medical office industry.

David Rutson, the Dallas-based firm's principal, has set up shops at 8117 Preston Rd. in North Dallas and 1200 Post Oak Rd. in Houston. San Antonio is next on the trip ticket. Rutson says other "markets of interest" are Raleigh-Durham, NC, Las Vegas and Phoenix. The goal is to have three to five brokers on the ground in each city in addition to physician board members in each market.

Charles Chou is leading the three-broker team in Houston. The new company's board members include Dr Ron Hellstern, founding partner and former chairman of a national practice management company with more than 250 physicians and revenue of exceeding $250 million a year, and Dr Lillian Chou, who has extensive real estate experience and general partner of a 106-bed hospital that opened this year in Lubbock, TX.

"Any market, with the strong downturn, is ripe for physicians to get good deals. Physicians should benefit from this," says Rutson, who's spent the past seven years of his career focused on the medical office industry. "We're not a typical brokerage firm, we're very physician centric and physician driven."