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Brokerage Aims for Small-Business Niche

A new commercial real estate brokerage that focuses on serving small businesses is setting up its West Coast operations in Orange County.

Coldwell Banker Commercial Alliance, a New York-based company that began operations last summer, said that it would be expanding for the first time with new offices in Irvine as well as Denver.

The Irvine office will be headed up by Michael Dorsey, a longtime commercial real estate broker in the area who worked in the Newport Beach office of Grubb & Ellis Co. for more than 20 years. He more recently was with Newport Beach-based Voit Real Estate Services Inc.

CBC Alliance bills itself as the first national real estate services firm dedicated to serving small businesses and the owners of small and midsize commercial properties. It plans to focus on properties valued at $10 million and less.

The company estimates that private investors, users and owners of such smaller-sized buildings are responsible for about 35% of commercial real estate sales and leases every year on a national basis—representing about $25 billion in gross commissions.

Dorsey said that Orange County’s small-business market, in particular, is underserved when it comes to real estate representation for smaller companies and property owners.

“Small to midcap companies make up the majority of all transactional real estate business within the Orange County market, and we will focus on that segment as our core business,” said Dorsey, who plans to recruit other brokers to the Irvine office over the next few months.

The goal is to have between 18 to 22 brokers in the Irvine office in the next two years, according to Dorsey.

CBC Alliance said it plans to open as many as 10 new offices across the country over the next year, with the Irvine office expected to help with an expansion of its western region operations.

CBC Alliance is an independently owned affiliate of Coldwell Banker Commercial, but it is run separately from that Parsippany, N.J.-based real estate company. The new venture is backed by Waterfall Asset Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund that counts about $2 billion under management, and specializes in nonperforming loan investments.

Waterfall is said to have bought more than $800 million of small-balance commercial loans nationally for its clients, representing more than 1,000 properties. CBC Alliance offices are expected to be used in part to service those assets.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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