Commonwealth Commercial Partners develops new subsidiary

Published April 4, 2018 by Paula C. Squires

Commonwealth Commercial Partners (CCP) in Henrico County has expanded its Rural Land Team by creating a subsidiary designed to meet the needs of rural land buyers and sellers.

The company has hired five new staff members to help run the subsidiary, Commonwealth Land. “This is a different business than commercial real estate, and it deserves its own marketing team, management team, research team,” Mark Claud, CEO of CCP said in an interview with Virginia Business.” It’s infinitely scalable, and we are excited to take our platform to other markets.”

The new hires in the company’s Richmond office and other locations are in the areas of marketing, data base management and transactional sales.
They  will focus on enhancing what has long been a business line of the company. Commonwealth Commercial has a history of working with clients to manage rural land sales, particularly in the range of 100 to 4,000 acres. “That’s our sweet spot,” Claud says. 

He added that the company has made “a significant investment” in marketing and technology for Commonwealth Land that will help leverage a proprietary database that matches buyers and sellers and provides comparable data to inform each deal.

Commonwealth Land will complement Broadleaf Forestry, an in-house forestry consulting subsidiary led by Brian Reinhart. According to Claud, Reinhart runs a Virginia, North Carolina enterprise that works with families of high net worth owning tracts of 1,000 acres or more, with much of the land in timber tracts.

Claud expects that Commonwealth Land’s clients will continue to be families and high-net worth individuals who own large tracts and who need help in managing their land, adding to their portfolio or offering land for sale. “With generational changes, people may be looking for a long-term strategy or new ownership may not always want the property,” he says.

CCP has not named a head of its new subsidiary, although “we are furiously working on it,” says Claud.
The new Commonwealth Land website was launched this month. Consumers in the Richmond and Hampton Roads markets will begin seeing the new name and brand identity by mid April.

“We’re operating in a very distinct niche,” Bill Barnett, senior vice president and partner at Commonwealth Land, said in a statement.  “This change better communicates those offerings and positions our team to connect the right buyers with the right sellers — and that’s why people come to us.”

In addition to its locations in Virginia, CCP has offices in Nashville, Tenn.; Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.; Greensboro, Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham, N.C.; Greensville, S.C.; Reading, Pa. and Houston.