Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. is diving deeper into the brokerage business. 

Courtesy of AGpicture

Lincoln Property Group’s Executive Managing Director of National Brokerage Tyler Courtney.

The firm, known for development and property management, hired Tyler Courtney to to bulk up its leasing services. Courtney until recently led Cushman & Wakefield’s Atlanta office and will now be Lincoln’s executive managing director of national brokerage, a newly created role. 

“Lincoln already has a significant portfolio of assets that we lease throughout the country and our goal is to grow our third-party portfolio,” Lincoln co-CEO David Binswanger said in a statement. “Tyler will help strengthen Lincoln’s national brokerage platform and support the growth of our local leasing teams in markets that are aiming to expand and scale their service offerings.”

Courtney started the job Monday and will work out of Lincoln’s Atlanta office, CoStar reported. He told the publication that he planned to spend the next few weeks traveling to Lincoln’s major markets — Dallas; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina — to meet with local executive leadership and begin recruiting brokers to the business. 

Courtney had been with Cushman & Wakefield since 2009. He began with a focus on tenant representation and climbed the corporate ladder to become the firm’s managing principal for Atlanta.

In that role, Courtney oversaw more than 500 staff and was responsible for Cushman & Wakefield’s strategic direction and business development in Atlanta. Courtney told CoStar that leaving the brokerage was the hardest decision of his career. 

“I was drawn to Lincoln because of the firm’s entrepreneurial spirit, which allows our teams to be nimble and respond efficiently to the current market conditions,” he said in a statement. 

Lincoln’s management and leasing portfolio spans 562M SF across the U.S., United Kingdom and Europe. The firm has built more than 164M SF of commercial space since its inception in 1965 and has another $19.5B in its active development pipeline. 

Courtney is especially interested in expanding Lincoln’s agency leasing services in the industrial sector, where the glut of pandemic-era construction has shifted the market more in tenants’ favor, he told CoStar. Lincoln could also explore building its presence in the office, healthcare, medical office, retail and data center sectors, Courtney said. 

Lincoln’s decision to expand its dedicated brokerage business comes as real estate services providers expect both the leasing and sales markets to accelerate through the back half of this year and into 2026. 

Top executives at brokerages are predicting that anemic activity over the last two years and the billions in capital sitting on the sidelines will translate into more activity. But those predictions largely came before President Donald Trump kicked off a bruising trade war, and it remains to be seen how corporate leaders will react to the newly injected economic uncertainty.

“We’re all experiencing this major whiplash,” Julie Workman, real estate attorney and partner at Chicago-based law firm Saul Ewing, told Bisnow in early March. “What’s true today might not be true tomorrow, and it might not even be true tonight.”

CORRECTION, APRIL 14, 3 P.M. ET: Lincoln Property Co. hired Tyler Courtney to expand its existing leasing business. 

Performance Brokerage Services announced the sale of Hanson Kia in Olympia, Washington, from Vince and Kim Hanson to Gee Automotive Companies. Hanson Kia and Hanson Subaru are centrally located in the Olympia Auto Mall, located off Highway 101.

Jason Stopnitzky, Co-Founder of Performance Brokerage Services, was the exclusive sell-side advisor for this transaction. Steve Hanson, father of Vince and Kim Hanson, founded the dealerships in downtown Olympia over 50 years ago, initially offering Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi.

Jason Stopnitzky said, “Vince and Kim Hanson have demonstrated exceptional leadership within their community, setting a high standard for excellence. Gee Automotive Companies is the ideal partner to elevate the dealerships to new heights. This marks our eighth transaction with them, and we eagerly anticipate the continued growth and success of Gee Automotive Companies.”

Gee Automotive Companies has expanded to include 35 dealership locations across Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona.

The National Association of Realtors headquarters at 430 North Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

Redfin instructed its brokers and agents to resign from the National Association of Realtors in places where that is possible, according to a statement by the company Monday.

As a company, Redfin resigned its seat on the NAR board early this summer.

NAR President Kenny Parcell resigned in August after allegations of sexual harassment against him surfaced, and his accusers said that the organization failed to act on their complaints and in some instances retaliated against them. Parcell has denied the allegations.

Redfin, a Seattle-based online brokerage, cited the allegations along with a reported culture of intimidation and retribution as the reason for its action.

Not all of Redfin’s roughly 1,800 brokers and agents will be able to cut ties with NAR.

“In about half the U.S., including in cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Long Island, Minneapolis, Nashville, Phoenix and Salt Lake City, we can’t quit NAR individually or en masse, because NAR membership is required for agents to access listing databases, lockboxes and industry-standard contracts,” the company said in its statement.

In other markets, such as Seattle, Boston and New York City, Redfin agents will no longer pay NAR dues, which will cost the organization about $1M annually, The New York Times reports.

Redfin also objects to NAR blocking sellers from listing homes that don’t pay a commission to the buyer’s agent and blocking Redfin.com and other websites from showing for sale by owner listings as well as agent-listed homes.

NAR didn’t immediately respond to Bisnow‘s request for comment about Redfin’s decision.

A CRE veteran who helped usher in popular adaptive reuse projects in Atlanta has teamed up to form a boutique brokerage firm with another seasoned real estate pro who led Stream Realty Partners’ retail group. 

Courtesy of Bridger Properties

Bridger Properties co-founders Jack Arnold and Merritt Lancaster

Merritt Lancaster and Jack Arnold have started Bridger Properties, a full-service brokerage firm that already is managing 500K SF and leasing 2M SF across Metro Atlanta, including the ground-floor retail spaces at Spectrum on Spring apartments and the retail leasing for the mixed-use Westside Paper project, which is currently under construction.

Lancaster and Arnold established the firm in late 2020 but officially announced its formation this month.

Lancaster — whose last firm, Confluence Real Estate, was folded into Bridger — said the timing of starting up a new brokerage house in Atlanta is partly due to real estate cycles: The coronavirus pandemic may be providing an opportunity to gear up as Metro Atlanta enters a recovery that will look hugely different from the last one.

“Even though it’s a very odd real estate cycle and it doesn’t jive with the other ones, it feels like the beginning of maybe a new cycle,” Lancaster said.

Since forming, Bridger has hired a handful of other CRE professionals, including property management Vice President Chris Hicks, previously a property manager for Stream Realty and Lincoln Property Co.; Laura King, who previously headed up leasing at Paces Properties; and Shelbi Bodner, who also worked at Paces Properties and assisted in leasing Krog Street Market’s food hall.

Arnold was previously the managing director of retail for Stream Realty in Atlanta, and he acknowledged that the firm at the moment is retail-heavy in its experience. But Arnold said Bridger is scouting the brokerage world for new hires to expand its expertise into other product types, including office.

“We plan to include having all the food groups as we go,” he said.

Arnold and Lancaster said Bridger is focusing on urban mixed-use and suburban properties throughout the metro area. Its initial leasing and management portfolio includes grocery-anchored and neighborhood shopping centers in Peachtree City, Acworth, Kennesaw, Smyrna and Sandy Springs, as well as retail at the Alexan Eight West apartments near Georgia Tech.

Bridger’s co-founders also have experience with adaptive reuse projects. At Stream Realty, Arnold drove the firm’s retail and mixed-use investment activity, spearheading the acquisition of 2.1M SF of retail, office and industrial spaces in the Southeast.

In the seven years he was a principal at Paces Properties, Lancaster and Paces CEO David Cochran developed a number of Atlanta’s most notable adaptive reuse projects, including Krog Street Market, Atlanta Dairies and Optimist Hall, a food hall in Charlotte that was converted from a historic textile mill.

Lancaster said Bridger also has opportunities to penetrate into the adaptive reuse and mixed-use sectors, which have been gaining more interest among institutional investors in recent years. Institutional owners have been tapping local experts with a track record in those properties to lease up empty spaces, Lancaster said. 

Transcend CEO Patrick Braswell, who co-founded his boutique brokerage firm in Atlanta in 2015, agreed that more institutional investors are looking to work with local experts, rather than relying solely on large, multinational firms.

“To understand where to find [deals] … and what tenants would be great for it, you have to have local knowledge,” Braswell said. “And sometimes the local boutiques have more local knowledge.”

Arnold said owners are seeking more nimble, less bureaucratic firms to lease their properties, and he and his co-founder think Bridger’s mix of services will hit the sweet spot for the increasingly large funds chasing real estate deals. 

“As capital consolidates and gets larger, they will continue to need local expertise on both the service and investment side,” Lancaster said. “We have the resources on both the landlord and tenant sides within the market. … That’s hard to get if you’re in New York. If you’re not touching it, it’s hard to get that local information.”