Wes Foster, co-founder of real estate giant Long & Foster, dies at 89
P. Wesley Foster Jr., a onetime aluminum siding salesman who co-founded one of the largest independent real estate firms in the United States, its name, Long & Foster, on "for sale" signs across the Mid-Atlantic, died March 17 at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 89.
The death was confirmed by his stepson, Rod Lawrence. No cause was given.
At the time of his death, Foster - known to his legions of real estate agents as "Wes" - was chairman emeritus of the company he founded with Henry A. "Hank" Long in Fairfax, Va., in 1968.
Long was an Air Force veteran. Foster, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, had served in the Army. They were both in their 30s and relatively new to real estate when they combined their names and ambitions to form the Long & Foster brand.
At the outset, the two men "flipped a coin," Foster recalled in an interview with the Washington Business Journal. "He got his name first. I became president. We took off."
When they began the operation, they employed a single real estate agent.
Long specialized in commercial real estate, Foster in residential. Foster bought out his partner in 1979 and, over the next four decades, built the business into one of the largest privately held companies in the Washington area and a behemoth of the real estate sector nationally, with operations in mortgage and settlement services, homeowner's insurance and property management.
In 2017, Long & Foster was sold to HomeServices of America, an affiliate of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company headed by billionaire investor Warren Buffett. By then, Long & Foster was the nation's largest independent real estate brokerage by sales volume, The Washington Post reported, with 11,000 agents in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West...