Wheeler chooses Longmont as site for support center

LONGMONT — Two of the region’s oldest real estate firms have their sights set on northern Boulder County and southern Larimer County and have merged to form a 175-agent realty company with a new corporate support center headquartered in Longmont.

Bill Neal, owner-broker of Fort Collins-based Wheeler Realty Better Homes & Gardens, said his firm’s partnership with Boulder-based Fowler Real Estate Better Homes & Gardens couples Wheeler’s commercial and residential development expertise with the residential marketing power behind the Fowler name.

“We are really excited about it,” Fowler vice president Chris Mygatt said. “A real catalyst of this entire merger is the fact that we have spent quite a bit of time specializing in the concept of agent support.”

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The new Longmont Services Center, located on the second floor of the new Micro Computer World building at 2330 N. Main St., will provide that support beginning Jan. 15. As home to the firm’s marketing and publications, education, accounting, contract management and closing, and showing appointment scheduling functions, as well as eight Realtors, the center will employ 20 people. Fowler’s education division includes both prelicense schooling and Graduate Realtors Institute training.

Both firms will retain their long-standing names. Wheeler was organized in 1915; Fowler opened in 1958.

Neal said that by year’s end, there should be 250 Realtors on the Fowler-Wheeler roster. The firms, which previously have concentrated on marketing Fowler listings in Louisville, Nederland and Boulder and Wheeler projects in Fort Collins, will begin to approach their new territory in February, with a monthly 118,000-copy, four-color, 16-page brochure circulated in Loveland and Longmont, as well as in the companies’ traditional marketing areas.

“That should give you some idea where we’re headed,” Neal said.

While Boulder County’s apparent slow-growth sentiment adds some mystery to the merger, Neal said he would like to see the Wheeler-Fowler partnership “do similar communities to those we have done in Larimer County.

“But it’s a big question mark whether our kind of development would be allowed in Boulder County. I haven’t seen any new-home subdivisions approved in Boulder, so I’m not counting on being able to do much in Boulder city anyway. But the commercial end of our development operations are looking at some opportunities in outlying Boulder County and along the I-25 corridor in Weld County, where there is still some interest in accommodating some quality development.

“With the regional circulation of our advertising, the expansion into Longmont and Loveland with our residential operations, the merger gives us enough strength to realistically proceed into those kinds of things,” Neal said.