"Our long-term intent always was to convert the company completely to a franchise model," Van Ness says, and the Irvine-based firm has decided that now is the time. "We have come to realize that it is inefficient for us to try to run two different businesses with the same staff," Van Ness tells GlobeSt.com. "We realized that it's time to make a full commitment to the franchise business."

The 10 SVN corporate offices are all in Southern California and Arizona. The rest of the company's approximately 160 offices are located throughout the US, Panama and Costa Rica.

Van Ness says that SVN has been running an organization of 1,500 people, more than 1,000 of them advisers, providing support to the franchisees as well as direct support to advisers and other staff. With the sale of the corporate offices to a franchisee, he says, SVN will be able to focus its resources on supporting its 200 or so franchisees, who in turn will provide the direct support to advisers and staff.

SVN has retained the investment banking firm of JMP Securities in San Francisco to market the corporate offices. Van Ness says that SVN hasn't put a price on the offices, and he adds that price is not the company's only consideration in seeking a buyer.

"We want to find a buyer who is a good strategic fit. The value in the deal for us and for them is going to be in what they can add to the organization in the long-term," Van Ness says. Likely buyers for the offices would be someone who owns, manages or finances a significant amount of real estate, he says.

SVN's expansion has been detailed in the pages of GlobeSt.com over the years and in recent weeks and months. Early this month, for example, Chicago-based Fisher/Sears and Associates Inc. joined Sperry Van Ness Chicago, becoming the multifamily division for the Chicago office of SVN. The company also recently boosted its New Jersey presence with the opening of a new office there, and other units of the firm are expanding too, such as SVN Asset Management.Late last year SVN announced that the firm was launching its "next wave of growth" and would be relying primarily on franchisees for the expansion. The firm, which started in 1987 as a local Orange County entity, grew to prominence in California and Arizona before launching its national expansion. SVN started expanding under the franchise model about the year 2000 and has grown "pretty dramatically since then," Van Ness says.

At the same time, it has been providing support directly to the agents and staff in all of the franchise regions. "We really can't provide that support as effectively as the local franchisees can, so what we're saying is, let's focus our support on the franchisees so that they can better support the people in the offices," Van Ness explains.