“We saw a big opportunity for our kind of money,” said Mr. Zoukis, who, flush with cash from the sales of most of the New York properties, was unencumbered by the need to seek financing from banks. He joined forces with a Charleston partner, Michael L. Wooddy, who holds 10 percent of Mr. Zoukis’s position, and in 2012 began snapping up all the available lots they could find, ultimately more than 20.

“It was really before people realized what was happening, so the pricing was very different than it is now,” Mr. Zoukis said, referring to a recent boom in Charleston’s commercial and residential sectors. “You looked at a map of the city and clearly people had to move up the peninsula because there was no place else to go.”

Working under their new shingle, the Raven Cliff Company, the partners initially sought to build a “shrunken” version of the Chelsea Market, the highly successful assemblage of food vendors and retail stores in Manhattan. “But we determined that you can’t really just scale these things down that way,” Mr. Zoukis said, noting the chasm between a place like New York’s Fulton Fish Market, which “cleans a million pounds of fish a day,” and “someone who’s starting an artisanal pickle company.”

A fresh option was suggested by Charleston’s budding tech sector, which has since grown to about 250 companies in the metro area, according to the Charleston Regional Development Alliance. Many were downtown and had little room to expand there. That inspired the two Raven Cliff partners — eventually joined by two others, Martin Skelly and Christian Sullivan — to step in.