“We’ll look at a piece of property two or three different ways,” said Kroll, a third-generation real estate veteran who started working construction sites during summer vacations growing up. “We’ll look at a deal and twist it or turn it. Usually the competitors will just look at it one way.”

A deal that put the company on the map came in 2000, when Sares Regis won an auction to acquire Commodore Station, the 20-acre former Navy base in San Bruno, in a joint venture with TMG Partners. Called The Crossing, the development transformed public perception of San Bruno and was a moneymaker for the firms.

“We built and sold both phases to a REIT, the first upon completion, the second during lease-up,” said Wagner, who got his start in real estate renting Boston apartments to college students.

Its commercial division, headed by real estate veteran Jeff Birdwell, started with the development of the Hayward City Hall and Civic Center mixed-use project in the late 1990s. Over the years, it’s worked with companies like Symantec, Informatica and Electronic Arts on diverse real estate needs (it even developed a jail for San Mateo County). Today it’s working for Google and Nvidia amid a trend of companies looking to make bigger statements through their real estate. It’s unusual in that it’s a one-stop development-services shop for companies and public agencies, rather than just an entitlement runner or construction manager.

“There aren’t a lot of people who just purely serve clients, whether public or private, to create development outcomes for them,” Birdwell said. “That’s been kind of key to this. We tend to play in a large, complex world.”

John Igoe, director of real estate, design and construction for Google in Northern California, is well acquainted with the company, having spent seven years there as a senior vice president before joining the search giant. He said in an email the company “has a very collaborative approach to development management” and that executives “always try to view projects from the viewpoint of the key stakeholders.

“The success of SRGNC is deeply seated in the founders, their moral compass and their work ethic,” he said.

The division’s creative dealmaking capabilities came together with a recent transaction in Marin. Sares Regis was hired by Cigna to figure out what to do with the old Fireman’s Fund headquarters, a 300,000-square-foot complex that was vacant. At the same time, the county was trying to build a new emergency operations center, but found itself short of funds. Sares Regis showed the county that it could save a ton of money by buying one of the buildings and renovating it rather than building a $100 million project on a beloved Marin dog park.

The county opened the new center in July. In addition to housing the Marin County Emergency Operations Facility and other county services, Marin will lease 152,000 square feet to outside tenants.

“It’s a huge win for Cigna, a huge win for the county,” Birdwell said.

But the Sares Regis touch might be most on display in a deal that closed in May. That’s when the giant teachers’ pension fund TIAA-CREF picked up Township for $628,000 per unit, a number that put other Peninsula sales to shame.

The project now seems like a home run, but Morgan Lingle, executive director of acquisitions for JP Morgan Asset Management, Sares Regis’s capital partner in the project, noted that Sares Regis pitched the deal in the dark days of the recession.

“It was very early in the cycle,” Lingle said. “It’s hard to remember now, but everyone was scared of their shadow. I think we all joke about it now, but it was very hard to buy that land and go into that deal because the returns looked so skinny.”

Wagner, though, noted that the market was poised for revival. The partners tied up the land in 2010, reconfigured it from condo to rentals, and took it through city approvals quickly to beat other players that were coming into the submarket.

“We could see this thing coming three or four years ago,” Wagner said.

Seth Martin is president of Pritzker Realty Group, the private real estate investment firm founded by Penny Pritzker, the philanthropist and current U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He said Sares Regis is skilled at finding off-market deals thanks to its laser-like focus on the Bay Area and relationships with local officials and landowners.

“They see opportunities that others don’t get a chance to see,” Martin said.

Pritzker has three apartment projects in the works with Sares Regis Group in the Bay Area, none of them cookie-cutter, which is another strong suit of the company, he said: Sares Regis won’t just plop in a standard format project to a given site.

“They bring a good design ethos to the table,” Martin said. “Multifamily more and more is becoming the hospitality business. You have to stay on the cutting edge in terms of look and feel, understand what residents want and really understand your customer.”

Rob Parker, who as director of marketing is tasked with finding emerging trends in design and amenities, agreed.

“Everything we do is unique,” he said. “We’ve never built a project twice.”

These days Sares Regis isn’t resting on its laurels. A major turning point came last year when the company closed its first fund, which will be leveraged to buy more than $300 million in apartments, focusing on coastal California, Seattle, Denver, Portland and Phoenix.

“We used to do everything with joint ventures, but the trouble is you have to make the deal sit still long enough to go to your JV partner and get approval,” Kroll said. “This lets you compete with REITs and really compete in the acquisition business.”