A warehouse is an excellent place to conceal an interesting career. It offers few of the usual distractions: no marble lobby to flatter the visitor, no penthouse view to do the explaining. Howard Schwimmer has spent more than four decades paying attention anyway. His professional territory is Southern California’s industrial property, where an awkward layout or an outdated building can present a question worth answering.
That attention helped him co-found Rexford’s predecessor business, become co-CEO of a listed real estate company and, in 2026, begin another business chapter. His current firm is S5 Industrial Realty. The change of name is considerable; the geographical departure is modest. He is still looking at the industrial streets of Southern California. There are more theatrical ways to describe a career. Few would explain his quite so well.
Eighteen years before the opening bell
Schwimmer graduated from the University of Southern California in 1983, studying business with an emphasis in real estate finance and development. In May that year he joined DAUM Commercial Real Estate. The interval between university and the property business was short. The apprenticeship that followed was considerably longer.
He remained at DAUM until November 2001. Over those years his responsibilities included manager, executive vice president and broker of record. Brokerage gave him a working life in acquisition, leasing and sales before Rexford became a public-company name. The early career belongs at the center of the story: eighteen years is a substantial amount of time to spend learning how industrial property changes hands and finds occupants.
A broker must concern himself with what somebody else will actually use. A building can look entirely respectable from the road and still prove inconvenient to occupy. Access, configuration and the terms of a lease require closer attention. Those practical distinctions would remain visible in Schwimmer’s later work as an owner. The move from arranging a transaction to keeping the property also changes the time horizon. An owner inherits the consequences of a layout, the work needed to alter it and the task of finding the next tenant. That helps explain why the brokerage period matters beyond the dates on his résumé. It preceded a business in which a purchase was the beginning of the operating work.
An $8 million beginning
In December 2001, Schwimmer co-founded Rexford’s predecessor business. By June 2002, the firm had completed its first acquisition: two warehouse and distribution buildings on John Reed Court in City of Industry. Together they measured 177,000 square feet. The price was $8 million, approximately $45 a square foot.
The early plan centered on older industrial buildings and holding them for cash flow. That starting point is worth remembering when considering the public company that followed. Rexford began with physical properties that needed to earn their keep. The strategy demanded both a view of the market and a willingness to deal with the building already standing there.
City of Industry makes a fitting opening location. Even its name dispenses with romantic misdirection. For this investor, the useful action was in the places where goods were stored, handled and moved. The first transaction gave the new enterprise something more tangible than an investment thesis: two buildings to own and operate.
Joins DAUM
predecessor
listing
Builds S5 chapter
A loading door is a business decision
To understand the work, take a documented Rexford project in Camarillo. At 3233 East Mission Oaks Boulevard, the company described converting roughly 110,000 square feet of single-tenant space into eight units. Plans included additional loading doors, new offices, electrical improvements and resurfaced parking. Schwimmer shared the project publicly.
There is a whole investment argument inside that change of layout. One large space requires a tenant able to use one large space. Dividing it changes the range of possible occupants. Better loading changes how the premises can function. The improvement is meaningful only if it matches what businesses need and can afford.
This is the physical side of industrial real estate’s financial language. Repositioning involves decisions about walls, doors and circulation before it becomes a line in a presentation. A diagram can show the idea in seconds. Executing it requires construction, leasing and a judgment about demand. A fresh coat of paint would have a much easier schedule.
Going public, staying local
Rexford’s July 2013 initial public offering sold 16 million shares at $14 each, raising $224 million. Schwimmer and Michael Frankel were its co-chief executives. The listing put their regional industrial business before public-market investors, with the obligations and visibility that accompany the privilege of a stock ticker.
The company expanded considerably. By 2023, Schwimmer’s professional biography described a portfolio of 45 million square feet and the previous year’s acquisitions of 52 properties for $2.4 billion. In 2024, Rexford added a Blackstone portfolio of 48 properties in Los Angeles and Orange counties for about $1 billion.
The figures are collective achievements. Frankel shared the chief executive role; acquisitions depended on colleagues who found, financed, improved, leased and managed properties. Assigning every square foot to one founder would make a tidier portrait and a less accurate one. Schwimmer’s place in that work is substantial enough without confiscating the team’s contribution.
His own comments suggest some resistance to treating volume as the entire purpose. Asked about the competitive buying environment in 2019, he said Rexford could have been several times larger if it had simply purchased for purchasing’s sake. The interesting measure was what the company could do with a property once it owned it.
The rent has to work today
There is a temptation in property investing to let a forecast perform the labor that the present income cannot. Schwimmer addressed it directly in a 2019 interview. His advice was to assess what the market could support at the time of purchase, rather than depending on rents becoming substantially more generous years later.
“No one ever got in trouble in a downturn having too little debt on their property.”
Howard Schwimmer, 2019
The remark is memorable because debt usually arrives dressed as possibility. It can enlarge a purchase and make an expansion easier to imagine. It also creates obligations that survive a disappointing forecast. Schwimmer spoke then about reducing leverage and approaching the market cautiously. His stated regret was that he had lacked the capacity to buy far more at the bottom of the previous recession.
That combination is revealing: caution about what to pay, enthusiasm about what might become available. It is possible to want more opportunities while refusing the assumptions required to justify a particular deal. The tension is part of the job. An investor who enjoys buying still needs a reason to decline.
And the market does change. By late 2025, Southern California industrial demand had cooled. Rexford’s leadership transition arrived alongside a shift toward property sales, share repurchases and renovation work. Any account that stops with the expansion years misses the more demanding question of what happens when conditions turn.
The family had a different set of metrics
Schwimmer’s other commitments have included USC’s Lusk Center Real Estate Leadership Council, USC Hillel and the Jewish Federation’s Real Estate Principals Organization. In 2022, the Federation honored him at its Real Estate & Construction Network dinner. Rexford said 1,200 people attended the celebration at the Beverly Hilton.
His family’s public tributes supplied details that a company biography rarely accommodates. His daughter Arin remembered industrial-building tours with him at ten. His son Adam described their shared enjoyment of golf. His wife Linda recalled him asking, “When did we become these people?” after they were introduced at a Federation event.
It is a pleasing question for somebody whose working life involved making plans. Recognition can still arrive looking faintly unfamiliar. His children described humor and kindness alongside the work. These are family recollections, with all the affection that implies, and they give the executive portrait some welcome room to breathe.
Industry recognition followed, too. In 2024, he was inducted into the NAIOP SoCal Hall of Fame. The following year marked his sixth appearance in the Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500. By then the broker who had begun at DAUM in 1983 had become a familiar name in the region’s business community.
A new company, a familiar map
Schwimmer’s co-CEO tenure at Rexford ended on March 31, 2026. Laura Clark took over as chief executive on April 1. The succession announcement provided a measure of the business he and Frankel had helped lead: its industrial portfolio had grown from 5.5 million square feet at the 2013 IPO to approximately 51 million by November 2025.
Today, S5 identifies Schwimmer as its founder and principal. Its published interests include established industrial buildings, multi-tenant projects and properties that can be improved or divided into smaller spaces. The list of target markets runs through the Los Angeles Basin, San Gabriel Valley, South Bay, Ventura County, western Inland Empire, Orange County and central San Diego.
In an April 2026 conversation with Andrew Kirsh, the agenda included smaller industrial spaces, finding opportunities through direct outreach and the limits of automating property judgment. These are familiar questions in a new company’s life. The next chapter will have to earn its own results.
For now, the continuity is visible. A founder has left a public-company role and returned to building under another name, still occupied with what an industrial property might become. Southern California offers plenty of scenery. Schwimmer’s professional eye keeps returning to the buildings where the delivery truck pulls in.