Kennedy Wilson hires Jamison's Jaime Lee to lead global capital push

Jaime Lee spent two decades learning to build housing in Los Angeles, where high land costs, slow entitlements, and unforgiving construction economics punish developers at every turn. Kennedy Wilson is betting those lessons travel. The Beverly Hills firm has hired the former Jamison CEO as senior managing director of capital markets and real estate investments, CoStar News reports, a role that started this month and puts Lee at the center of the firm's global capital-raising effort.

Lee's job is to raise capital, build institutional partnerships, and identify investments across the firm's platform in the US, the UK, and Ireland, with multifamily as her stated priority: the asset class she believes will draw investors off the sidelines as a persistent housing shortage collides with high interest rates, construction costs, and economic uncertainty. “If you can build something in Los Angeles, you can build something anywhere,” she told CoStar News.

Lee's resume came from Jamison, the firm founded by her father David Lee, which she joined more than 20 years ago and helped transform from one of Los Angeles' largest office landlords into a major housing developer — overseeing an 18 million-square-foot portfolio and advancing more than 7,000 residential units across 36 buildings, including adaptive reuse and affordable housing projects. That work put her on the front lines of a market where an abundance of aging offices meets a shortage of homes, and where apartment rents run roughly 30% above the national average, according to CoStar data.

The hire deepens a relationship that predates the job: Jamison and Kennedy Wilson have traded properties and partnered over the years, and the two firms recently formed a venture targeting roughly 4,000 affordable Los Angeles apartments, starting with the planned conversion of the former Los Angeles World Trade Center downtown. Lee has known Kennedy Wilson Chairman and CEO William McMorrow since she was a teenager.

Kennedy Wilson has about $37 billion in assets under management and has been reshaped around exactly the strategies Lee knows best: 44,500 multifamily units, including the Vintage Housing affordable platform, and the recent acquisition of Toll Brothers' Apartment Living business and development pipeline. Hiring someone who has actually delivered projects through LA's approval and financing maze amounts to a serious commitment to the housing-shortage thesis.

The judgment call is whether the LA playbook travels. High construction costs, expensive capital, and slow approval processes are not unique to Los Angeles, but the city's intensity forces a discipline most developers never acquire. The bid for apartments has broadened beyond core, and buyers who accept a reset on current cash flow are setting the next comps. Kennedy Wilson wants to be one of those buyers, and Lee's development experience is meant to give it an underwriting edge competitors cannot match.

The early test is the planned World Trade Center conversion, the first project in the Jamison-Kennedy Wilson venture. If Lee can move that building through the approval process and into apartments, the whole platform gets a template. If the capital she raises also finds projects in the UK and Ireland, the hire turns from a homecoming into the start of a global development platform.