Talk about a sweet deal.

From the time Bryan Walker found the new house he wanted in Fayette County on Dec. 10, it took only two and a half weeks to close the sale and move in. With the contract signed before year's end, Walker avoided the cost of renewing his apartment lease.

"I didn't think it was possible to meet this date with everything that still needed to be done," he said.

Walker said he clearly benefited from "one-stop shopping." That's a national trend in which the buyer deals with a builder, a real estate agency and a mortgage lender that have a common owner. In his case, Ball Homes was the builder. And Ball Homes, or the Ball family, owns the real estate agency, Milestone Realty, and the mortgage lender, Walden Mortgage Group.

Others in Lexington's home-building and real estate industries are now riding the national wave, creating interlocking businesses that move customers seamlessly from dirt patch to dining room.

Nationally, the top 12 home-building corporations already have 10 percent to 20 percent of the home sales market, and that could jump to 40 percent in the next decade, said Weston Edwards, a real estate industry consultant based in Provo, Utah.

The result: Competition among realty firms is intensifying, giving home buyers a wide range of choices and conveniences.

With new developer-backed real estate companies gaining market share, traditional realty firms have countered with their own round of nationwide consolidation.

In Lexington, for example, the region's largest realty firm, Rector-Hayden, was gobbled up by HomeServices of America Inc., a Minneapolis-based holding company that already owned another major brokerage in Lexington and the largest brokerage in Louisville.

When combined with Semonin Realtors in 2003, Rector-Hayden accounted for 45 percent to 50 percent of the region's real estate market.

Nationally, about 56 percent to 57 percent of the real estate business is owned by investor-owned firms, said Jeremy Con-away, a real estate industry consultant in Traverse City, Mich.

Builders and real estate agencies are moving to one-stop shopping because there are great profits to be reaped from mortgage, title and insurance services, Conaway said.

But that's not the whole story. Many think customer demand is playing a major role in the move toward one-stop shopping.

"Eighty-five percent of American consumers want to deal with full-service organizations because they don't have the time to run around dealing with different companies to buy a house," Conaway said.

As national franchises leverage their size to provide an ever-widening array of services, the expectations of customers are rising, said Jonah Mitchell of Jonah Mitch-ell Real Estate in Nich-olasville, last year's president of the Lexington-Blue-grass Association of Realtors.

Mitchell said he has had several opportunities to join national franchises, but declined because he is convinced there is still a good living to be made by small independent real estate firms -- if they're clear about what they're doing.

Those firms must "have a good name and a niche in the market, and provide the 'concierge service' that individualizes it for the customer," he said.

Other established real estate agencies, including independent firms such as Turf Town Properties in Lexington, say their existing relationships with other businesses give them a strong hand to compete with against builder-backed agencies.

Jimmy Nash of Nash Homes said Lexington is "still a small town" where many people choose to "do business with you because of who you are."

However, Walker's experience makes it clear that one-stop shopping has great potential.

"Bryan's one of the first four or five who's gone through this with us," said Bob Osborne, the principal broker for Milestone.

Walker, 27, a native of Charleston, W.Va., and a first-time home owner, said the Ball Homes people worked closely with him throughout the proc-ess and minimized his time away from work as a marketing representative for International Crankshaft in Georgetown.

"The mortgage guys, the Realtor and the Ball Homes people kept in constant contact with me and each other to make everything quick and smooth," Walker said.

He purchased his two-story brick house with four bedrooms and attached two-car garage for $174,230 -- "a pretty good deal," he called it. His mortgage rate was 5.65 percent.

"Walden's rate beat every other company I got estimates from by almost a quarter of a point," he said. "Walden's closing cost was much cheaper than the other companies, as well."

Mike Dunn, the manager of Walden Mortgage Group, said that meeting Walker's deadline meant going a "little bit faster than normal."

The typical time needed to close a house deal is 30 days, he said.

"I had to get Bryan's information very quickly," Dunn said. "It does help that I have a relationship with these partners at Ball Homes and Milestone."

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