When you join Keller Williams, not only do you join the largest real estate sales force in the world, you also become the partner of the most successful estate agent in the world, Gary Keller.

The top estate agent in the world

Gary Keller is the Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Keller Williams Realty. In the world of real estate he is a legend.

Gary graduated from Baylor University in 1979 with a degree in marketing and real estate. He sold five homes in his first month in the business, and by age 26 was the vice president of expansion for Austin’s then-largest real estate company. He resigned from the position, and three and a half years later, his new firm was the largest in town. This is a position it retains to this day. Gary soon took Keller Williams and his philosophy of “people helping people” nationally, then internationally.

Gary is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times, and The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, which reached #1 on the Wall Street Journal business bestseller list.

Recognized by the real estate world

A recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and finalist for Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Keller is widely recognized as a business leader. REALTOR® Magazine named him one of real estate’s most influential thought leaders. A REAL Trends survey identified Gary as one of the five “Most Admired People” in real estate.

In 2015, Inman News named Keller as one of the top real estate “doers” who are driving change in the industry. Gary has also been named one of the five most powerful people in residential real estate on the annual SPower 200 list compiled by the influential T360 consulting firm.

Stefan Swanepoel of T360 said, “Gary Keller has been one of the five most powerful people in residential real estate every year since 2014, when the SP200 debuted. This year [2019] is no exception. Keller rose to the No. 1 slot last year based on Keller Williams Realty’s staggering recent growth. At the end of 2017, his firm had unseated Re/Max’s 20-year run as the largest residential real estate brokerage brand by annual sales volume in North America. In addition, Keller Williams Realty entered 2018 as the world’s largest residential real estate brand by agent count and it continues to set new records. In 2018, it passed 980 offices, 165,000 US agents and over 190,000 affiliates worldwide.”

Reshaping the real estate industry

In 2016, Swanepoel said, “Keller guided the brand to three straight years of record-breaking agent growth through 2016, but more than winning in body count, Keller’s firm is also reshaping the real estate landscape. The firm’s traction is compelling traditional brokerage operators to consider adopting some of its innovative tactics including caps on commissions agents pay to their brokerage, profit sharing with agents and a business model centered on agents.”

Gary Keller and Keller Williams have indeed been reshaping the real estate industry since 1983. Several of the most well-known agent-centric innovations were introduced by Gary Keller.

This includes profit share in 1987, which eventually was adopted as Growth Share in KW regions like South Africa. Intially, this was ridiculed by many of the more prominent real estate brands. Today, more than $1,2 billion has been distributed to Keller Williams associates, and the amount is increasing yearly.

Gary also came up with the concept of real estate teams to allow top agents to add leverage to their businesses. Again, this was second-guessed by the rest of the real estate industry. Today, a large percentage of sales transactions are done by successful teams, many of them with Keller Williams. Successful KW teams are now expanding their team operations into other areas and countries.

Recently, Keller announced that Keller Williams will pivot to become a technology company. Our vision is to build the real estate platform that our agents and their clients prefer. To do that, estate agents must own their data and their technology. As the largest single real estate company in the world, Keller Williams have the resources and the data to realise this grand vision.

Like before, the doubters continued.

He is fighting for all agents

In previous blog post (here as well as here), we shared with you the looming current battle between estate agents and technology companies. Like all other service industries, technology companies (which include property portals) are seeking to disrupt the property industry. To a large extent, they are attempting to remove estate agents from the centre of the sales transaction so they can access the income generated by agents. To do so, these technology companies are building large platforms to reach home buyers and seller directly, and they are using estate agents’ data to do so.

“Not so fast”, says Gary Keller. In the clip below (played from 1:22:40 into the full speech), Gary explains how he and Keller Williams are taking huge steps to keep our agents where they belong; in the centre of the transaction. By building the technology platform, Keller Williams equips our associates to be tech-enabled agents and not agents who enable the tech companies that want to replace us.

“The price you pay for getting where we are, is you look stupid for about four years.”

Gary Keller

Surprisingly however, Gary stood alone for quite some time. Watch the clip until 1:27:31 to discover why no other real estate leaders supported Gary Keller when he stood up for estate agents by taking the tech companies head on.

Partner with Gary… and 180,000 other KW agents

Many of the advancements, technology, models and systems we take for granted in the property game these days were innovations by Gary Keller. You have an opportunity to become his partner and re-write the rules once more.

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