Member Spotlight: Tomko Company

Member Spotlight by Tomko Company.

Provide us with a brief summary of your business’ services

We are a development firm specializing in historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and mixed-use development.

Our primary area of focus is downtown Columbus, where we work to identify buildings that have exceptional architectural character but are in need of modernization and adapt those buildings to modern uses.

Modernization of office space has been a primary focus for us, as we have redeveloped a number of pre-1920 office buildings to meet the growing demand for offices ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 square feet with high ceilings, large windows for natural light, hardwood floors, and modern amenities.

As our company has grown, we’ve also prioritized retail development, especially in partnership with local businesses, to ensure a vibrant and engaging street-level experience. In addition, we’ve recently expanded our multifamily operations with a focus on workforce and affordable housing.

Tell us about your company’s mission and values

Our company’s mission is to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods through redevelopment projects that meet the needs of today’s businesses and residents.

We prioritize excellence in architecture, design, and client experience, and we believe that everyone in Columbus should be able to love where they work and where they live. 

We believe that we have a responsibility to the communities where our redevelopments are located and our standard of excellence is that every mixed-use project we complete should be a place where we would be happy to live, work, and shop.

What are the services you use the most (or are looking forward to using) from the Columbus Chamber?

We’re looking forward to the events hosted by the Columbus Chamber and to getting to know more businesses with a major presence in Columbus.

We’ve always been a heavily partnership-driven organization, and our partners in the construction, design, brokerage, and architectural industries have been essential to our continued growth in the Columbus market, so we look forward to meeting with more businesses through the Columbus Chamber.

How do you stay engaged with trends that you see in your industry?

We think that the best way to stay engaged with trends in the real estate industry is to understand our local market within the context of broader nationwide trends. We work with a lot of great local organizations including the Columbus chapters of BOMA, NAIOP, and IREM. Their presentations, events, and programming help us to understand what’s happening in Columbus, the opportunities that other developers are seeing in the market, and how Columbus is different from other cities. 

This also helps us contextualize feedback we’re hearing from our clients, which is particularly important for our office developments. Over the past few years, many companies have been in the market for new office space to help them keep growing and improving employee engagement as remote work became a bigger part of their overall strategy. Understanding trends in the broader market and how companies are responding to change has helped us meet that need.

What is your company culture like?

Our company culture prizes inquisitiveness and resourcefulness. Real estate development is always changing as the macroeconomic environment shifts and consumer trends evolve, so projects that didn’t make sense five years ago may be exceptional opportunities today. As a company, we believe that we should learn from experience but not be constrained by it, which is why we are deliberate in always trying to question our prior assumptions and think about how things can be done differently.

What does it take to be a successful employee at your company?

The most important quality for success at our company is relentless curiosity. Historic preservation is different from other kinds of real estate development because existing buildings present certain challenges and constraints, and figuring out how to make a redevelopment feasible requires a commitment to always finding a new way to look at an opportunity and reimagine something different. Many successful developers apply a similar formula to each site they analyze for a new project of a given type, but historic preservation requires working within existing constraints, so each project starts with many more questions than answers.

What makes Columbus such a great place to do business?

We think that one of the things that makes Columbus an exceptional place to do business is the city’s culture. There’s a real dynamism in Columbus that makes the city unique. Columbus is open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, and changing the status quo in a way that’s admirable. Rather than simply looking at the way things have been done in the past, business and civic leaders here understand that the city is still defining its future and they work to make Columbus the best it can be.

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thetomkocompany
Website: https://tomkocompany.com/