Up Close with Ralph Tullier

Stream managing director Ralph Tullier and his team were one of the first groups to build a retail property in Houston coming out of the Great Recession. Now they're gearing up a second development while also working on an existing project in Lake Jackson.

Ralph (above) and partner Mark Sondock are developing a power center at the intersection of Garth and Hunt roads in Baytown. Ralph says the location is the latest spot to watch in that area: Kroger's already under construction across the road, and other new development is moving toward this intersection. Ralph and Mark are hammering out the anchor lineup now and will have more info in a few months. Hopefully it'll be easier than Stream's first Houston development—Ralph says building the Center at Pearland Parkway was the hardest deal in his career. It was built right as the nation was coming out of recession and had multiple layers of complexity that took his team’s full range of skills sets. Ralph recently closed his first Stream acquisition; the firm just bought a shopping center in Lake Jackson. It’s a unique area, Ralph tells us, with Dow expanding nearby. He later found out that lots of people had been eyeing the property, so Stream was lucky to snag it.

Houston's retail sector has Austin's multifamily sector to thank for bringing us Ralph—in college at UT, he met a guy from Los Angeles who was buying Austin multifamily. Ralph thought that sounded cool and started taking real estate classes. During college he acquired a few multifamily units before turning his attention to office, industrial and retail investment sales after graduation. Ralph has since decided to focus exclusively on retail, but he loves and misses industrial. He tells us (whispering, so his retail colleagues can't hear) that at some point, he would like to do something in that space again.

Here’s Ralph with his wife of 23 years, Laurie, and his kids Zach and Cassi (and Cassi's boyfriend). Ralph and Laurie love to travel to unusual places; they’ve backpacked the wilderness of Alaska and are looking forward to a trip to Africa. But sometimes they bring other places to them; the family hosts international exchange students.