North&Co. acquires Rusch Gledhill brokerage – Phoenix Business … – Phoenix Business Journal

Since sisters Chelsea Rusch and Daria Gledhill opened their Chandler-based residential real estate brokerage firm Rusch Gledhill in April 2020, they always kept an eye on North&Co. brokerage.
“I was in charge of coming up with marketing and branding and I would stalk their website, thinking, this is who we want to be,” Gledhill said. “When we first decided to open a brokerage, our hope, our vision, our dream was to run a brokerage that felt different. Basically, we wanted to be agent centered and we wanted to provide proper education for our agents so they could take their knowledge and service our clients to become top in the industry.”
By the end of 2021, Rusch Gledhill was producing triple digit increases in sales volume and doubling the number of transactions. But when the new year came around, particularly in February and March, mortgage interest rates started ticking up, causing many homebuyers to pause their purchasing decisions.
“Everything felt like it came to a standstill,” Gledhill said. “We were going over our numbers talking about how much longer we could sustain the brokerage without going into debt.”
That’s when they thought about joining forces with a larger brokerage, and immediately they thought of Phoenix-based North&Co.
They called Stephanie Gonzalez, CEO and managing partner of North&Co. to see how they might team up.
Gonzalez said she was flattered that Rusch and Gledhill had been “stalking” her brokerage.
“It’s such a compliment to have a boutique small brokerage come to us and seek us out,” Gonzalez said. “From the beginning, we wanted to create a culture and aesthetic that was a pull and not a push model. In real estate, we’re so often used to having real estate agents picking up a phone to acquire other brokerages.”
This time it was the other way around, she said.
“To have somebody pick up the phone and say, ‘We think we need more resources, we need more support, and we can’t give our agents what we want to give them, would you be interested in joining forces?’ was amazing,” Gonzalez said.
While terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Gonzalez said North&Co. covered all the expenses of transitioning Rush Gledhill under the North&Co. umbrella.
“We had 10 agents at the height of our business,” Rusch said. “We ended up bringing four of our agents with us.”
With more than 260 agents in four offices across the Valley, North&Co. is in growth mode, Gonzalez said.
“We want to have 350 sales agents by the end of this year,” she said. “I would love more acquisitions like this. It’s one of those delicate things where our desire to grow isn’t to gobble agents or consumer brokerages. The goal is to find individual agent teams or brokerages that want to align themselves with a culture and a community and a progressive sense of self and sense of brand like we do.”
North&Co. was founded in 2015 by Brian North, who built the company on five core values: Specialization, innovation, authenticity, commitment and teamwork.
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