THE BREAKUP AT SEARS : No Bidder Shortage Seen for Coldwell Banker : Real estate: Analysts expect to see offers from American Express, GE and Ford.

Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s decision Tuesday to cut its ties to the Coldwell Banker Residential Group will likely attract bids from several financial services firms eager to profit from a combination of real estate and financial services, analysts said.

Sears’ decision to divest the residential unit and its Dean Witter Financial Services Group simply underscores the failure to integrate the different businesses under the retailing umbrella, real estate experts said.

American Express Co., General Electric Capital Corp. and Ford Motor Credit Co. lead a short list of companies that analysts speculate may compete for Mission Viejo-based Coldwell Banker despite current slow home sales. They say the residential unit might attract a financial services company desiring to use the real estate company’s customer base to sell its other services.

Prudential Life Insurance Co. has profited from such a combination since it bought Merrill Lynch & Co.’s real estate brokerage firm for about $300 million in 1990.

Spokesman for the three companies rumored to be interested in Coldwell Banker could not be reached for comment.

In announcing a major corporate restructuring, the giant retailer said it will sell the residential unit, including Sears Mortgage Corp., Sears Savings Bank and Coldwell Banker Relocation Services. Sears will retain Coldwell’s Homart Development Co., a shopping mall development firm.

The sale of the Coldwell Group would also accelerate the trend of consolidation in an industry where housing sales are down about 20% from their 1980s peak. Many small- and medium-size real estate firms have been losing market share to bigger and more aggressive real estate companies.

“This is the time you take advantage of the tremendous adversity and attrition in real estate,” said Sandford R. Goodkin, a real estate expert who heads his own San Diego consulting firm. “Coldwell Banker is a very well-known and respected name. And it still makes sense to combine some . . . big financial company” and a real estate brokerage firm.

Real estate executives said that Sears’ decision to sell its Coldwell residential division had been anticipated ever since April, 1989, when Sears sold Coldwell Banker Commercial Group for $305 million to a group of investors who later changed the firm’s name to CB Commercial.

Some experts added that they anticipated a Sears move might be at hand because the Coldwell Banker Residential Group, which accounts for about 3% of Sears revenue and 5% of its net income, recently showed improvement after struggling somewhat in 1990.

“I think the shareholders over the years have had a lot of questions about these subsidiary corporations that were not tied to the retail side” at Sears, said Dick Loughlin, president of Irvine-based Century 21 International. But Loughlin, echoing the sentiment that Coldwell and a financial services firm would make a good match, added: “Coldwell is not a company that is suffering severely.”

In fact, Coldwell Banker increased its market share to 5.7% in 1990 from 5.4% in 1988, according to recent estimates. The firm, which has nearly 18,000 real estate agents in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, closed 404,007 transactions in 1990, according to Real Trends, a Dallas-based industry newsletter.

The decision to sell the residential unit comes 11 years after Sears paid $202 million for Coldwell Banker and another $607 million for the Dean Witter brokerage firm as part of its “stocks and socks” strategy to offer a one-stop market of retailing, financial and real estate services.

“Pairing real estate and other financial services was a big trend” in the 1980s, said Laurie Moore, co-editor of Real Trends. Even though the trend has cooled somewhat, she said that for a financial services firm “there are not very many opportunities to buy the kind of organization that Coldwell banker represents . . . if you are looking for a major player in the market.”

Times staff writer Chris Woodyard contributed to this story