ATLANTA—Jack Portman has always had big goals. So it's no surprise that he still has a visionary mindset 40 years after he launched his career, despite the challenges.

In this final installment of our exclusive interview series, GlobeSt.com asked the Atlanta commercial real estate pioneer to share his goals for the next phase of the company's journey. He got granular with us, as any visionary would.

"For Portman Holdings, we are invigorated by the opportunities at hand and ahead," Portman tells GlobeSt.com. "We have a new class AA office building going up in Charlotte: 615 South College. We just broke ground on construction and are actively seeking tenants for 2017. In Denver, we have a mixed-use office-and-hotel project under construction. In San Diego, we have a dual-branded Marriott hotel that will complete construction in 2016 and a second hotel that should start construction early next year."

What about his home town of Atlanta? There's plenty of action going on there too.

"In Atlanta, we are finishing up the adaptive reuse of a project our firm originally developed as our first office tower in 1965," Portman says. "The tower is now being repurposed as office with a Hotel Indigo and a destination restaurant, JP Atlanta, at street level. It will open in January 2016."

Portman was competitively selected to work on an important project with Georgia Tech. Further south, Portman is looking forward to a public referendum in Miami Beach that could clear the way for the firm to begin work on a new 800-room convention headquarters hotel there.

Of course, those are just some of Portman's more significant US projects. In India, the firm has two projects each in Pune and Bangalore spanning 4,000 residential units. With a local developer in China, the firm has kicked off a 5 million-square-foot development on the Huangpu River in the center of Shanghai that will be a new commercial node in that city.

"John Portman & Associates is designing everything that Portman Holdings is developing in the US and China, while also working with other developers here in the US and in China, where we have 10 projects under construction," Portman says. "We are actively working to grow our architecture business even more and find additional clients and projects, especially here in the States. We are fortunate that the ongoing success of past projects provides a steady stream of new and existing clients that appreciate the value that our design expertise can bring to their projects."