Photo by John Kringas Callahan

When Trizec Properties was sold to Brookfield Properties Corporation (NYSE: BPO) in 2006, Trizec president and CEO Tim Callahan realized that he wasn't ready to retire. Instead, Callahan launched a new venture,

Callahan Capital Partners LLC, a private real estate operating company focused on investing in office properties on a national scale.

"Our main objective is to take what we did successfully with Trizec and apply it on a private basis, meaning we're going to attempt to build a national operating platform," Callahan says.

With more than 30 years of experience in the real estate industry, including four years with Trizec, Callahan readily assembled a group of real estate notables to help build the new company. The list includes Steve Budorick, Mike Colleran and Bill Tresham, all former Trizec colleagues, as well as Ross Satterwhite, former senior vice president of investments with Equity Office Properties Trust and most recently head of the U.S. office platform for Macquarie Bank.

"I was gratified by the number of people interested in working at Callahan Capital Partners," Callahan says. "We have a core group of senior people who worked well together previously and who have a great deal of real estate expertise."

Building a successful platform is not new to Callahan. After joining Trizec Properties in 2002, Callahan transformed the Canadian company into a public U.S. REIT, repositioning the portfolio to strictly office properties and reallocating capital into more dynamic markets. Now that he is building a new firm, Callahan says step one is developing processes to leverage the firm's considerable internal skills.

"One of the things my colleagues and I focused on with the turnaround at Trizec was finding ways to fuse process with efficiency, not bureaucracy," he says. "You have to build operational processes for decision making and information sharing if you expect to run a business efficiently on a national scale."

Callahan says the firm is strengthening its platform both internally and externally. "We will continue to prudently add staff, while also finding investment partners that share our goal of being a high-end team of real estate professionals that can build value through operational excellence and investment acumen."