SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, CA—Helping both individual homeowners and large institutional funds with enormous single-family residential portfolios is something Port Street Realty Corp. handles every day, even though the approaches differ. According to Bryan Auer, manager of the newly formed Murrieta, CA, office, dealing with “mom-and-pop” sellers requires more of a hands-on approach, while the institutional sellers operate in a more corporate atmosphere.

As GlobeSt.com reported last week, the residential real estate firm, an Orange County subsidiary of Pintar Investment Group, has opened its fourth US office, a flagship office in Murrieta. The opening marks the brand's continued commitment in the Inland Empire region, an area the firm says has been extremely popular for investors looking to capitalize on single-family residences.

“With the mom-and-pops, it's more of a start-to-finish approach,” Auer tells GlobeSt.com. “It's more about sitting in their living room with them as a leasing agent—it's very face-to-face and one-on-one. When you deal with the institutional clients, our leader Jeff Pintar communicates with them. It's quite a bit different.”

Auer says the firm is already managing more than 1,500 homes in the Inland Empire, “and we're doing an incredible job at it. We're going after more people to grow even more. We want to grow our platform in the Inland Empire in a way that even a mom-and-pop type of investor who has been living in their house for a long time and wants to move to a larger home, who doesn't know the first or last thing about property management, finding tenants, screening them, marketing the property or managing it, can be helped. We handle all that. We're going after the one-off owner as well as the huge hedge funds. We already have a management platform in place.”

Auer adds that, in addition to the single-family residential market, the firm is also interested in growing its multifamily presence in the Inland Empire. “We have a couple of multifamily units now, and we are very interested in expanding that side of the business as well. We are a full-service brokerage as well as a property-management company. We are constantly acquiring properties for investors. We have a huge platform/system in place for property acquisition. And we also have all of the systems and the tools and the marketing dollars for sales/property dispositions. We have a lot of licensed realtors who are doing traditional real estate:  working with buyers and sellers, hosting open houses. In the Inland Empire right now, most of our licensed agents are doing quite a bit of regular real estate, doing a lot of deals and making customers very happy. We deal with a lot of first-time buyers.”