Orange County's commercial real estate leaders gathered at the annual Judges Breakfast to decide the winners of this year's CREW-OC SPIRE Awards. The annual award event recognizes "superior performance in real estate." This year, the event is on Thursday, March 21 at the Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa, and you can still grab tickets here. This year, the categories are women in real estate, leasing, sales, building renovations, new construction, tenant improvements, philanthropy, MVP service partner, and emerging category. "We are recognizing superior performance in real estate by different categories of careers in this business," Sharon Kline, EVP at CBRE Capital Markets and SPIRE Awards co-chair, tells GlobeSt.com. "We also have an emerging leader award, which is new this year. We are really looking to recognize unique or outstanding projects in Orange County in the last year." This year, the judging committee had a friendly but difficult deliberation due to the quality of the nominees. The committee included: Dave Pintar, director of project development at C.W. Driver; Jo-E Lopez, VP at Snyder Langston; John Combs, principal at RiverRock Real Estate Group; John Mehigan, SVP and senior market officer at Regency Centers; Kristen Croxton, SVP of originations at Capital One Multifamily Finance; Kurt Strasmann, managing director at CBRE; Marissa Kasdan, director of design and research at KTGY; Michelle Schierberl, SVP at Stream Realty Partners; Perry Schonfeld, principal and COO at LBA Realty; and Sandra Vaughan-Acton, director of real estate development at Cal Poly Pomona Foundation. "Our five-star panel of judges gave their time to read 100 nominations and voted at the judges' breakfast," says Kline. "They were very collaborative, and there were a few categories where we had to vote twice because there were ties." Get an inside look at the Judges Breakfast in the slideshow above. This week, the winners will be announced at the SPIRE award event. "We had a first-class panel of judges, and the nominees were all great," adds Kline. "The event is getting better each year. It is going to be an exciting event, and hopefully the best won over. It will be great to see the winners' reaction."