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When Ben Kochalski arrived in the Bay, he had a big job to do.

Then working with Chicago based-developer John Buck Co., he was tasked with establishing the firm’s first West Coast regional office, where he would lead some of the most high-profile projects built in San Francisco in recent years, like Park Tower and One Steuart Lane.

The cross-country move was one of the most pivotal moments in his career, he said, giving him the ability to build a new office, lead a new team and set the strategy.

He made the move to TMG in 2019 to head up a new Silicon Valley office, and was later named president and chief investment officer in spring 2025. This year, he became co-CEO of the company alongside longtime head Michael Covarrubias.

TMG has been active in San Francisco’s postpandemic era, acquiring 149 Montgomery St. and the Metreon mall and entering a joint venture with Macy’s Inc. to redevelop the retailer’s Union Square location — with Kochalski working closely on the projects.

He also helped to reposition 350-380 Ellis St., a Mountain View office complex that earlier this year landed a full-campus lease from artificial intelligence giant OpenAI.

“We're always trying to go in a direction where the puck is going, not where the puck is,” Kochalski said. “I think through our recent investments, that continues to show our ingenuity and continued evolution in the real estate market.”

How did you get into real estate?

A really close friend's dad owned a construction company, so we worked the yard when I was in high school, and it was a fantastic-paying job, but it was also just exciting to be around all the heavy machinery and construction equipment. That kind of piqued my interest, which led me to getting a civil engineering degree in undergrad and I continued to stay and expand in the real estate world.

Where was high school for you?

Columbus, Ohio.

Is there a project that you’ve worked on in your career that was particularly impactful?

For sure Park Tower fits that bill. That was taking a risk, moving my family out here and starting a brand-new office and having it end up being such a success was incredibly impactful in my career in many different ways. It cemented the reason that I moved out west and gave me the opportunity to understand the local landscape and how versatile this economy is. That led to my ultimate decision to end up leaving the John Buck Co. to join TMG.

Do you have a morning routine?

I try to go to the gym in the morning before my kids wake up. It helps me really level-set for the day and compartmentalize what I'm trying to get done. Then I always love to help make breakfast for my kids and send them off to school.

What leadership lesson did you learn that you still remember to this day?

I had an individual decide that he wanted to move on. I realized had I just invested a little bit more time explaining the vision of what we were trying to accomplish and how he folded into that vision, I think I might have had a better chance of retaining him. That helped me realize that sometimes you just need to slow down and look around at those people who are truly important in terms of making everything at the organization successful, as opposed to just trying to charge ahead.

When you were named co-CEO, you said you’d take TMG to the next level. What does the next level look like?

Well, the Bay Area continues to reinvent itself, so we continue to reinvent ourselves — and we've been doing that for our 40-plus-year history. What that means today is continuing our focus in our core asset classes of retail, mixed-use, research and development, office and multifamily, and really capitalizing on the growth trends that we see in all of those different asset classes.

What was it like working on the OpenAI lease and repositioning 350 Ellis?

It was very exciting. It was a single-tenant campus when we made the acquisition. During the downturn, we really tried to look at the asset and think about different ways this could be a campus that could fit for multiple tenants as opposed to just one tenant. As growth retracted in the market, that became more and more a focus. But we realized pretty quickly that as AI continued to grow, and as these tenants continued to come back to the market, the best product delivery for that asset was a single-tenant campus.

And it's a beautiful asset in a fantastic location, so to see a really high-quality, exciting tenant like OpenAI be our partner there, I think it's the best outcome we could hope for.

You also scooped up 149 New Montgomery. What’s the repositioning strategy there?

It is a fantastic asset that has been completely overlooked. It's a beautiful building, and the moment we put eyes on it, we saw the vision and what it could be. And Lightspeed also came in and shared the same kind of vision. They saw the brick-and-timber nature of it, the high ceilings. For Lightspeed, as well as for us, we thought that this could be a headquarters location given the quality of the building and the New Montgomery corridor has always been a very strong corridor from a leasing-demand perspective.

In your prior roles, you worked on some major developments in the city. What would it take for new projects to break ground in San Francisco?

We have a saying that the road to recovery always starts on the first floor. It doesn't start on the 33rd floor of a building, and so everything that the current administration has done in terms of tackling that at the first-floor level, things like First Thursdays and building reasons for people to be in the city after hours again has been really important on that recovery.

So that really is what has started it, and I think then you've seen with the continued technology growth, AI growth, continued leasing success, that creates the economic feedback loop where restaurants are starting to open again, retailers are looking at Union Square all over again. That feedback loop is very important to the real estate cycle. I think as that absorption continues to occur, and you continue to see rent growth, at some point development will pencil in not as far of a distant future as we all might think.

One of the most-discussed redevelopments is the Macy’s site that TMG is partnering to redevelop. How are those conversations going?

We have continued to evolve from where we were last November or December, but we're in what we would call the ideation and experimental design phase now. We anticipate that it will be some form of mixed-use redevelopment, but we just don't know yet what it will be. So we've made a lot of progress, and candidly, as we continue to make progress, Union Square seems to continue to recover, which is a very positive aspect.

And so we're looking out forward into the future, trying to ensure that whatever we do will meet the demand of those user groups several years from now.

How long do you anticipate the timeline to be?

We will probably have a direction in the next year or two.

You’ve worked your way up the ranks at TMG. Was that something you had charted in your mind, or did it happen organically?

It was all part of the original plan when I talked with Mike about coming over. Mike is a very forward thinker, and even at that time, he was planning for what the future of TMG might hold and what that leadership looked like. And I was a part of that from the day that I joined.

What’s it like working with Mike?

Fantastic. He's very creative. He's an incredible leader. He's very politically involved, which is influential both for what we work on at TMG and, candidly, for the entire Bay Area and the work that he's done. But he's a very good partner, very collaborative, very easy to work with.

What’s something about you that would surprise people?

I’ve completed an Ironman.

What was that like?

Very difficult, but it was fun and exciting to do. You have to truly commit work-ethic-wise. I think a lot of people in our industry, including myself, have a very rigorous work ethic. That is an athletic way to extend that work ethic, and for me I use athletics as a way to decompress and destress.

I lost my mom and quickly signed up for a marathon to help me just process that large impact, large change of life. At the time that I did the Ironman, I worked through work and stress and I had become a new father, and so it was really exciting for me to be able to finish that race and then hang it up and focus on my kids for the next five years without doing any races.

About Kochalski

Hometown: Columbus, Ohio

Residence: Hillsborough

Education: Bachelor’s, Ohio State; MBA, Northwestern

Resume: TMG, the John Buck Co.

Favorite Bay Area restaurants: Rossotti’s Alpine Inn, Portola Valley; Village Pub, Woodside

About TMG Partners

Founded: 1984

HQ: San Francisco

Employees: 54

What it does: Full-service real estate development company focused on urban infill projects

Did you know? TMG has a a $6.8 billion portfolio spanning more than 33 million square feet in the Bay Area.