Lyon Real Estate sold to Seattle giant Windermere. ‘Timing is right,’ Sacramento firm says
Lyon Real Estate, a name synonymous for generations with real estate in Sacramento but tarnished by scandal in recent years, has been sold to Seattle’s Windermere Real Estate, officials announced Monday afternoon.
The deal to acquire Sacramento’s oldest independent realty, first reported in December, closed Friday, ending local ownership of a firm established 75 years ago.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but officials said the firm will keep the Lyon name and that the current leadership team, including president and chief operating officer Pat Shea, will remain intact.
“We will each continue to maintain our own identity,” Shea said in a statement announcing the deal.
“There’s 75 years of blood, sweat and tears and the Jacobi family (Windermere’s owners) understands the equity there. They will continue to leverage the Lyon name,” Shea said Monday in a later interview.
With the deal, Lyon joins a family-owned behemoth in Windermere. The privately held firm is one of the nation’s largest, with more than 300 offices and 6,500 agents across 11 states and Mexico. Windemere officials on Monday said they had eyed expanding its reach into the Northern California market.
Sacramento-based Lyon fields more than 800 agents in 17 offices from the Sierra foothills to Solano County and closed $2.86 billion in sales volume last year, its officials said.
“We’ve been looking for the right opportunity to grow our network in Northern California and chose Lyon Real Estate because of the strength of their brand, leadership team and aligned values,” Windemere co-president OB Jacobi said in the Monday statement.
Jacobi said Windemere also plans to support the Sacramento firm’s Lyon Cares Foundation.
The acquisition could also open the way for Lyon to expand its reach in the Sacramento area and into the competitive Bay Area market under the Windemere umbrella, Shea said.
“This is providing a path (for expansion) — that’s the plan,” Shea said. “It’s an opportunity to expand even into the San Francisco Bay Area. This provides a keen opportunity. It provides a path to grow in and even outside our footprint.”
Windermere and Lyon could also capitalize on a heated Sacramento real estate market fueled by Bay Area residents’ migration to the capital city, less expensive home prices and living costs and a local push to market the city as a work-from-home destination during a pandemic.
“The future’s extremely bright from an agent perspective. The Sacramento market is trending up,” Shea said. “It’s more affordable than other metropolitan statistical areas. It’s perfect timing to strengthen our company’s partnership.”
Lyon had attracted “a number of suitors seeking a strategic growth opportunity” over the years, Shea said in the earlier statement.
“This timing is right because Windermere is well suited to maintain the company’s legacy and grow it in the future,” Shea said. “The Lyon family’s first priority is that they leave the company they built and have run for the past 75 years in the best possible hands for the long term,” he added.
On Monday, Shea said family members — including Laura Lyon, the firm’s former board chair and daughter of company patriarch William L. Lyon — had “thought about the future of Lyon for a while and wanted to put it on a path where it was in like hands.”
Laura Lyon called the deal with the Pacific Northwest realty giant a “new chapter” and a “perfect fit” for the firm that her father founded in 1946.
“This new chapter is a perfect fit when taking into account our mutual values of superior customer satisfaction and long-term relationships with our clients, agents and community,” she said.
The deal inked Friday comes as Lyon Real Estate continues to emerge from the sex-and-drug scandals involving family scion and former CEO Michael Lyon that ultimately sent the Carmichael man to prison and tarnished the Sacramento realty’s brand.
Lyon pleaded guilty in March 2011 to four counts of electronic eavesdropping and later agreed to pay millions of dollars in damages to those who claimed they were secretly recorded in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his homes. His settlements included a 2012 payout of $2.5 million to former nannies, baby sitters and family friends who said he had used cameras hidden in bathrooms, bedrooms and showers to record them.
Lyon’s legal struggles were capped by his arrest and sentencing in 2018 on video voyeurism charges related to secret sex tapes of prostitutes he recorded in 2013 and 2014. Lyon served part of a six-year, four-month sentence in state prison and was released in 2019.
This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 5:04 PM.
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