"The real estate brokerage industry has been in transition over the past 10 years and its evolution will intensify over the next 10 years," company president and CEO Harvey Green tells GlobeSt.com. "The name change is reflective of what we have become and what we expect to become."

Over the past decade, the locally based company has grown organically from 22 offices to 66 offices and is now the largest commercial real estate brokerage in the nation focused on representing investors in real estate acquisitions and dispositions, closing $20.5 billion in transactions in 2006.

"While the majority of our agents are focused on private investors who have accumulated equity and have become great buyers, we also have executives maintaining relationships with institutions, pension fund advisors and REITs," Green says. "We're able to move capital from institutions to the private market in a way never really seen before."

The company also has been expanding beyond the brokerage business. Hessam Nadji, the Walnut Creek, CA-based managing director of the company's research services division, tells GlobeSt.com the re-branding is in deference to those newer service lines and the kinds of assistance a broker now needs to provide to a client and will have to do more of in the future.

"It's no longer just transactional," he says. "To maintain a relationship they have to keep clients informed on what's happening in the market and how their investments are performing against the market while also keeping them informed of new opportunities."

In support of that, Marcus & Millichap built up its market research and advisory services as well as its loan sourcing capabilities, and it continues to do so. Green says the company is now hiring additional people with consulting and high-level analytical backgrounds, increasing its financial analysis modeling capabilities and adding staff in research.

"We've had a lot of folks come to us and say 'we get you're research, know you're brokers; can you do a consulting assignment?'" Green says. "We see the consulting business growing on its own."

Nadji says the company's independent consulting and custom research and advisory divisions is designed to be integrated into the agent's services to clients instead of competing with the brokers' relationship with the client.

"If it's something typically part of what a broker provides, there likely will be no charge," he says. "But when a client has a specific need--a buy-sell decision, a market decision, a portfolio repositioning--where a custom study is warranted, there might be a charge and their might not be, depending on the relationship."

As far as what this means to the investor, Green says, "Instead of going to one expert for transaction services, to another source for market information and yet another source for help with strategy formation, our clients, whether they are private or institutional investors, can now benefit from the integration of all these services as well as capital markets expertise through a single source."

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Marcus & Millichap Rebrands for the Future

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