Real estate merger makes sense

The union of Fort Collins Real Estate with Keller Williams Northern Colorado, announced in early September, is just the latest in a series of consolidations, new affiliations and mergers that have shaped the real estate scene in recent years.

In three years, two mega-mergers of residential real estate brokerages have dominated the news in the region. In November 2005, the four offices and 170 brokers at Re/Max First Associates joined a metro Denver brokerage six times its size, Re/Max Alliance.

Just three months later, residential brokerages flying the Prudential flag in Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Estes Park and Boulder merged to form the 174-broker Prudential Rocky Mountain Realtors.

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But the Keller Williams/Fort Collins Real Estate combination is different. Mike Jensen, the owner of Fort Collins Realty since 2003, said the merger plugs him in to a much larger network of commercial contacts, and that will serve him and his new partners well.

“What I’ve seen happening locally is the emergence of the big nationals, like Marcus & Millichap, Fuller, Sperry Van Ness and so forth,” he said. “This will get us into a much larger network, with maybe 30,000 commercial brokers in the KW Commercial division.”

Keller Williams’ late-August launch of KW Commercial is reflective of the way the housing market has spurred residential brokerages to diversify. Jensen said the combination will help with his marketing efforts for mixed-use projects in Fort Collins that have been challenging sells.

“Penny Flats is an example,” Jensen said, referring to the downtown retail, office and loft project that is under construction by Boulder-based Coburn Development. “This gives that project more national outreach and more national exposure.”

The same is true for Solar Village, another downtown mixed-use project. Meanwhile, the residential projects that Jensen is listing, including Conifer Meadows on Vine Drive in northeast Fort Collins and the North Flats project north of the city, will benefit from the attention of the 200-plus-strong army of KW residential specialists.

“We have to have an outlet for our residential listings and we have to have an outlet for our commercial projects,” Jensen said. “With this, we get both of those things done.”

Editor Tom Hacker covers real estate for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 223 or at thacker@ncbr.com.