JLL tapped industry veteran Lee McKenna to lead its health care real estate operations across Central and South Texas, a fresh signal of the Chicago firm’s Texas expansion as well the Austin–San Antonio corridor becoming more coordinated, if not yet truly merged.
Based in San Antonio, McKenna will serve as managing director over separate JLL teams in San Antonio and in Austin, overseeing project leasing, tenant rep, development and investment sales for the medical office sector, the San Antonio Business Journal reported.
He joins after three years as senior vice president at Stream Realty Partners and brings experience across Texas health care markets.
McKenna’s first task will be building out the two parallel teams, tuned to the different growth curves of their respective metros but increasingly part of the same regional playbook.
For JLL, the hire is a bet on both institutional knowledge and market segmentation.
McKenna said the needs of health care tenants and clinics are evolving fast, with operators seeking not only space but more strategic distribution, meeting patients where they live, work and go to school. He called mapping out tenants’ footprints across the two metros the “biggest opportunity.”
What could make the move a tea leaf for real estate observers is how JLL is drawing the boundary lines.
That slice, the Interstate 35 median between San Marcos and New Braunfels, has become the working edge of a slow-moving market merger between the two metros.
McKenna said the two areas’ individual market dynamics “don’t lead to a lot of overlap,” hence the need for two teams. But for real estate brokers and developers, how the big firms divide this turf reveals threads in the gradual stitching together of the Austin and San Antonio real estate markets.
McKenna’s hire also signals a win for San Antonio, where the South Side is fast becoming a health care hotspot by ways of residential growth, Texas A&M–San Antonio and new projects around the redeveloped mixed-use community Brooks, formerly the Brooks Air Force Base. JLL’s choice to center leadership there rather than in Austin marks a subtle but telling alignment.
— Judah Duke
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