SAN DIEGO—UC San Diego is the largest engineering school in California; yet young professionals leave San Diego for the Bay Area. What can the region do to keep our talent from moving away? Plenty, according to Olin Hyde, founder and CEO of local technology firm Englue. Hyde says the commercial real estate community here is finally beginning to step up and give tech startups a reason to stay in San Diego—but more of them need to start doing more.

“The drivers of the San Diego economy are changing dramatically, and technologies that are experiencing exponential growth and change are playing a bigger role in the economy here,” Hyde tells GlobeSt.com. “We're starting to see this in genetics, robotics and a variety of other technologies. About one-third of the economy years ago when I first came to San Diego was defense related; now it's much less.”

Hyde says tech firms have different real estate needs than other areas of business, and CRE needs to realize what those needs are and meet them, rather than live by the “old-school San Diego, 'Let's build a class-A office building and Qualcomm will move in and we'll all make lots of money' mentality.” He adds that Qualcomm, one of the area's leading wireless-technology firms, is planning to lay off 15% of workforce globally, and since there's such a concentration of that workforce in San Diego, that percentage may be higher here. Because of this, the area needs to focus on growing innovative technologies and businesses here.

“San Diego is at a crossroads of finding ways to attract businesses,” says Hyde. “It is positioned to do this via artificial intelligence. UCSD's engineering school is the largest in California with more than 9,000 students—that's almost bigger than the Stanford's and Berkeley's engineering students combined. San Diego is producing more engineers than any other metropolitan area, and where are they going? They're not staying here—they're going to the Bay Area. That's the opportunity for economic growth that San Diego is missing.”

Venture-capital funding to San Diego was a small fraction of the $170 million that all of Southern California received last year, while the Bay Area received about $3.1 billion in VC funding, Hyde says. “What little came to San Diego was principally biotech and wireless.”

So what can real estate do that's really visionary that can attract, keep and build companies of the future? Hyde says the Irvine Co. is doing this, and has been for the last four years, with its support of EvoNexus, an incubator for start-up businesses, and its development of office buildings like One La Jolla Center, which offers tenants of all sizes a great amount of flexibility and scalability. But he argues that more developers need to jump on the bandwagon. “People building exponential technologies really do change the world. It's a matter of getting them into the right water, soil and sunlight for them to grow, and we have that here in San Diego. We need to ask why they are leaving San Diego to go to San Francisco.”

Amenities like walkability and bikeability to work, allowing dogs in the office and creating the live/work/play atmosphere that attracts young tech companies are key. Hyde says, “We also need to give them access to capital, a place to grow and the amenities they want.”