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Claude Gruen, Ph.D. Principal Economist |
Dr. Claude Gruen is an urban economist who specializes in the evaluation and implementation of real estate opportunities and trade offs.
Since the early 1970's, Dr. Gruen’s work has provided the economic foundation and real estate development programs for successful shopping, entertainment, housing, industrial and mixed-use projects sponsored by public and private entities. Projects completed by Dr. Gruen’s clients include major office buildings, industrial parks, housing projects, shopping centers and mixed-use projects in California, Ohio, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Examples of projects include Settlers’ Landing in Cleveland, OH, the San Francisco Centre, Santa Maria Town Center in Santa Maria, CA, the McCarthy Ranch Marketplace in Milpitas, CA, Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton, CA, student housing at the University of California in Santa Cruz, faculty housing for the University of California at Berkeley, and the Fifth Street project in Chula Vista, CA.
Fiscal policies, policy assessments and strategic development programs formulated by Dr. Gruen have been implemented by local governments, including Scottsdale, AZ, Lawrence, KS, and the California communities of Hawthorne, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Tracy, Stockton, Daly City, Oakland, Brentwood, Antioch, Lodi, and many school districts and other institutions. Many revitalized downtown projects were developed based on land use marketability and implementation assessment prepared by GG+A teams working under Dr. Gruen’s direction.
Since the mid-1990s, Dr. Gruen has specialized in the development of large land parcels for clients with properties that are no longer in their highest and best use. Two of the properties developed and sold for the State of California include an 87-acre former developmental center in San Jose that was redeveloped as the headquarters of Cisco Systems, and the 360-acre former Agnews Developmental Center in Santa Clara that consists of the award-winning mixed use Rivermark residential community, Rivermark Village Shopping Center, the R&D buildings of Sun Microsystems and a 16-acre Citation Homes project. The State of California has received approximately $500 million for the sale of these lands to builders and users.
Working as Special Master for the United States District Court since 1999, Dr. Gruen and Nina J. Gruen remediated the 84.5-acre former Pacific States Steel Corporation property in Union City, California, redeveloping the land for 545 residences, a business park and public infrastructure. Remediation costing $20 million was accomplished with no public subsidies. Real estate developed on the now cleaned land is on the tax roles for in excess of $245 million, and all first tier creditors have been paid to date.
Dr. Gruen has conducted a wide variety of real estate valuation, highest and best use, and feasibility studies on matters that were under litigation, and then testified in support of his findings in California, Nevada, and Illinois courts. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cincinnati and has served on the faculties of Xavier University in Cincinnati and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Western Regional Science Association, Lambda Alpha Honorary Land Economics Society, the American Economic Association, and the Urban Land Institute, where he sits on the Community Development Council (Green). Since 1990, he has written a “Trends” column for the Institutional Real Estate Letter, a publication that serves the country’s pension fund real estate investors.
He was a Founding Director of RREEF America I, a private non-leveraged real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns and manages industrial, retail, residential, and office properties. The REIT was organized in 1995 with $262 million in funds drawn previously from pension fund investors. The REIT’s assets have grown to over $800 million, earning its investors annual returns of 12.6 percent per year. In 2005, Dr. Gruen and his fellow directors voted to liquidate the trust in order to capture for the stockholders the returns available in the low cap market at that time. In 2003, Dr. Gruen became a founding director of RREEF America III, a private real estate investment trust (REIT) that seeks to provide shareholders with leveraged value added investment returns. As of May 1, 2006 the trust held over $3 billion in real estate assets. The directors of both REITs maintain sole responsibility for the selection of appraisal firms and the determination of the properties’ market values.
