This month marks 10 years of operations for the Colliers Rural & Agribusiness team.
After being set up by Shane O’Brien and Ruth Hodges, who are both still with Colliers, the team now provides brokerage services to all corners of the rural market, including dairy and sheep and beef farms, lifestyle properties, horticulture, viticulture, and forestry. They are complemented by an independent Rural Valuation team.
While Colliers had completed some transactions in the rural and lifestyle markets via their commercial and industrial offices, this helped lay the groundwork for a specialised offering.
In the early going, the team had a lean structure and shared an office with the Colliers Christchurch commercial team in Victoria Street in Christchurch.
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O’Brien and Hodges had to build their offering from scratch with important things like marketing material, submission templates, and listing agreements all developed from the ground up.
To help build on their established networks and existing commercial acumen, they worked closely with the Colliers agribusiness team in Australia to gather key insights to apply to the New Zealand market.
“We felt Colliers had a fresh approach and given their success in commercial real estate we knew there was potential to take a dynamic approach to the rural market,” O’Brien, Director of Rural at Colliers in Canterbury, says.
“This led us to bringing some new thinking to the rural sector and taking the opportunity to introduce external capital to the market. We also collaborated with our colleagues to connect with clients who had an interest in the rural sector. We knew there was a good story to tell and this allowed us to meet with parties that were keen to make strategic rural investments.”
After starting from their base in Canterbury, the team rapidly expanded into new markets. Director of Rural Hadley Brown, who is still with Colliers, helped form the office in Hawke’s Bay.
Bay of Plenty, Nelson, Marlborough, Waikato, Wanganui, and Nelson later followed and Hodges moved to Central Otago in 2019 as Colliers developed its presence across the lower South Island.
Hodges, Director of Colliers Rural & Agribusiness in Otago and Southland, says Colliers has always taken pride in recruiting good people who have added to the culture of the organisation.
“It is important for someone who works in rural brokerage to be passionate about rural people and have established networks with farming clients and rural professionals. People who take pride in their relationship management and understand the underlying drivers of the rural sector and how they impact the market will put themselves in a good position to succeed.”
Having good people with the right networks has been a winning formula for the Colliers Rural & Agribusiness team. This has helped them transact some major deals during the past decade that have shaped the future of the rural sector.
O’Brien, who recently ticked past 31 years in rural real estate having originally started in the valuations space, recalls the first rural deal Colliers did was the sale of the well-known Big Ben Station in Rakaia Gorge and it was through his existing relationships that allowed him to get it over the line.
Hodges says one of her standout transactions was the sale of the Van Leeuwen Group’s South Island dairy portfolio in 2021, a group of farms that no other agency had been able to sell.
The Central Otago team also recently brokered one of the largest horticultural deals in the region that included an extensive pipfruit operation featuring 10 orchards and a modern packhouse and storage facilities.
While the brokerage team has been in business for 10 years, Colliers launched its Rural Valuations service in 2015 promoting close collaboration with their rural brokerage colleagues and it is now recognised as the largest rural valuations business in the country.
Warwick Searle is the National Director of Forestry and regularly collaborates with his Colliers colleagues in Germany, Australia, and the United States. He was named Individual Rural Salesperson of the Year at the 2024 REINZ Awards for Excellence.
Searle has transacted small properties through to landholdings spanning 20,000-plus hectares. A recent notable sale was a portfolio of Northland properties totalling over 4,000ha that consisted of four established forests and three farms for greenfield development.
James Nilsson, National Director of Rural & Agribusiness at Colliers, joined Colliers in 2021 and is proud of the team’s reach and brand presence across New Zealand, which has been enhanced by their recent dedicated marketing campaigns.
“In the past few years, we have grown the team of Rural Sales Advisors from 28 to 55 and our Rural Valuation team has 19 Valuers based throughout the North and South Islands that have dedicated expertise in multiple areas of the rural sector,” Nilsson says.
“We are incredibly pleased with the progress we have made and continue to be motivated by the desire to deliver the best possible service to our clients with the unique advantage of collaborating with our global agribusiness teams.”
Colliers is set to open a Rural & Agribusiness office in Gore in early November and Rural Sales Advisor Mark Wilson will be based there.
Mark Synnott, Executive Chairman of Colliers, was the CEO when the Rural & Agribusiness team was established and says the foundations of the service line were built on recruiting the right team members.
“Being able to develop our Rural & Agribusiness team with Shane O’Brien and Ruth Hodges, with excellent support from Hadley Brown in the early stages, set them up for success and this has been underscored by their market-leading performance.”
- Supplied by Colliers
