www.exp1031.com, went live on Friday

"It's the same business that we have now; it's just going to be called something else and located somewhere else," Rob James, president at EXP, tells GlobeSt.com. What's also a continuation, he says, is a relationship with Kimco. The parting was amicable, James says, adding, "Yesterday we were in conversations with Kimco Development about bringing some new Kimco triple-net product to market." A spokeswoman for Kimco based in New Hyde Park, NY, declined to comment.

James and his fellow team members--director of sales Doug McCulloch, sales manager Dan de Sa' and real estate investment analyst Grant Schreier, who have a total of 43 years' experience in commercial real estate--plan to continue Exchange Place's core business activities at EXP. At the same time, they intend to expand the work force. "We have extra desks and workstations set up with the anticipation that we'll add people," James says. "Right now, there's such a wonderful gene pool of available talent, because so many people have been laid off. Part of the plan is to tap into some of the people that are available and bring them into the organization on a traditional brokerage model. The Kimco Exchange Place team will continue doing what we're doing, but we want to add people to complement that."

Although overall transaction activity in the 1031 arena has been down, James says "there are interesting upshots. For example, we recently brokered a deal where the guy had 10 Circuit City locations and he was going to hand the keys back to the bank and do a deed in lieu, which the IRS considers a sale. Since he had done a 1031 coming into it, he had to buy a replacement property, even in a foreclosure."