From roadside strawberry stand to real estate: Why McWhinney just changed its name

One of the biggest names in Denver real estate just changed it.

McWhinney, which was among the firms that developed both Union Station and the Dairy Block in downtown Denver, is no longer the namesake of its founders, Chad and Troy McWhinney.

Earlier this month, the company rebranded as Realberry.

“We wanted something to really represent not just where the company’s been or where it’s at, but really where we’re going,” Chad McWhinney told BusinessDen.

The name harkens back to the strawberry stand that the brothers opened in 1986, when Chad was in seventh grade and Troy was in fifth. It was in Southern California near Knott’s Berry Farm, the berry stand that became an amusement park.

Chad McWhinney said he and Troy, along with two other brothers that joined the business, grew their operation five years later to include 28 stands “from San Diego to L.A. to Riverside to Orange County.” Those stands bore the McWhinney name.

“When you’re in seventh grade, you don’t know what to name your company, and we picked our last name,” he said. “I thought that’s just what you did.”

The name stuck when McWhinney went into real estate 1,000 miles away in Colorado. McWhinney’s grandmother died, and his father inherited the family farm in Loveland. His father planned to sell.

McWhinney asked his dad if he could buy it. His father said yes, provided he move to Loveland and “become part of the community.”

“He said, ‘You’re not going to be some kid from Southern California flying back and forth to Colorado,’” McWhinney said.

McWhinney initially lived for six months in Room 101 at the Best Western at the Highway 34 exit off Interstate 25, he said.

“I called Troy, who was in high school, and I said, ‘When you get out of high school, you have to come to Colorado. Something transformational is happening here.’ Troy moved to Colorado and hence the real estate side of the business was born,” he said.

The brothers didn’t stop with the family farm, adding dozens of others totaling thousands of acres nearby during the 1990s. And in 2000, Loveland signed off on the plans to redevelop the land into Centerra, a mixed-use community.

The company has since bought and developed a host of assets, mostly along the Front Range but also out of state. In Denver, in addition to Union Station and the Dairy Block, its holdings include the former Great Divide building in RiNo, LoDo’s Thompson Hotel and FoundryLine, a 17-story apartment building in RiNo that McWhinney completed in 2024.

The change to Realberry coincides with a shift in the company’s financing approach. Up to this point, Chad McWhinney said, company projects have generally been financed by rich individuals who invest at least $1 million after in-person meetings with him or his brother.

As Realberry, the company is now advertising investment opportunities on its website. It’s starting with Red Hawk Crossings, 60 townhomes in Castle Rock that the company bought in December for $24.7 million, according to public records. The company says it’s looking to raise $10 million from accredited investors, with a minimum check size of $100,000.

The goal is to lower the investment minimum on future deals, McWhinney said.

“We believe, and we’ve been able to demonstrate over time, that if you want to create great places for people, don’t just look at the developer. Look at the capital,” he said. “Because ultimately the capital is going to decide how something looks and feels and performs.”

Accredited investors need to have a net worth of at least $1 million and annual income of $200,000 for single individuals and $300,000 for married couples, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The arrangement takes advantage of a 2012 federal law known as the JOBS Act, which changed how companies can raise money.

Steve Drew, Realberry’s chief operating officer, previously worked at Crowd Street, a commercial real estate crowdfunding website. It and other fintech companies like Fundrise sought to democratize real estate investment last decade in the wake of the JOBS Act.

“What I think you’re seeing now is … the sponsors themselves are really embracing this change from a regulatory perspective, and they’re doing it themselves. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Drew said.

Drew said there are two components to the strategy behind the change in financing approach.

“One part of it is providing access to a larger audience, of course so we can raise capital. But it’s also allowing the company to scale operationally and more efficiently so we can meet people in mass rather than one on one,” he said.

McWhinney said he also sees an element of fairness to the change, particularly because the company has done public-private partnerships such as the Union Station redevelopment that take advantage of taxpayer dollars.

“(Denver Mayor) Mike Johnston said to me once, ‘I wish as we do these public-private partnerships with people like Realberry, that access to the local community to invest could be made available,’” McWhinney said.

The new approach to financing didn’t necessitate a name change, McWhinney said. But he’d long been interested in rebranding.

“While it’s a good name — it’s my last name — it’s an ‘I’ name,” Chad McWhinney said of McWhinney. “And we need a new name that is a ‘We’ name.”

It’s a notable shift, given that real estate has long been home to eponymous firms. Locally, there’s Koelbel & Co., Broe Real Estate Group, Haselden Construction, Saunders Construction and Jordon Perlmutter & Co., to name a few.

McWhinney hired Made Thought, a creative studio in New York and London, to help with the new branding. Among the ideas thrown out was Strawberry, a more direct nod to the brothers’ roadside berry beginnings. It had potential — one of the world’s largest companies is named Apple, after all. But there were issues involving trademarks and the owner of the domain wanted millions for it.