Preston O Connell

Preston O'Connell is a Partner at Harvest Properties, Inc., an Emeryville/Bay Area–based private real estate firm, which he joined in 2018 to lead its development platform with a focus on office, mixed-use, and multifamily projects. He specializes in the entitlement, curation, and execution of large-scale, amenity-rich mixed-use developments. He holds a BS in Applied Economics & Management from Cornell University, is a member of the Urban Land Institute, and has served as a Junior Board Member for City of Hope.

Before Harvest, O'Connell spent roughly seven years at the Jay Paul Company, a privately held, self-financed San Francisco real estate firm founded in 1975. He joined as a Real Estate Associate (2011–2012), became Director of Acquisitions and Capital Markets (2012–2015), and rose to Managing Director of Acquisitions and Head of Capital Markets (through March 2018). There he co-managed a ~5 million-square-foot acquisition and development pipeline and was responsible for capitalizing the firm's ~8 million-square-foot office, residential, and retail portfolio. Over his tenure he sourced and closed in excess of $7 billion in debt and equity transactions and helped negotiate 7.3 million square feet of leasing with tenants including Google, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Amazon.

Earlier in his career, O'Connell worked on HFF's structured finance platform in San Francisco, raising debt and equity for office, multifamily, mixed-use, retail, and land transactions — the foundation for the capital-markets expertise he later brought to Jay Paul and Harvest.

While at Jay Paul, he was a visible spokesperson on Bay Area office trends, emphasizing the advantage of the firm's single-owner, self-financed structure: "We're owned by one individual, and a small group of us make investment decisions. We can move pretty quickly, and we don't need to go raise outside capital." Flagship Jay Paul projects during his era included 181 Fremont, an 800-foot, 70-story San Francisco tower with ~432,000 SF of Class A+ office and 67 luxury residences.

• Invests in physical real estate, not startups — sourcing, entitling, capitalizing, and developing large office, mixed-use, and multifamily projects in supply-constrained Bay Area / Silicon Valley submarkets.
• Focus on institutional-quality, amenity-rich campuses built for "today's leading corporations and growth technology companies."
• Says yes to fully entitled or entitlement-ready sites in prime tech corridors that can serve as a corporate "headquarters or Silicon Valley beachhead."
• Deep capital-markets orientation: structures debt and equity, and executes through institutional joint ventures (notably a long-running partnership between Harvest and Invesco Real Estate).
• On demand cycles, expressed strong conviction on office fundamentals during the tech-expansion era: "We think the demand is the strongest it's ever been, and we think it will continue" — while flagging rising construction costs, elevated land values, and compressed yields as reasons for selectivity.