Town & Country Joins William Raveis

Town & Country Real Estate has joined William Raveis, the largest family-owned real estate firm in the Northeast.

Town & Country’s eight offices, all on the East End, will be rebranded under the William Raveis name in the next quarter, joining more than 140 William Raveis offices spread across New England, New York, the Carolinas and Florida.

The deal closed on Tuesday, December 17, an occasion marked with a Town & Country meeting at Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton followed by a cocktail party put on by William Raveis at the Barn at Topping Rose.

Judi Desiderio, the CEO and founder of Town & Country, and Janet Hummel, the managing partner, will stay aboard with William Raveis, with shares in the new venture.

Desiderio said there will be a name change as well as a color change.

“We’ll go from our British racing green to his sky blue,” she said.

Her agents get access to the William Raveis referral network, and William Raveis gets a strong presence in the Hamptons and on the North Fork.

“It was a missing link for them because they are everywhere our clients are when they’re not in the Hamptons,” Desiderio said. “They’re all through Westchester, Greenwich, Connecticut, New York City, all through the Carolinas, all over South Florida. And this was a missing component that their customers were asking for, and our customers were asking for what they have. So it’s a match made in heaven.”

She also noted William Raveis is not corporate.

“It’s a family-run boutique that’s just expansive, so it was a perfect fit for us, because we are independent and we are run by community-minded individuals,” she said. “So it just fit. It just fit like a hand in a glove.”

Desiderio said Town & Country had been approached by several people over the years, and she had visited New York City a few times to see about Town & Country buying boutique firms in Manhattan. But it had never worked out until now.

She said she and William Raveis founder and namesake Bill Raveis had been talking for “many, many, many, many months,” and once the contract was signed the deal was done in five weeks.

Not even 24 hours after the deal closed, referrals started coming in, she said.

Raveis said he had eyed the Hamptons for a long time but couldn’t quite find a firm that would be a match. Then two years ago, he said, he met Desiderio and they hit it off.

“She and I are of the same ilk. I like her a lot as a person. I like her company,” he said. “We have a very strong trust factor together. It’s a great synergy.”

They formed a joint venture, with William Raveis as the majority owner and Desiderio as regional vice president, partner and minority owner, he explained. Joining a larger company will give her agency the ability to step up its marketing, social media and technology, according to Raveis.

“Fifty years ago, when I started the company, the first thing that came out of my mouth is, ‘The agent is the customer. If they make money, I make money,’” he said. “So therefore we focus in on being the operating partner for our agents. And Judi does the same thing in her way too. So the cultures of the company really did align a lot.”

He founded his real estate company with just himself, a desk and phone, he said. “A 27-year-old kid above a grocery store — and now we have 145 offices, 5,000 agents.”

He noted that his company offers mortgages, mortgage insurance and homeowners insurance.

“The whole financial service component does not exist in the Hamptons,” he said. “So we saw that as a competitive advantage that we would have.”

Town & Country agents will also be trained on William Raveis technology.

“There’s a lot for them to know. Our technology is world class,” Raveis said. “There’s nobody else that has our technology. Microsoft built it for us only. … We have the only Microsoft-developed real estate platform in the nation and the world.”

He noted William Raveis’s marketing is online and AI driven.

“We were voted the No. 1 luxury broker in the world by LeadingRE,” he said. “We were voted the top brokerage company in the United States by Inman News.”

He said having Town & Country in fold will be a great referral system for agents and “the opportunity for customers to have one-stop-shop service.”

Another thing that attracted him to Town & Country was Desiderio’s great offices in the Hamptons, he said, explaining that he has visited all of them and all are kept in great condition.

“She’s done a marvelous job,” he said, calling it a marriage made in heaven.