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SANTA ANA, CA-RiverRock Real Estate Group has been one of thefastest-growing property management and leasing firms in SouthernCalifornia in the past three years since it was founded, yet thecompany has stayed out of the retail leasing and managementbusiness until recently. Now, after building a portfolio of morethan six million sf of office and industrial space undermanagement, the company has set its sights on building a portfolioof retail assignments.The reason that RiverRock is only nowventuring into retail properties is simple, according to JohnCombs, the company's founder and formerly the head of a nationalproperty management portfolio for Insignia/ESG before that firm wasacquired by CB Richard Ellis in 2003. "Retail is a separate breedand a separate specialty, so RiverRock had to reach a point whereit could afford to start a specialized group before we expandedinto retail," Combs explains."Even though I ran retail at Insignia,including the mall group, that's not my specialty," Combs furtherexplains. "We didn't want to have office and industrial peopletrying to do retail. We wanted retail people with retailbackgrounds."To that end, Combs has hired longtime retailspecialist Sally Vogel to head the RiverRock retail division. Vogelhas held posts with Pan Pacific, the Mills Corp., Trizec Hahn,Alexander Haagen and the J.H. Snyder Co. Combs has also hired JonWaldron, a retail specialist who worked for him at Insignia, toteam with Vogel in building the new RiverRock division.Combsemphasizes that the new RiverRock division is not intended as agarden-variety property manager or leasing firm. It wants to tacklethe most challenging jobs and will focus on developing its ownspecialty within the retail world as "a boutique management andleasing firm," he says."We want the centers that have some hairaround them. We want the properties that need repositioning or thatneed to have value added," Combs says. As an example, he explainsthat RiverRock, in bidding on a management contract for a portfolioof older properties, asked the owners to "tell us which is theirmost troubled asset so that we can show them what we can do withit."Vogel says the RiverRock approach will thus be"solution-oriented," meaning the company will marshal whateverresources are required for a specific property. "The idea is thatwe will add whatever disciplines are needed to drive an asset'svalue," she says. "The solution might require us to add inconstruction, for example, so if we need to, we can add that aswell."Combs believes that considerable opportunities exist for athird-party boutique retail management and leasing firm because"there just aren't a whole lot of them out there." He points outthat the large national brokerage shops have retail divisions, tobe sure, and some third-party companies have formed long-termrelationships with home builders to manage the grocery-anchoredcenters that the home builders typically include as part of theirlarge residential developments. But Combs says that neither ofthose types of companies is the model for the new RiverRock retaildivision.RiverRock already has about 500,000 sf of retail spaceunder management in Los Angeles, Ventura and Riverside counties,including Warner Marketplace, and it hopes to have about twomillion sf by the end of the year. But Combs says he's more focusedon expanding the new division carefully rather than quickly. "Wewant to have the program tweaked so that it's the best out there,and you don't do that by growing real fast," he says.