Recently Cushman & Wakefield acquired Royal LePage Commercial. Cushman & Wakefield is a large commercial brokerage based out of the States and Royal LePage Commercial is a Canadian commercial real estate brokerage house. Although Royal LePage and Cushman & Wakefield had an affiliate relationship for the last 12 years, this acquisition means the loss of one more major business with a Canadian Identity. The residential side of Royal LePage is not affected by this transaction, while the commercial side has been rebranded as Cushman & Wakefield.
What does this mean for cross border commercial real estate? Possibly brokers on either side of the border will consider taking their clients across the border. It appears that U.S. brokerages don’t even consider Canadian real estate as an investment alternative. Canadian commercial real estate brokers may be interested in cross border transactions, however lacked the connections in the States to get started. Possibly this acquisition will help bridge this gap.
From a world prospective, I think Bruce Mosler the president and CEO of Cushman & Wakefield summed it up best by stating that Canada’s gross domestic product is growing faster than that of the United States and he said that some Americans tend to forget that Toronto is North America’s sixth largest office market. He followed this up with “Overseas, investors tend to look at North America as a whole.”
If overseas investors are looking at Canada and the U.S. as one market, perhaps it is appropriate to have a unified commercial brokerage identity and brokerage relationships between the two countries.
Via: Commercial Property News; January 1, 2006
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