If Connie Grant had to focus on making one contribution, it would be opening up the freeways through Bellevue and the Eastside.

“If I had a soapbox, that would be it,” said Grant, one of four managing directors for the Bellevue-based family real estate investment firm called Tochterman Management Group.

“I think all of our futures count on us getting a handle on this transportation gridlock,” said Grant. “In real estate, you can’t make it work if people can’t go from one place to another. All of the other factors like interest rates and the health of the national economy don’t matter if the transportation problems don’t get fixed.”

Grant sees widening and other improvements to Interstate 405 and Highway 520 as the top priority for a fix.

The Tochtermans’ biggest piece of Bellevue real estate was the former family farm on the superblock now partly occupied by the Eastside’s convention center, Meydenbauer Center.

The family spent the past five years working with a development group on a huge proposal to convert the remainder of the block into hotels, an office skyscraper or two, retail and entertainment.

The elaborate proposal never came together, so last fall the Tochtermans changed course and agreed to sell the land to a different developer for $25.3 million. The new developer, Schnitzer Northwest, plans to create a new proposal for a hotel and possibly three office towers.

The Tochtermans promptly reinvested the money in suburban office buildings -- one in Snoqualmie, one in Lynnwood and then a two-building complex in Bellevue.

In the first purchase, they bought the Cascade View building in Quadrant’s Snoqualmie Ridge master-planned community.

Then the family bought a Lynnwood complex from Quadrant. This month, the Tochtermans bought the two-building Mountain Pacific Complex, paying Rreef Funds $18.7 million.

“We’re done buying for a while,” Grant said. “We’ve fulfilled our 1031 exchange (to avoid taxes on the sale to Schnitzer), and these were our first moves out of downtown Bellevue,” which required study.

“We will continue looking at other markets throughout the Northwest,” she said. The family may invest in retail or other types of properties.

Grant expects the Northwest economy will soften this year but then pick up.

“I think there’s an overall sense that there will be sort of a pause,” she said. “We’re in a period where we don’t know where we’re going to go, but there seems to a general consensus among real estate professionals that there could be a lull in the market.”

But so far, no lull. “What we see more than anything, is active interest by tenants in the properties we have.” Tochterman Management Group’s three other managing directors are Grant’s bothers, Tom B. Tochterman and Tom L. Tochterman and her sister, Linda Gaskins.