Cortese: We've been in this business for the last 25 years. Mark and I have relationships with a lot of owners and developers, and in a couple of circumstances, have bene able to buy properties for our clients off market by going directly to sellers. The other component of what we do is we dig through a lot of deals. If the client has an investment requirement, we reach out to our entire database through a marketing campaign we utilize externally and internally, and we turn over every rock we can to find deals that are going to make sense for them.

Hoekstra: One of the interesting components to our business is we don't necessarily want to try to compete with larger national and international firms. That's not a place in the market where we need or want to compete, nor do we want to be everything to everybody. But we are everything to a certain select group of clients and to our employees. We compete by being who we are, by being very accessible and approachable, high-tech and high-touch. Our clients are mainly small family offices and high-net-worth individuals, and each one of them has different investment criteria for what they're trying to achieve for their families and partners.

GlobeSt.com: What's special about the way your firm has grown over the last 10 years?

Cortese: Mark and I met in 1987 when we were working for Coldwell Banker, before it became CBRE. We worked together for three years, and then I left and in 2008 moved to San Francisco, but the friendship was always there. I left a partnership in San Francisco called Presidio Exchange Advisors that advised private and institutional investors in the acquisition of approximately $750 million of commercial real estate and came back down to San Diego, and after 20 years Mark and I ended up working together again. Twenty years after we first started working together, we became business partners.

The interesting thing about our company is, I joined in 2009, and it was not the best time to start a business. But we've been good friends, we are aligned and were trained in the same company, and we think about real estate in the same way. We have a tremendous historical perspective on the market and have been through multiple economic and real estate crises. Mark has his operational background, and my expertise is growth in capital markets. We brought together two very strong disciplines in CRE. Both of us know each other well enough to know who we are and what we do. I don't trust anyone in CRE more than Mark.

We try to do things at our company that we didn't get at other companies for which we worked. First and foremost, we add value by really focusing on tenants within our portfolio, and we have employed and embraced the technology to do that because we're a smaller firm. Mark and I worked for larger institutions, and what we didn't like was being awarded business because it was “your turn,” and we didn't want to run our company that way. We both have a passion for commercial real estate, we want to exercise our craft with our clients, and we don't have the bureaucracy in our company that compromises real estate.

Hoekstra: Rocco's family, from the time he was born up to this day, has been involved in CRE. My grandfather, Ernest Hahn, had deep commercial real estate roots in San Diego County. This has in turn developed in Rocco and me a passion for this business. We hope to transfer our passion to the employees within our organization.

GlobeSt.com: What do you foresee for your firm's future?

Hoekstra: In July of last year, we relocated our offices into the Burnham real estate building. We did this because it was a good space with city views, and we're super-passionate about Downtown San Diego. Our office will always be located in Downtown; there's an excitement and energy down here that appeals to us. We currently have three people in our brokerage-services division, and we hope to double that by the end of the year. We want to grow it with individuals who are not so specialized in geography and product type, but are good real estate individuals who can add value. We also have small offices in San Francisco and L.A., and we have direct plans to grow both of those regions as well.

Cortese: Our platform looks and feels a lot like the old Burnham company did. Anyone who worked for that company will share that it was the best experience for their careers; they all loved it, and we want to create the same environment here. The San Diego office is an opportunity to learn and grow, one broker, one client at a time organically with the right people. Ten years from now, if the company feels like Burnham—great! There's no target on size for us—we're just committed to making sure we do great real estate work; the rest will be easy.

We want to embrace technology on every level. We have great clients, but we want to continue this philosophy by leveraging technology. And Downtown San Diego is prime for a significant creative-office project.