RedKey Expands to St. Charles County
Date Posted: May 22, 2023
Posted In: News,
From St. Louis Business Journal: One of St. Louis’ largest independent real estate agencies is expanding to St. Charles County.
RedKey Realty Leaders, which has offices in Frontenac and Chesterfield in St. Louis County, is still searching for a permanent satellite office in St. Charles County to house its growing number of real estate agents based there. But the need for the space is so pressing that the agency has opened a temporary office until it finds that more permanent home.
The three-story Finance Centre building at 2299 Technology Drive in O’Fallon, near Lake St. Louis, is an office building that houses multiple tenants, including the Winghaven branch of Webster University that has since closed.
The real estate agency is renting about 2,400 square feet of the space. A lease listing advertises more than 14,000 square feet available in the building, which has a total of 46,000 square feet, according to county records. It is owned by an entity called Finance Centre LLC, after it was originally developed around 2000 by developer Paul McKee’s McEagle Properties. The county gave the property a market value of $4.05 million this year, down from $4.6 million in 2021.
RedKey ranked as the 10th largest residential real estate agency in St. Louis on the Business Journal’s list last year, closing $541 million in sales volume in 2021.
The new office won’t match the size or amenities of RedKey’s original offices, but the agency began to take on so much business in St. Charles County that it needed to find temporary digs to give those agents a home base, said B.J. Sonderman, RedKey’s director of agent success.
“We just were getting too much business in St. Charles County and too many agents that live out that way to not give them a place they can work from and function out of,” Sonderman said. “But what we were finding is commercial real estate is a challenge to find what would work for us, and buildout times can be seven, eight months in some cases. We just had too much of a growing presence to wait that long. So we found a location where we can get our agents up and running.”