Though just a little more than four years old, Eden Prairie–based Northstar Partners already has a high profile in commercial real estate in the Twin Cities region. The firm sold close to $1 billion in real estate in 2006, thanks in large part to its sale of two of the metropolitan area’s tallest buildings—the 225 South Sixth building in Minneapolis and Wells Fargo Place in St. Paul. Other buildings that the firm brought to market in 2006 included International Plaza in Bloomington and the First National Bank building in St. Paul. Northstar’s revenues have grown to more than $5 million since its inception.
How has a relatively small firm managed to make such big deals? Largely by being able to do everything—but not doing everything—itself.
Northstar was founded in November 2002 by two industry veterans, Clint Miller and Terry Kingston. Before starting the firm, Miller was managing director of the Twin Cities office of Chicago-headquartered real estate firm Grubb & Ellis. Kingston, who heads Northstar’s investment division, was a broker for Coldwell Banker in the 1980s before founding a Minnetonka-based investment boutique, First Capital, in 1992, which he merged into Northstar.
Northstar is a consulting firm for large businesses that don’t have the time or expertise to manage their real estate. The company is a one-stop shop, managing the buying, selling, financing, leasing, and maintenance of commercial properties. It also can offer services that it doesn’t perform itself through its alliance with New York–based Cushman & Wakefield, one of the world’s largest real estate firms. Those services include site selection, as well as market and portfolio analyses.
One of Northstar’s chief strengths is its ability to round up real-estate investors. For the Wells Fargo Center and 225 South Sixth deals, for instance, “we had to find capital sources around the world that would feel comfortable writing big, hundred-million dollar checks for assets that, on a global scale, are in relatively small markets,” Kingston recalls.
Northstar also specializes in renovating and “re-marketing” existing office space. In 2004, the company was hired to reposition the Atria Corporate Center in Plymouth, formerly occupied by a single corporate tenant, as a Class A multi-tenant office complex. Northstar arranged for a complete interior renovation of the building’s office space, including up-to-date furnishings, computer and telecommunications connectivity, lighting, and flooring systems. Today the center is 95 percent leased, Miller says.
In starting Northstar Partners, Miller and Kingston sought to create a full-service real-estate firm that was still small enough to offer personalized service. “There are other things we both could be doing at this stage of our lives, but we wanted to create a great team of people we enjoy working with, and who enjoy working with each other,” Miller says. “The world of real estate brokering is highly competitive and entrepreneurial, and one of our goals in founding the company was to build a new kind of culture that is more supportive and team oriented.”
