The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation has hired Kirk Horiuchi, former Hawaii market lead at the commercial real estate firm JLL, to lead an effort to outsource the management and leasing for its fee-simple properties in Honolulu and across the state.
Horiuchi, who started his new role as director of asset management this month, is working with Giorgio Calderone, who last summer became the foundation’s managing director of Hawaii real estate, overseeing a $1.2 billion real estate portfolio in the Islands.
The two men had worked together at Kamehameha Schools, where Calderone was most recently senior director of planning and development and where Horiuchi had worked as an asset manager prior to joining JLL about eight years ago.
Horiuchi told Pacific Business News in an email that Corbett Kalama, who took over leadership of the foundation’s Hawaii office as executive vice president in December and is a Kamehameha Schools trustee, “is another familiar and welcome face from my time at Kamehameha Schools.”
“The foundation has created a management team specifically to oversee and manage its properties in Hawaii with the goal of right sizing and refining the portfolio,” Horiuchi said. “We are also preparing [a request for proposals] to outsource management and leasing for our fee-simple, multi-tenant properties.”
Horiuchi also pointed out that he knows “all about JLL’s capabilities since I ran the Honolulu office for the last eight years, but I am very excited to hear about the other firms’ resources and abilities to determine the best service provider for the Foundation’s properties and requirements.”
The foundation’s real estate portfolio in Hawaii makes up about 42 percent of its overall portfolio, Kalama recently told PBN.
The foundation plans to distribute $12 million this year to nonprofit organizations that focus on housing, health care, jobs, education and community services, an increase from $10 million last year. Goodwill Hawaii recently received a grant of $3 million for the new Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Honolulu Career and Learning Center under construction at 1075 S. Beretania St.
The foundation and its affiliates such as HRT Realty and Honolulu LLC owns dozens of properties and ground leases on Oahu, including commercial and industrial parcels along the Nimitz Highway corridor, where the former Hilo Hattie building, owned by Honolulu LLC, was recently leased to FedEx. The foundation and its affiliates also own a dozen commercial and residential parcels along Hausten Street in Moiliili, which went on the market for $19 million with JLL in December.
In West Oahu, foundation affiliates own interests in at least a half dozen undeveloped parcels in Ko Olina Resort.
On Maui, the foundation owns more than a dozen commercial properties and ground leases in Kahului and in Maui Lani.
Kalama succeeded Alvin Awaya — who had been the sole Hawaii-based trustee and the Baltimore-based foundation’s longtime Hawaii CEO — after Awaya stepped down on Nov. 30. Awaya was replaced on the board of trustees by Gordon Berlin, president of the New York-based nonprofit MDRC.