Pemberton Holmes has opened a new office in Nanaimo which will help to further strengthen the cooperation among its realtors and streamline opportunities for prospective buyers and sellers.
“It’s really good news for us,” said realtor Gerry Beltgens. “Nanaimo has always been the second largest town on the island but now it’s really taken off.”
Pemberton Holmes’ individual offices are not a franchised and instead all the locations are owned by the same company, having served Vancouver Island area since 1887.
“Cooperation is a different kind of leadership and we as a non-franchise outfit, we’re able to work together a lot better,” Beltgens said. “We’re not competing with the Nanaimo office, we’re working with them.”
As an example, he or realtors Lyndon Bzdel, Sue Daniels, Shannon Norris, Denise Tutte can go work out of offices in Duncan, Parksville or now Nanaimo, and likewise the Ladysmith office on First Avenue welcomes realtors from other markets.
“We all work together as realtors and I think that’s partly one of our strengths,” Beltgens said. “For people who are selling property it gives them a much broader reach. We have about 300 agents now so when we send out information on our internal Facebook pages that gets out to everybody.”
North Nanaimo is the area of town that is really booming as well as up towards Lantzville where a the Foothills development will add 730 homes in the future.
“Our reach into the Nanaimo market is a lot stronger now and so people that are coming to look at properties in Nanaimo, those realtors can show our properties…and have a direct connection to us,” he said.
Outside of the Ladysmith, the closest Pemberton Holmes office north of town had been in the Parksville Qualicum Beach area near French Creek.
“Mike Holmes, who is the owner of the company, he drops by the different offices so we have a consistent kind of guidance from Victoria up to Bowser and we’re able to work together so cooperation is huge,”
Beltgens said the Pemberton Holmes team in Ladysmith remains committed to clients in the mid-Island.
“We’re pretty focused on Nanaimo south to Duncan but most of our work is done right in close to Ladysmith,” he said. “It’s the area that we know and now we have some really great skilled people that we work with (in Nanaimo).”