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Chicago

Baird & Warner follows agents, clients to Florida with expansion

Naples office is the first outside of Chicago for the 167-year-old firm

Baird & Warner's Laura Ellis and Steve Baird (Baird & Warner, Getty)
Baird & Warner's Laura Ellis and Steve Baird (Baird & Warner, Getty)

Baird & Warner’s 30th office will be its first outside of Chicagoland in the 167-year-old brokerage’s history.

Baird & Warner, which opened its first office in Chicago in 1855 and now has 29 offices across the city and suburbs, is opening a residential brokerage office in Naples, Fla., Crain’s reported. The firm isn’t beginning a massive out-of-state expansion, though. Rather, it’s just following some of its agents and clients.

Some of its top-producing agents have secondary business in Florida, where towns along the Gulf of Mexico have long drawn retirees and second homeowners from Chicago and the Midwest, while the Sunshine State’s Atlantic Coast has captured more relocations and second home purchases by East Coast transplants.

Some Baird & Warner agents work in Florida as well as Chicago, and some of its clients prefer to work with those agents when looking for homes outside of Chicagoland. Before the new office opened, those agents had to affiliate with other firms that have a Florida presence to work down south.

The firm has about 20 agents with Illinois real estate licenses also working out of their Naples office. Those agents primarily represent buyers and sellers in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, and suburban Highland Park, Cary and Algonquin.

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Baird & Warner is the second-largest brokerage in the Chicago area with $7.7 billion in home sales volume in 2021, according to data from RealTrends data cited by the outlet.

Steve Baird, the fifth-generation CEO, said the firm opened the new office as “a response to customer loyalty,” as many of their Chicago clients who also buy homes in Florida have asked their Baird & Warner agents for assistance.

While the agents were able to help their clients through other brokerages, Baird said the firm wanted let them do that work under his namesake brokerage’s brand.

Christie’s International Real Estate this year also leaned into the Chicago area’s Naples connection, as the brokerage and its Chicago-based parent @properties struck a deal to rebrand the 700-agent office Naples-based John R. Wood Properties under the Christie’s flag.

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— Victoria Pruitt

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