The news has broke this morning. It represents the largest real estate franchise acquisition of the year.
Here’s an excerpt from the Vancouver Sun.

“Real Living Inc. built a major real estate brokerage in Ohio in a fairly short period of time by focusing on women clients as the primary decision maker in a home buying transaction. Toronto’s Brookfield Asset Management wants to duplicate that success across and the U.S. market and is buying Real Living’s brand to do it.

Brookfield said in a statement it is rebranding its GMAC Real Estate division, which its acquired from the trouble financing arm of General Motors last year, as Real Living to create a new franchise with more than US$20-billion in annual home sales.

Brookfield Residential Property Services says it will add Real Living’s 2,000 brokers and sales associates to its existing real estate network of 30,000 real estate professionals.

While Real Living says it will not change its core real estate business in and around Columbus, Ohio, it has essentially sold Brookfield the right to use its brand and technology across the rest of the U.S. as well as Canada.

In Canada, Brookfield controls real estate giant Royal LePage, but the company made no mention of alter that brand to make it more like Real Living.

In September 2008, Brookfield announced it was buying GMAC’s home-services unit and picking up about 1,500 offices in North America and nearly 30,000 employees.”

I’ll have some further commentary when I confirm a few things…

Stefan has some interesting thoughts on this as well. Read them here.