Familiar faces lead Realtec Greeley through year of transition

GREELEY — Partnerships can bring a lot of energy to any business, and in the case of Realtec commercial real estate brokerage of Greeley, it also brings a lot of home cookin’. 

“I think the biggest change is the load of management is now split,” said co-owner Nick Berryman. “Now we’ve got both of us to help in the office. Having two people to carry the load lets us look at doing some new things.”

Berryman and partner, managing broker Gage Osthoff, bought the Greeley office from Mark Bradley in a deal consummated on Jan. 1, 2023. In their first year, all has run fairly smoothly, they both said, but then again their partnership had few surprises given they had already worked together for more than a decade.

Remarkably, both partners grew up in the Greeley area, both are graduates of Colorado State University, and have extended runs with Realtec Greeley (Berryman since 2004 and Osthoff since 2011). Both are also at a stage of life in which they are looking to start families.

“We should be on the same timeline,” regarding the ownership of the business, Osthoff said. “We don’t really have to worry about one guy wanting out earlier.”

Which brings about an interesting aspect of the sale of the business that Osthoff said often needs explaining. While Bradley was interested in selling the business, he never intended to stop being a real estate agent and still remains active in the Greeley office.

His presence helped a great deal in managing the transition, they said, though they often have to reiterate that he is still around. 

“I think it was important to us to have some continuity,” Berryman said. “Mark is still staying with us as a full-time broker for the foreseeable future. He’s not retiring. Mark has just handed off the ownership.”

Osthoff said having Bradley around is more than reassuring, as today’s partners were both hired and mentored by him. But each has his own deals to look after in any brokerage.

“Now it’s his turn to yell at us when the internet doesn’t work,” he said.

Today’s partners see a lot of overlap in their practice areas; still each one has his own areas of expertise.

Berryman’s primary areas of focus and expertise are in the office and industrial real estate markets, mostly in Weld County, where he has worked with many national and local clientele.

Osthoff has a great deal of interest in finance, graduating from CSU with emphasis in both finance and real estate at the College of Business. He spent time traveling throughout the United States and Canada, working for a nonprofit, before returning to Colorado and getting his masters in real estate and construction management from the University of Denver.

The partners acknowledged that having two principles in the business with such a local background is fairly unusual for any real estate office, but both said knowing both the people and the history of properties is a great advantage.

Greeley and Weld County aren’t that divergent from the rest of the Front Range, but there are important distinctions. 

“Oil and gas has been pretty stable, but of course that is always a concern (that the bottom will drop out of the oil market),” Osthoff said. “We haven’t seen a lot of new construction,” which makes for a fairly tight market for some industrial concerns, he added.

Berryman said that Greeley, the retail hub for the county, has a stable market with vacancy rates around 5.5%. “That’s vacancies and not all availability,” he said.

Berryman also noted that Greeley has a great deal of smaller office buildings, which may have helped avoid the big problems with office vacancies seen in other Colorado locations, especially Denver.

Weld County also has two major transportation corridors, Interstate 25 and U.S. Highway 85. The combination keeps the competition for industrial space fairly robust, Osthoff said.

“I-25 has the big distribution warehouses,” he said, “where 85 is more ag and oil, fenced yards and outdoor storage.”

While Weld County and Northern Colorado, in general, don’t have the acute problems such as inflation, especially in construction costs and supply shortages that have plagued other parts of Colorado, they are still a concern. There is a lack of new construction, Osthoff said, and not all of his clients can find, or afford to remodel, sufficient industrial space.

For the partners, it’s been a year of first getting their sea legs, and then getting their office in the shape they envisioned. That’s also been a road of finding local talent, and they were happy to welcome back broker Lanny Duggar and bring along recently licensed broker Reed Sedinger, a 2023 graduate of the University of Northern Colorado.

Along the way, the partners said they have reinforced their cooperation and friendship, though both have found a little less time for outside activities, even the occasional hunting trips they often enjoy together.

“Gage is the better hunter,” said Duggar, noting he himself is limited mostly to bird hunting.

“Well, I do have two great Springer Spaniels to flush them out,” offered Osthoff.

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