E-Real Estate – Keller Williams Realty – 11/33 – 07/05/2019

E-Real Estate – Keller Williams Realty – 11/33 – 07/05/2019


E-Real Estate – Keller Williams Realty – 11/33 – 07/05/2019

Keller Williams Realty
Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is the largest real estate franchise company in North America
Austin, Texas, United States
Total Funding Amount $2M
Categories Real Estate, Residential, Service Industry
Headquarters Regions Southern US
Founded Date 1983
Founders Gary Keller
Operating Status Active
Last Funding Type Venture – Series Unknown
Number of Employees 10001+
Legal Name Keller Williams Realty, Inc.
Type
Privately Held Corporation
Industry Real Estate
Founded Austin, Texas, (1983)
Headquarters
Austin, Texas

,

United States
Number of locations
940+ worldwide
Key people
Gary W. Keller, Chairman and CEO
Mo Anderson, Vice Chairman
Josh Team, President
Ann Yett, CFO
Neil Dholakia, CPO
Darrell King, COO
Number of employees
180,000 associates
Website www.kw.com

 

Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is the largest real estate franchise company in North America, with approximately 700 offices and 100,000 associates in more than a dozen countries around the world. The company has grown exponentially since the opening of the first Keller Williams Realty office in 1983, and continues to cultivate an agent-centric, education-based, technology-driven culture that rewards associates as stakeholders.

Training magazine recently named Keller Williams the second-best training organization across all industries worldwide and the highest-ranking real estate business. The company also provides specialized agents in luxury homes and commercial real estate properties.

Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is powered by a mission to help real estate agents build careers worth having, businesses worth owning and lives worth living. A unique profit-sharing system that encourages all associates to become stakeholders in the profitability of individual market centers is serving to fuel the company’s growth trajectory.

Often described by co-founder and chairman, Gary Keller, as “a training and coaching company that just happens to be in the business of real estate,” Keller Williams Realty is uniquely devoted to providing market-leading training while supporting associates with tools to capitalize on the ever-changing real estate environment.

Keller Williams Realty (commonly referred to as Keller Williams) is an American technology and international real estate franchise with headquarters in Austin, Texas. It is the number one franchise in the United States by sales volume, ranking number one in agents and units sold in 2017. It is also the largest real estate franchise by agent count in the world, and one of the largest privately held global residential real estate brokerages.

Founded in 1983 by Gary Keller and Joe Williams, it grew from a single office in Austin to approximately 940+ offices with over 180,000 associates worldwide as of May 2018. It is an Inc. 5000 company and has been recognized as one of the highest rated real estate companies by numerous publications, including Entrepreneur and Forbes. In 2018, it was listed as one of the “happiest companies to work for” by Career Bliss.

Founding and early history

Keller Williams was founded in 1983 by Gary Keller and Joe Williams. It started out as a single office based in Austin, Texas, selling local residential real estate in the Austin area. After two years in business, Keller Williams became the largest single office residential real estate firm in Austin with 72 licensed agents. In the mid-1980s, the company suffered from the United States housing bubble and began to offer profit sharing to existing and potential associates in order to retain agents and help get through the recession. Within a year, the company grew to 130 agents and began to climb back as the top real estate broker in Austin.

Keller Williams co-founder Gary Keller speaking at an event in 2012.

In the early 1990s, Keller Williams expanded outside of the state of Texas, opening up its business model to franchising beginning in 1991. It opened an office in Oklahoma in 1993, marking the firm’s first office to be located outside of its home state. The Oklahoma office was later recognized as the most successful single real estate office in that state. Keller Williams expanded at a rapid rate throughout the United States, much of which was attributed to its commission split for agents. In 1997 the company was recognized by being on the Franchise Gold 100 list by Success Magazine. As it moved into the next century, Keller Williams became the 6th largest real estate agency in the U.S. An example of its rapid expansion came in the state of Florida where in 2004 it was attributed as the largest real estate office in Polk County with 114 agents.  That same year, it was attributed as the fastest growing real estate office in the entire state with 45 market centers, bringing its total nationwide agent count to over 30,000.

Keller Williams continued expanding and in 2007, the company launched Luxury Homes by Keller Williams, a division within the company that brokers luxury only real estate. In 2008, it launched KW Commercial, a division providing commercial real estate associates with specialized technology, marketing tools, and resources. The division is known for allowing agents to keep more commission splits. It also allowed profit sharing similar to residential gents. As of 2012, the division boasted of more than 1,000 brokers nationally.

2010 to 2016 International expansion

Keller Williams Realty franchise signing in South Africa in 2012.

By the end of the decade in 2010, Keller Williams had 77,672 real estate agents in the United States. It surpassed Century 21 as the second largest real estate agency in the U.S., two years after taking over the third spot from RE/MAX International. Between 2005 and 2011, the company saw a 40 percent increase in the number of offices in North America. Keller Williams went international in 2012, launching Keller Williams Worldwide as a subdivision to manage its international franchising. It awarded its first overseas franchise in Vietnam in 2012. The same year, franchising of the company was made available in Indonesia and Southern Africa, and in 2013 expanded to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

At the end of April 2014, Keller Williams reached 100,575 agents worldwide. This was due to an 18 percent increase in agents during 2013. As of 2014, it is the largest real estate franchise by agent count in North America and the only privately held global residential real estate brokerage. In 2014, the company also announced the opening of a region in Dubai. The first Dubai franchise was awarded to a leadership group affiliated with IFA Hotels & Resorts which is considered the largest foreign investor on the Palm Jumeirah.

2017 to present: Transition to technology company[edit]

Keller Williams topped $67.1 billion in sales volume in 2016, up 22 percent from the previous year. The company began to position itself as a technology company in 2017. In 2017 it launched KW Labs, a division of the company process devoted to the building and testing of technology created by the company alongside its agents. This was in addition to KW Keller Cloud. It also introduced “Kelle,” an artificial intelligence app which has been referred to as Siri but for real estate used as a virtual assistant, and an agent-to-agent referral tools platform called “Referrals.”Keller Williams became the number one franchise in the United States by sales volume in 2017, ranking number one in agents and units sold in 2017.

Keller Williams continued expansion into South America in 2018, opening franchises in Argentina, adding to already existing locations in Colombia, Belize, Nicaragua, and Panama. Gary Keller replaced John Davis as CEO of the company in 2019, adding to his already title of Chairman of the company.