrop we’re in, some of those developers may come into problems and that might be an opportunity for the company to continue to expand its footprint within our core markets.”

The company acquired a 104,000-square-foot two-office portfolio deal in San Diego – adjacent to the booming Kilroy-developed One Paseo mixed-use retail center in Del Mar – for $35 million at the end of October and will likely eye more in the future.

Aman says Kilroy will continue to refine its portfolio – focusing on high quality assets in optimal marketplaces – as well as hopefully grow its life science portfolio.