Stream Realty Partners has big plans for the DC market, and it just hired a top local broker to bring the firm to the next level.

Matt Pacinelli headed up leasing at Penzance for more than a decade. He now joins a young DC office at Stream Realty, a Dallas-based real estate services firm with a presence in 11 major cities throughout the South and Midwest.

Stream opened its DC office in 2013 and has grown to about 20 people, with a leasing team of six. It manages and leases five Downtown DC office buildings and a handful in NoVa. Much of that growth came in 2016, with eight new hires in the last six months.

DC managing partner Kyle Luby says the firm plans to continue growing rapidly over the next two years, expanding into new business lines such as construction management and tenant representation. He plans to open offices in NoVa and suburban Maryland to grow the firm's presence geographically, but for now, he is focusing on beefing up Stream's DC leasing team with hires like Pacinelli to help it compete with the best in the District.

"Our goal really, in the short term, is to be regarded as the best downtown leasing team in the market," Luby said. "Going forward our goal is to grow rapidly to the point where we're one of the largest service providers not just in downtown DC but also in Northern Virginia as well."

To boost that growth, Pacinelli plans to leverage the relationships he's built in the DC real estate community, to find new business partners and to hire new brokers.

"I’ve already been in contact with a number of them about working on new projects together, it's sort of a very comfortable next step in the evolution of those relationships," Pacinelli said. "Having worked with practically everyone in the market on the service side, I’d love to help some of those folks further their careers here."

Pacinelli is the oldest broker on the leasing team, which sits in a small corner office on the seventh floor of a building the firm manages, 1432 K St NW. The other downtown buildings it leases are the Madison office building at 1155 15th St NW, Arch Square at 7th and H streets NW and 727 15th St.

The biggest deal the firm has done since breaking into the DC market has been the acquisition of a 183k SF Herndon office building for $21M. It was 50% leased when Stream bought it, and during renovations, it leased 35k SF to TJX Cos and Fairfax Family Practice Centers, bringing it to 75% leased. It expects to sign another 30k SF lease to bring the building to 90% in the coming weeks.

Nationally, Stream Realty has 780 employees and manages more than 150M SF in Orange County, Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Denver, Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago and now DC.

Twenty-three of the firm's national institutional clients have a presence in the DC market, which Luby said is one of the main reasons the company decided to expand into this market.

"We just felt like DC represented everything that we wanted to associate our platform with," Luby, who previously worked in the Dallas and Atlanta offices, said, "whether it was the size of the market, the quality of the office product, the reputation of the investors in the region as well as just the pure real estate opportunities to grow our service business."