San Diego-based Washington Wealth Management LLC has pegged Brea as the starting point of its push into Orange County.
The firm recently set up shop there, forging a partnership with Pearce Saunders Murray Wealth Management LLC, a group formerly with New York-based Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC.
Washington Wealth is a financial advisory practice with more than $1 billion in assets under management. It counts financial advisers as clients, who in turn serve investors through Washington Wealth’s “hybrid investment platform”— a model that allows advisers to “be independent and still have some structure,” according to David Richman, an executive director at Washington Wealth, who also is a Morgan Stanley veteran.
The firm’s focus on North OC aligned with the business plans of the Pearce Saunders Murray team, which until recently had been part of the Brea office of Morgan Stanley. The group of three advisers—Bradley Saunders, Janet Pearce and Krista Murray—managed about $160 million in assets while operating under the Morgan Stanley umbrella as the Pearce Group.
The firm has taken a 3,500-square-foot office on Pointe Drive, in the same building as its former office.
“Morgan Stanley was a great parent and partner,” said Saunders, managing partner of the newly formed group. “I had 23 years with that firm, but life on Wall Street post-2008 is a different animal. When you work in a [traditional] wirehouse, you can only trade through its platform. We made the decision [to leave Morgan Stanley] about two years ago, and then we decided to partner with [Washington Wealth].”
Saunders has stayed local throughout his investment career, most recently overseeing the Southern California and Las Vegas markets for Morgan Stanley. A sense of familiarity and “tremendous connectivity” in the local marketplace helped the team identify where the new location should be, Saunders said.
“Several years ago, I wrote the business plan for Morgan Stanley for the Southern California market,” he said. “I’m aware of the demographic changes in OC and L.A., and the movement of wealth. And the Brea area … is a great location because it’s a transition point between the Los Angeles area and the money center location of Newport Beach. It touches the eastern side of L.A., Diamond Bar, the wealth of Anaheim Hills and the Whittier marketplace. We could’ve been anywhere we wanted to. When we made the decision, we specifically wanted to be here.”
And there seems to be room to grab market share in North OC.
“If you were to get a plot map and mark where these financial firms’ branch offices are, they have a tendency to cluster,” Saunders said. “You get a lot of offices there along the 405 freeway corridor and a lot in the Newport Beach area. Our decision was to open an office where we would have a competitive advantage.”
Washington Wealth’s Richman also has spent many years in Orange County during his 17-year stint at Morgan Stanley, which he left in December.
“I joined Washington Wealth three months ago, but this area isn’t a new market for me,” said Richman, who will be splitting his time between the new Brea office and the firm’s year-old office in Woodland Hills, a district in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Washington Wealth has six other locations in the U.S., including Seattle, Miami and Westport, Conn. Eight additional locations are pending.
“North OC is a good corridor to a lot of places,” Richman said. “It’s a very wealthy, growing area. We thought that was a great place to put our first office [in OC], and hopefully we’ll have an office in South OC soon.”
Goal
Washington Wealth wants to bring in more partners to serve the Brea market.
“The goal is to bring in two to three more teams in the existing location,” Richman said. “We built the office in Brea to be able to handle that. The good thing about this particular type of business is that there is a lot of room for competition. We’re starting to see more and more [firms] in the hybrid world. It’s a part of the financial services industry that’s changing very rapidly. Competition is good in that sense.”
