Editor’s Note: RISMedia recently released a special advanced look at the Top 100 firms ranked in RISMedia’s 35th Annual Power Broker Report, exclusively for RISMedia Premier Members. The Top 500 Power Broker firms will also be released in advance to Premier Members in the coming days, and the Top 1,000 firms will be available this April.
The choppy waters of the current market with its fluctuating mortgage rates, inflation and interest rates—and now a bout of big bank busts adding to the uncertainty—isn’t phasing Anywhere Brands President and CEO Sue Yannaccone. In this recent Q&A with RISMedia for its 35th annual Power Broker Report, Yannaccone shares how the company–sitting comfortably at the No. 2 spot in this year’s ranking–saw the market shift as an opportunity to only accelerate its already-existing plan to meet the changing needs of agents and consumers.
Yannaccone will expand even further on market conditions and brokerage strategies during her “State of Real Estate” Opening Keynote Address at this year’s RISMedia CEO & Leadership Exchange in Washington, D.C. Sept. 5-7.. Click here for more information about the event.
Anywhere Advisors
No. 2 Sales Volume
No. 2 Transactions
Sue Yannaccone
President & CEO
Anywhere Brands
What was the biggest contributor—positive and/or negative—to the company’s results in 2022?
The theme of the past year for Anywhere has been transformation—in the obvious sense as we adopted our new brand identity in June (replacing the Realogy name)—but also in ways that are going to impact how we do business in the future.
There isn’t a company in the housing industry that didn’t feel the effects of the pace of change in the market in 2022. But for Anywhere, we were already in the midst of executing our strategy to make the transaction simpler while rearchitecting our business for the future in a way that better leverages our scale. So, when we started to see the rapid shift to a tougher market, we chose to see it as an opportunity to accelerate our efforts to structure our company for the changing needs of agents and consumers.
We cannot control the macroeconomy, but we know that we can continue to build an even better foundation for our brokers and agents regardless of the market backdrop. So, we’re working on integrating aspects of our company so that our brokerage professionals can better benefit from the full spectrum of scaled businesses that comprise Anywhere, including title, escrow, mortgage, insurance, relocation and our product and technology suite. These investments shaped our company in 2022, but they’re poised to pay even greater dividends in the coming years as the market improves.
How do you anticipate 2023 ending up? Are you seeing signs that things are turning around?
Those of us who have endured several market cycles know that the ride can be unpredictable, and it’s rarely a straight line. Even in the first months of 2023, forecasters expressed optimism with the uptick in contracts as rates fell below 6%. But just as fast as we saw those green shoots, rates shot back up and we saw seasonally adjusted mortgage purchase applications fall to their lowest levels in decades—and that’s just within the span of a month.
Although the economic conditions are difficult to predict, we know that supply remains an issue. Not only do we still need more new homes to meet the national demand for housing, but we are also dealing with a tight supply of existing homes on the market as so many homeowners are locked into lower rates.
The bottom line is that we can’t anticipate every single twist and turn that the market will take in 2023, which underscores the importance of investing in ‘bigger picture’ goals that are market-agnostic. For Anywhere, those goals center around the need for a simpler transaction experience for agents and consumers–but it’s an approach that we encourage for our entire network of brokers and affiliates.
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