If There Were No Craig Irving
Craig Irving

Without Craig Irving, there would not be an Irving Hughes Group to write about, and John Burnham & Co. might have a stranglehold on the Downtown office-leasing market.

    Irving and John Donovan broke away from Burnham in 1989, intent on starting their own full-service brokerage firm, representing tenants and landlords. Then the market started to implode.

    "Soon after we left (Burnham), we had the Catellus Development listing, which comprised 3.8 million square feet of office, retail and hotel work," Irving says.

    The bulk of the ambitious project was to be built around the Santa Fe Depot. "But timing is everything in the economy," says Irving, 35, the son of retired federal Judge Lawrence Irving. "So that project ended up on the shelf."

    Nevertheless, he and Donovan managed to sparkle in a shrinking marketplace, with Irving emerging as a Downtown leasing power. In 1990, he landed the exclusive representation of the city of San Diego for its office needs. Then Donovan left for a new business in North County.

    After pondering his moves, Irving decided to start a new business from scratch. Only this time he would represent only tenants in lease negotiations or buyers in acquisitions, getting rid of those nagging feelings of guilt he was carrying from getting payments from landlords.

    The Point Loma resident started The Irving Group and later hired Jason Hughes, who eventually became his partner. Along the way, Irving individually has represented most of the largest law firms in town, including Lewis, D'Amato, Brisbois & Bisgaard; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach; Chapin, Fleming & Winet; Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason; Lorenz Alhadeff Cannon and Rose; Edwards, White and Sooy; Mulvaney, Kahan & Barry; and Stutz, Gallagher and Artiano.

    Since 1990, he's negotiated 475,000 square feet of office space leases for the city, and most recently Irving secured the new Golden Eagle Insurance Co. in its quest for better space.

    The rest is San Diego leasing history, with the soft-spoken Irving occasionally playing the conciliator against Hughes' tougher negotiating style in a good-cop/bad-cop routine.