1031 Exchange Services in Glendale, CA

Brand Boulevard's cluster of mid- and high-rise office towers has long housed corporate headquarters and regional offices for insurance, finance, and professional-services tenants drawn to Glendale's lower cost basis relative to Downtown LA or Century City. That tenant mix tends to sign longer leases with less turnover than entertainment-driven office markets elsewhere in the county.

Two major retail destinations sit almost adjacent to each other downtown — the open-air Americana at Brand and the enclosed Glendale Galleria — giving the city an unusually concentrated retail draw for a submarket its size. Retail and mixed-use property near this corridor benefits from that pedestrian volume in ways that outlying Glendale commercial parcels generally don't.

The former DreamWorks Animation campus, now part of the broader NBCUniversal/Universal family following the studio's acquisition, keeps a media-industry presence in Glendale that supports nearby office and flex demand, even though the city's economy is considerably more diversified than neighboring Burbank's.

Glendale's large Armenian-American community and pattern of multigenerational households have historically supported strong occupancy on larger-unit apartment product — two- and three-bedroom units in particular — a nuance worth factoring in when comparing Glendale multifamily against smaller-unit product in more transient submarkets.

Glendale sits within a short drive of both the Downtown Los Angeles employment base and the Burbank media corridor, which gives it a broader commuter draw than a standalone suburban city its size would typically pull. That dual accessibility has helped support multifamily occupancy even during periods when either neighboring employment center has cooled, and it's a factor we point to when comparing Glendale against more single-employer-dependent submarkets nearby.

Glendale's Brand Boulevard office towers have seen a mixed recovery since 2020, with some floors converting to medical or professional-services use and others sitting available for lease longer than they would have a decade ago. That softness has created real entry points for exchangers targeting Glendale office at a discount to its pre-pandemic pricing, though we're careful to underwrite each building on its own tenant roster and lease expiration schedule rather than assuming citywide office softness applies uniformly across every tower on the boulevard. Buildings with strong insurance or professional-services anchor tenants have generally held value better than those more exposed to general administrative or back-office users, and we walk clients through that tenant-quality distinction before including any Glendale office candidate on an identification list. We also compare each candidate's parking ratio and building-system age against newer Burbank and Pasadena office stock, since those two factors have quietly become bigger swing votes for tenant retention in older Class B towers than base rent alone.