20-Broker 'Palmer Team' Leaving CBRE

SACRAMENTO-After 18 years with CB Richard Ellis, locally based Bill Palmer is going out on his own and taking with him the 20-person “Palmer Team” he built into a perennial top producer for the company. The team averages about 40 transactions a year totaling about $1 billion for clients such as Equity Office Properties, Prudential, Kennedy & Associates, CarrAmerica, Rreef and Arden Realty. His new company, the Palmer Team Inc., officially launches operations March 1.Palmer tells GlobeSt.com his team of investment sales brokers, which already was set up within the CBRE organization as a separate profit center, will continue to focus on markets in Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Seattle. “We already have our own office space, phone lines, website, equipment, etc.,” says Palmer. “Nothing changes with this move except the logo.”Palmer, 54, says that every year he has evaluated whether he should remain at CBRE. “It’s been a great ride; I have been their top performer continuously worldwide and so the company has been good to me,” he says. “CB is becoming a very big, very effective company, but I just felt that for the next leg of my career I’d be best suited to have more flexibility.”Palmer will be president and chief executive of the Palmer Team Inc. The separation agreement with CBRE includes a six-month period where the two firms will share profits, he says. As a private company, Palmer says he will be focused first and foremost on clients, whereas a public company may be more focused on its shareholders. “It may not always be profitable right away to provide services for a client, but you invest in that service anyway for your long-term success,” says Palmer.CBRE’s investment properties division did about $28 billion worth of investment sales in 2004. Division president Greg Vorwaller tells GlobeSt.com that Palmer will be missed. At the same time, Vorwaller says he is confident that CBRE will be able to compete effectively with Palmer going forward.”We have a lot of embedded strength [in Sacramento] and we have plans to recruit in certain other markets where we previously had been unable to do so [because of territorial agreements with Palmer and his team],” says Vorwaller. “We will provide additional resources to investment sales teams who remain with the firm…and fortify those markets [outside of Sacramento] where [Palmer] also did business.”