Coldwell Banker

Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC is an American real estate franchise owned by Realogy with headquarters in Madison, New Jersey. It was founded in 1906 in San Francisco, and has approximately 3,000 offices in 43 countries and territories.

History

After the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires, Colbert Coldwell and two partners formed Tucker, Lynch and Coldwell on August 27, 1906. Benjamin Arthur Banker joined the firm as a salesman in 1913, and became a partner in 1914. The company was renamed Coldwell Banker in the same year. Banker and Coldwell remained active in the company throughout their lives.

In 1920 Coldwell Banker moved to a three-story building in San Francisco. It opened an office in Phoenix, Arizona, its first outside California, in 1952. In the 1970s the company expanded by acquiring firms in Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The first international Coldwell Banker office opened in Toronto, Canada in 1996.

Coldwell Banker became a corporation in 1961, and went public in 1968. In 1981 it was bought by Sears, Roebuck, and became part of the Sears Financial Network. Sears sold it to the Fremont Group, a California investment company, for $230 million in 1993. It was sold to HFS Inc., later Cendant, in 1996. When Cendant broke up in 2006, the real estate businesses were spun off as Realogy, which was sold to Apollo Management for about $7.75 billion.