Howard Hanna Real Estate Services is entering Alabama through a partnership with ARC Realty and Capstone Realty, adding 875 agents across 12 offices in Birmingham, Montgomery and Huntsville.
ARC and Capstone operate as Alabama’s largest real estate brokerage and will continue to do business under their existing brands while joining Howard Hanna’s national network, according to an announcement on Wednesday.
The move gives Pittsburgh-based Howard Hanna, a RealTrends Verified brokerage, a foothold in one of the Southeast’s faster-growing housing markets while extending its footprint to 19 states. The family-owned brokerage now spans more than 500 offices with about 15,000 sales associates and staff.
Howard Hanna’s partnership with ARC and Capstone comes a little over three months after the firm announced a similar partnership with the Maine-based Portside Real Estate Group, a RealTrends Verified brokerage.
“This is very similar to the partnership with Portside,” Hoby Hanna, the CEO of Howard Hanna, told HousingWire. “A lot of the transactions we’ve been doing lately have been us acquiring a majority interest in the company and allowing local leadership to stay in and run the market as a partner.”
Hanna, a HousingWire Vanguard award winner, said ARC Realty and Capstone Realty will retain local leadership and existing office structures while gaining access to Howard Hanna’s technology stack, marketing platform, referral network and affiliated mortgage, title and insurance services.
“We think leadership is so valuable and important for everyone,” Hanna said.
This means that both Beau Bevis, the CEO of ARC, and Darrin Hasley, the CEO of Capstone, are staying on board.
“The local leaders are focused on growth, and we are bringing them the best products from Howard Hanna to add to the mix and just allowing them to really focus on the local marketplace and growing in their markets,” Hanna said.
Partners in growth
Hanna said this partnership strategy is one the company intends to employ moving forward as Howard Hanna looks to continue growing and expanding.
“We have become a vehicle for owners of these types of independent brokerages to come to and say, ‘Maybe we can achieve more collectively and have greater strength to compete on innovation and to add mortgage title and insurance operations as new revenue sources,’” Hanna said, noting that the leaders of Portside, ARC and Capstone came to Howard Hanna looking for a partnership like this. “They had taken their businesses to a certain level, but they wanted to take it even greater. They felt that Howard Hanna could be a vehicle for them to do that by bringing new products, services, technology and innovation to the marketplace that they couldn’t on their own in today’s climate.”
But Hanna noted that his firm won’t take just any company that comes knocking on their door, they must also share some of the same cultural values. Some of the central pillars to Howard Hanna’s culture, according to Hanna, are valuing leadership, financial stability and a focus on agent productivity and professional growth.
“We don’t need to have the most agents in the business, but we want highly productive agents that want to be the best in the business,” Hanna said. “And it is expensive to have managers in an office, but having a level of management or a department of people who are committed to helping the agents grow and wanting to be leaders themselves is also important.”
Hanna added he and his team have no interest in buying broken companies and trying to fix them, but instead want to enhance the companies and help them learn and grow.
Looking ahead, Hanna said the firm will continue growing, focusing on opportunities West of the Mississippi River “with good, well run companies.”
“I wouldn’t say there is any one specific place we are targeting, but with Portside and now with ARC and Capstone and the relationships of those leaders, we are talking to some firms in New England. I think we are expecting to see a bit more growth in the Southeast corridor between Alabama and where we are now in the Carolinas,” he said.
But even as the firm continues growing, Hanna said they will only enter a partnership or an acquisition if it is the right fit for the overall company.
“It is not like we have shareholders we have to answer to each quarter or a hedge fund telling us we have to do something this month to show growth,” Hanna said. “We can look for [partnerships] that are strategic.”
