Selling ‘Blue Sky’: How REMAX Commercial Brokers Market Large-Scale Development Sites

When Roy Belson, a team leader with REMAX One in Woodland Hills, Calif., first became involved with Jackson Ranch, a 415-acre campus in Kettleman City, he saw more than just land. He saw the potential of a site along Interstate 5, with access to major population centers, ports and distribution networks.

Belson, who also serves as the brokerage’s senior vice president and commercial director, has worked with the ownership and development group at Jackson Ranch as an advisor for more than three years, helping to shape the campus’ development strategy and positioning it for logistics, industrial, commercial, agricultural, energy and data center uses.

“I helped them build the vision,” Belson says. “They’re looking at land. I’m looking at a vision.”

After two previous firms were unsuccessful in bringing the project to market, Belson assembled the current team, which includes co-directors Nathan Bragg of REMAX Time Realty and Brian Hennessey of REMAX One, to take a more comprehensive and disciplined approach to the assignment.

Today, Belson, Bragg and Hennessey are marketing approximately 138 acres within the larger campus for industrial and logistics development. The team is focused on logistics operators, manufacturers, cold-storage companies, fleet operators, developers and institutional groups, with the site offering the potential for up to 2.4 million square feet of development.

For commercial brokers marketing large-scale development opportunities, the team’s work at Jackson Ranch offers the following lessons.

Sell the Potential

Early in his career selling land, Belson came to understand that buyers need help seeing something that isn’t there yet.

“The first rule is to understand you’re selling blue sky,” Belson says. “You have to visualize.”

That means marketing land differently than an existing building, where prospective buyers can walk through the space and determine whether it meets their needs. With a development site, the broker has to help them envision what could ultimately be built there.

And that requires more than putting up a sign and waiting for a buyer.

“If you’re marketing land, you need to be specific,” Belson says. “You can’t just put up a sign. Pick the right properties, figure out the best way to market and know who your audience is.”

At Jackson Ranch, that has meant presenting the property not simply as available acreage, but as part of a larger master-planned campus with existing fuel stations and plans for EV charging, hospitality, restaurants and other supporting services. The team’s marketing shows prospective buyers how their operations could fit within the broader campus and how the property’s location, infrastructure and development plans could support those uses.

Build a Foundation

Behind the marketing effort was another critical piece of the project: establishing the foundation needed to support future development. That included securing entitlements and advancing infrastructure planning, allowing prospective buyers to focus on the requirements specific to their facilities.

“The foundation is the hardest part,” Belson says. “You’re working for months, and you need to have the right team in place.”

Once that work is done, however, the conversation with prospective buyers changes.

“When you build the foundation, you create opportunity for the buyers,” Belson says.

Look at the End User

For Bragg, marketing a development site starts with a basic question: Who is going to use it?

“You’ve got to look at the end users,” Bragg says. “Who is going to want to be located here specifically, and what is the property approved for?”

At Jackson Ranch, location is a key part of that equation. Situated along I-5 in California’s Central Valley, the campus is about three hours from Los Angeles and six hours from Las Vegas.

Rather than broadly marketing the property and waiting for the right buyer to find it, the team has identified the types of users it wants to reach — manufacturers, developers and other companies that need convenient access to markets throughout California and the West.

“We know what we’re going after,” Belson says.

Bring It to Life

Knowing the audience is only part of the challenge. The next step is giving prospective buyers a way to envision what Jackson Ranch could look like when it is built out.

The team has invested heavily in the presentation of the property, including an extensive offering memorandum detailing the development opportunity for potential investors, architectural renderings and visualizations of the larger campus.

Bragg said he spent approximately 150 hours developing the offering memorandum. Before beginning, he studied marketing materials for comparable projects around the country with a straightforward goal: make the Jackson Ranch presentation better.

Technology, including artificial intelligence, is also giving the team faster access to the data and tools needed for complex assignments.

For land, Hennessey says visualization is especially powerful. Renderings and 3D tools can help a prospect to see a warehouse, logistics facility or other development before it exists.

“That visualization gives them a feel for the warehouse and what it’s going to look like,” he says.

Power of the REMAX Brand

For an opportunity that could attract companies and investors well beyond California, Belson also sees the REMAX brand’s reach as an important part of the strategy.

“Our audience is national and international,” Belson says. “REMAX gives you exposure to the world.”

But Belson and Bragg say the value goes beyond brand recognition. It also comes from the commercial brokers within the REMAX network and the ability to connect people with different specialties, relationships and market knowledge.

“The more we link together, the stronger we’ll be,” Belson says. “REMAX has an exceptional talent pool.”

Bragg believes that combination of technology, expertise and the REMAX network is creating new opportunities for REMAX Commercial brokers to pursue larger and more complex assignments.

“REMAX agents are competitive, and they can win because of their skill set,” Bragg says. “When you have agents with diversified skills and experience, we can accomplish anything.”

For Bragg, Jackson Ranch is an example of what that can look like.

“This is groundbreaking,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”