Inside View: Charlie Pfeffer, land broker and developer

Sales associate, Pfeffer Co. Inc.

After selling homes for Edina Realty for 13 years, Charlie Pfeffer, 46, left the residential business in 2001 to join his father's Maple Grove-based land brokerage and development company. Pfeffer Co. Inc., founded in 1991, specializes in land transactions in the Twin Cities northwest metro but is also active within a 90-mile radius of the metro area.

The Pfeffers broker bank-owned land, raw land and develop lots for residential, commercial and industrial development. They have deals underway in Delano, Plymouth, Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park, Rogers and Monticello.

Q: Has the land market rebounded from the recession?

A: Dirt was kind of a four-letter word in the real estate market for five or six years. There just wasn't much going on. We did receive a lot of calls from people trying to transition out of their holdings. The other part of it was some of those guys were sitting on dirt that didn't have the entitlements. We specialize in the entitlement part of it, too, so we're able to take raw land and transition it into a marketable piece.

Q: Where is the land market now?

A: As a whole, it definitely has improved. But I can tell you that the market within the five-county metro area is way different from what it is in outstate counties. The farther away you go from the core business district, the tougher the market.

A: The biggest percentage of land being absorbed right now is for residential, and in the five-county area for sure, prices have gone up since 2011.

Q: Are the big national homebuilders buying land again?

A: They obviously are a good percentage of the absorption, but there are still a few local developers who've been around forever and didn't go broke over the last five or six years. So there's still a lot of vitality among some … custom builders.

Q: What about demand for industrial land?

A: There are definitely a bunch of people running around for build-to-suit developments, and I would suggest that they're larger projects in the 100,000-square-foot-plus range. There's also land being acquired for speculative industrial projects. [Speculative development has no leases signed before breaking ground.]

A: Shakopee has … done really well over the last two years; they've been really aggressive. For example, they landed Shutterfly with 300-plus employees. Brooklyn Park has been really aggressive. Rogers has done really well. A lot of it is where the incentives are.