North Texas' largest independent residential property company, Ebby Halliday Realtors, has just made its biggest sale ever.

Ebby Halliday, which handled more than $8 billion in home sales last year, said Monday that it's being bought by HomeServices of America Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate.

For months, speculation has swirled about a sale of the 73-year-old Ebby Halliday firm to billionaire Warren Buffett and his Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Corp. Company officials had previously discounted talk of a sale but have finally confirmed that a deal is in the works.

Ebby Halliday's execs held a companywide meeting Monday at the Dallas Cowboys' headquarters, The Star in Frisco, to announce the pending transaction. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and a representative for HomeServices of America said the company has no comment about the purchase at this time.

The sale is one of the biggest shifts in years for North Texas' highly competitive home sales industry.

In 2015, Berkshire Hathaway's HomeServices of America Inc. bought local high-end home sales firm Allie Beth Allman & Associates. The company has also been expanding its Dallas-Fort Worth residential sales operations under its own Berkshire Hathaway brand.

Ebby Halliday operates more than two dozen sales offices in North Texas, stretching from Mansfield south of Fort Worth to near the Oklahoma border in Grayson County. Besides home sales, the Farmers Branch-based firm with more than 1,700 sales agents has property management and leasing divisions.

Founder Ebby Halliday — who started the company in 1945 selling tiny concrete homes built north of Dallas Love Field — died in 2015 at 104.

The company is owned by its employees.

Ebby Halliday officials say the sale will include its Dave Perry-Miller Real Estate and Fort Worth-based Williams Trew Real Estate divisions. Those companies will continue to operate under their individual brands.

D-FW is one of the country's hottest home sales markets, and agents here handled more than 100,000 pre-owned residential sales in 2017. Soaring home prices in the last few years have also resulted in record profits for the residential sales sector.

In terms of dollar volume of sales last year, Ebby Halliday ranked ahead of Keller Williams Realty, Go Management and Briggs Freeman Sotheby's International Realty.

And Ebby Halliday ranked 15th nationally last year based on the number of transactions it handled.

Jim Fite, president of Dallas-based Century 21 Judge Fite Realtors, said he wasn't surprised to hear about the Ebby Halliday sale.

"I've been expecting it for a couple of years now," Fite said. "Berkshire Hathaway was a natural fit for Ebby.

Fite said being bought by a large national company can "take them to a different level."

Fite should know: His family-owned company aligned with the Century 21 brand more than 20 years ago.

"It was a very positive thing for us to affiliate with an international brand," he said. "We have grown significantly," from four offices to 25 today.

"In the first quarter, we were the third-largest firm in the area based on sales through the MLS."

During the last decade, the big nationwide home sales brands have expanded their reach across the country and have bought out many local operators.

"The numbers of large, independent, privately owned brokerage firms has shrunk without any doubt," said Steve Murray, president of Denver-based RealTrends, which tracks sales each year by the country's top 500 residential firms.

At the same time, Murray said he's seeing new startup residential firms with innovative approaches to the business.

"So while traditional independent brokerage firms are shrinking, we are seeing a new breed of younger firms taking their place — and in most cases they operate lower-cost business models," Murray said. "All part of the maturation of the industry, I think."

Minneapolis-based HomeServices of America is the country's second-largest residential brokerage firm. It has almost 40,000 sales agents working out of 843 offices in 30 states.

Last year the company handled $127 billion in property transactions.

Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway's founder, already has a big footprint in North Texas. His Omaha-based firm owns Fort Worth-based BNSF Railway, and Berkshire Hathaway's GEICO Insurance, Acme Brick and Nebraska Furniture Mart employ thousands of people in the area.