From left: Neil Binder, president of Bellmarc, and Chris Raveis, managing partner of William Raveis

The planned purchase of a large stake in Bellmarc Realty by William Raveis Real Estate, which would have been one of the larger real-estate acquisitions in recent memory, is dead.

Neil Binder, Bellmarc’s president, confirmed today to The Real Deal that during negotiations in recent weeks the two sides could not bridge their differences about how a brokerage should be run.

“As we continued to progress on trying to create a framework for marriage, it appeared to both sides that we had different business models,” Binder said, without elaborating about whether the disagreement was over price or how the combined company might function on a day-to-day basis. [more]

Neil Binder, co-founder of Bellmarc Realty and author of four real estate books, sat down with The Real Deal to
talk about the market, cutting costs at the firm to survive the
downturn and how a cheating girlfriend got him into the real estate
business. 

There are tons of predictions about when the market will bottom. Do you have one? Yes, and mine is the right one. (laughs) It already has. There are
three [economic] states that economists talk about: one is an L — we
go down and we stay down, one is a V — we go down and we pop up and
the W — we go down, we go up, we go down, we go up. I truly believe
[this] will be a W.

How are you trying to cut costs? We closed our main location,
we consolidated staff, we repositioned our advertising a little bit and
made cuts wherever we could make them and still be able to service
customers. Nothing was sacred. I think we were the first ones to get
out there and start doing things and everybody said ‘Oh, Bellmarc’s in
trouble, Bellmarc’s going down, Bellmarc’s bankrupt.’ I’ve been in
business 30 years, and for at least 20 of them, someone has told me I’m
going bankrupt. We just had our 30th anniversary. [more]