More than 1,000 RE/MAX brokers and their industry vendors recently gathered in San Francisco for the company’s annual Broker Owner Conference. They’re celebrating recent successes and preparing for new opportunities in a recovering real estate market. Since the second quarter of 2013, more than 4,200 new agents and 208 new offices have joined the RE/MAX network.
At the opening session, RE/MAX Chairman and Co-Founder Dave Liniger told the audience that the company has come through a difficult housing market as a stronger organization and is much better positioned for success in the future. Liniger acknowledged that much of the talk in the industry over the past few weeks has been about what’s happening online after Zillow acquired Trulia. Liniger brought Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff on stage for a straightforward, one-on-one conversation.
Rascoff reassured the crowd of real estate professions, “We are a media company and we sell ads — not houses. We are not an MLS and not a brokerage. We sell impression based advertising. That’s what we did before the merger and that’s what we will continue to do.”
Liniger said the motivation for RE/MAX to partner with online portals is based on the company’s reputation for innovation and interest in providing valuable technology resources for its affiliates. “We keep looking at ourselves and reinventing ourselves to do what works best. We negotiate the best packages we can for all our affiliates,” he stated.
RE/MAX CEO Margaret Kelly spoke to the audience about new creative materials and customizable technologies that have been developed to assist brokers to recruit new agents. Specifically, she provided statistics about the success of the 2014 recruiting campaign, “Open Your Eyes to RE/MAX.” “In the United States, we added 2,934 agents since the second quarter of 2013. We continue to expand our network of agents in the United States with growth of 5.5 percent over the second quarter of 2013.”
In 2014, the results from the two surveys of the largest U.S. real estate brokerages revealed that RE/MAX agents continue to outperform their competitors. The RISMedia Power Broker Report and the REAL Trends 500 survey both showed RE/MAX agents were the most productive when ranked by closed transaction sides per agent among the leading real estate franchisors.
For more information about RE/MAX, visit www.remax.com.