Management/leasing professional of the year: Robert Ruth, principal of Tooley and Co.

The metaphor is too easy to pass up: Robert Ruth continues to hit home runs.

As a principal in the downtown Los Angeles-based Tooley & Co., Ruth has signed up some major league clients recently, earning him the title of Management/Leasing Professional of the Year from the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Though he shies away from making the connection, Ruth admits that he may, in fact, be somehow related to the great baseball player and home run king Babe Ruth.

"You know he (Babe Ruth) was an orphan, so you can't really say for sure. But my father seems to think we might be related," says Ruth, whose father, Craig, is another Los Angeles real estate industry notable, and Robert's boss.

Robert and his dad aren't the only family members involved in the real estate business, either. In fact, the rest of his family - his mother, a brother and two sisters - work in real estate in Los Angeles County, but not at Tooley.

"I was brought up in real estate and don't really want to do anything else. I love it because I enjoy the people in the business, and it gives me the opportunity to do something different every day. Nothing is the same in this business," he says.

Over the past year or two, Ruth has put together some big deals that have landed Tooley several new, prestigious clients. In this case, clients are owners of existing office buildings that Tooley manages, leases or both.

Among the properties Ruth has landed for Tooley are the Wilshire Crescent building at the comer of Wilshire Boulevard and Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, the Water Garden complex on Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles, the 9701 Wilshire building in Beverly Hills, the Arco Center building in downtown Los Angeles, and the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City.

Ruth says the key to his success, and the company's, is to focus on the client. "We start and end with the client, not the asset. To us, the most important thing is not the building itself but the owner," says Ruth.

Among his activities at Tooley are looking for and closing deals with new clients, or as he says, "finding points of opportunity."

Ruth, a self-described eternal optimist, says he concentrates on trying to develop "long-term relationships" with clients. By doing that, he says, his business can better withstand the ups and downs of the commercial real estate market.

Short-range focus

Ruth's primary market is the Los Angeles area, but he has also reached out to New York and is exploring possibilities in China. He says he has made some inroads in China and plans a trip there in the near future, which would be his second.

Rather than set lofty goals, Ruth says, his ambition "is to take one day at a time."

Outside of work, which Ruth says occupies about 60 hours a week, the 36-year-old keeps busy with his wife, Gretchen, his 11-year-old daughter, Heather, and 9-year-old daughter, Samantha.

A native of the Los Angeles area, Ruth is a graduate of Miraleste High School in Palos Verdes and USC. Ruth lives with his family in the Rolling Hills section of Palos Verdes.

Ruth has an image of being a clean-cut All-American type who plays tennis and water skis. But the political conservative, who is a big supporter of California Gov. Pete Wilson, also has somewhat of a wild side. He has raced speed boats and says he has gone over 100 miles per hour on water skis.

"It's unbelievably scary. That quarter of a mile you have to go to record that type of speed is the longest you can imagine," he says.

Ruth says his high-speed water skiing days are probably over, but he still harbors a desire to race boats again.

"I'm not going to give up real estate though. It's what I do and what I want to do," he says.