Tishman Speyer Hires AEW’s Adrian Lee for APAC Expansion

Tishman Speyer has added a Singapore-based dealmaker to its growing team in Asia Pacific, with the US developer and fund manager announcing on Tuesday that it has hired Adrian Lee as senior director of acquisitions.

Lee joins Tishman Speyer from AEW, where he had served as director and head of investments for Singapore since 2019, and is now expected to source and execute new investment opportunities across asset classes, according to a statement.

Having served as a director and portfolio manager with the global real estate division of UBS from 2015 through 2017, Lee’s new role with reunite him with Graham Mackie, who has headed Tishman Speyer’s business for Asia, outside of China and India since joining the company from UBS in June last year.

“The addition of Adrian to our Singapore office is an important milestone in the build-out of our Asia Pacific investment platform,” said Mackie. “Adrian brings a deep understanding of the region, excellent relationships and an impressive investment track record across gateway cities in Asia Pacific.”

Singapore Experience

After building development and fund management businesses in China and India over nearly two decades, Tishman Speyer signalled its intention to grow its Asia business beyond those markets last year by hiring Mackie away from his 14-year stint at UBS.

With the addition of Lee to the company’s Singapore-based team, Tishman Speyer is gaining an industry veteran who last year led AEW’s $489 million of the Westgate Tower office complex in Singapore’s Jurong East.

Also during 2022, AEW’s team sold the 20 Anson office tower near Tanjong Pagar to KKR for $442 million and disposed of 55 Market Street, an office asset in Raffles Place, to Japan’s Kajima for $213 million.

Tishman Speyer said it expects Lee, who also previously worked at PGIM Real Estate and Union Investment, to lead deals across the office, retail, industrial, life sciences and multi-family sectors in his new role.

AEW has been reshaping its Asia Pacific leadership post-pandemic with regional chief executive David Schaefer handing greater responsibility to chief investment officer Jason Lee, who recently relocated to Singapore.

Expanding Asia Footprint

In his new role, Adrian Lee will report to Mackie, who last October added former Gaw Capital Partners executive Jian An Tan to his Singapore team as an investment director.

In its statement, Tishman Speyer said that it is also recruiting investment professionals to source acquisitions for its offices in Japan, South Korea and Australia, where it is pursuing core, value-add and opportunistic investments, as well as brown-to-green office refurbishments in gateway cities. The company has yet to announce acquisitions in those markets or in Singapore.

In January of this year Singapore’s CapitaLand Investment announced that it had purchased the first phase of Tishman Speyer’s The Springs Center in Shanghai for RMB 7.6 billion ($1.1 billion), seeing the New York-based developer part with one of its largest projects in mainland China.

The company has continued to acquire sites Asia’s largest economy, including buying a plot on Shanghai’s Tianshan Road for $800 million in 2021.

On 31 March Tishman Speyer president and chief executive Rob Speyer was in Shanghai where he met with municipal Communist Party secretary Chen Jining and pledged to continue to increase his company’s investments in the city, according to an account in the Shanghai Daily.