Some are quick to criticize big companies. They’re not nimble. They’re too bureaucratic. They’re out of touch with employees and customers. These are just some of the common complaints often lodged at the corporate behemoths of the world.
There are some organizations, however, that know how to turn size and scale into a hard-to-replicate advantage, and Anywhere Real Estate Inc. stands among them. Roughly one year out from its rebranding, which included Anywhere CEO Ryan Schneider ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the company is doubling down on its mission to make the real estate transaction simpler for anyone, anywhere. Sue Yannaccone, president and CEO of Anywhere Brands and Anywhere Advisors—the company’s franchise and brokerage operations—discusses how she is doubling down on Anywhere’s mission, leveraging the firm’s massive reach to help brokers and agents succeed in any market.
Despite difficult headwinds for housing and the economy, it’s full speed ahead for Yannaccone and her team, choosing to stay the course on Anywhere’s foundational strategy instead of reacting to market cycles. As she says, they’ve “seen this movie before,” and while real estate activity remains tied to mortgage-rate fluctuations and inventory issues, pent-up demand and life circumstances will continue to fuel homebuying and selling longer term.
“I think that the sentiment and the demand out there speaks to the opportunity for us to start seeing some movement back to a healthier market toward the end of the year, beginning of next year,” says Yannaccone. While she admits that it will likely be a bumpy ride, Anywhere is forging ahead, confident in its big-picture strategy.
“In any market, we’re going to adjust how we execute a little bit,” says Yannaccone, “but we’re not changing our direction. When we launched our new brand, we talked about the broader strategy to simplify the transaction experience for the consumer and the agent, and we’re not moving off of that. Consumers trust our world-class brands, and because of our scale, coupled with our capabilities as an integrated real estate company, we have the continuity and consistency to position ourselves to best serve the consumer and the agent, in good markets or challenged markets.”
The size advantage
With a well-established track record and unrivaled scale, Anywhere is leaning into its depth and breadth to give affiliates and agents a competitive edge:
- More than 330,000 globally affiliated agents, including 195,000-plus in the U.S.
- More than 20,000 offices in the U.S.
- 1.2 million transactions in 2022
- Six internationally recognized brokerage brands: Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate (BHGRE), Century 21 Real Estate, Coldwell Banker Real Estate, Corcoran, ERA, Sotheby’s International Realty
- Nationally scaled service businesses including:
- Cartus relocation services
- Anywhere Integrated Services (title, mortgage joint venture, underwriting joint venture, escrow and closing services)
- Anywhere Insurance Agency
“We’ve achieved significant scale, significant brand awareness and breadth of services,” says Yannaccone. “Those all collectively create the competitive advantage that Anywhere has.”
In the current market more than ever, Yannaccone will look to leverage that scale and accelerate growth within its businesses.
“We’re looking at helping our existing companies grow in a way that works for them, and we’re also looking at organic growth and new sales growth,” she says. “We’re leveraging our digital footprint to drive greater leads, and investing in more automation and simplification. When you’re in a market like this, you have to be very prudent on where you’re investing and where you’re accelerating.”
To those who believe that a company the size of Anywhere isn’t agile enough to adapt quickly, Yannaccone says it’s all about choice.
“You can allow your size and scale to slow you down, or you can harness the power of it to drive value,” she explains. “The power of our scale is about an integrated business philosophy. And it’s about empowering people at all levels to engage in decision-making. Freeing up that horsepower of the scale is really exciting.”
Empowering key players
The transformational journey of Anywhere has included a series of noteworthy executive appointments over the past year, including Yannaccone’s expanded role as head of Anywhere Brands and Anywhere Advisors. The move puts nine businesses within her purview—all six of the brands’ franchise operations, plus the owned brokerages of Coldwell Banker, Sotheby’s International Realty and Corcoran—providing Yannaccone with a wide lens across the entire company.
She takes this expanded responsibility very seriously, and part of that responsibility is putting the right leadership team in place. “I philosophically believe that it is the job of the leader to empower the people around them to do things that they’re best at,” Yannaccone says. “I want to fiercely protect the uniqueness of each of our brands, but I also want to make sure that I’m building a sustainable structure in a market that’s ever changing.”
The executive appointments at Anywhere are also indicative of the movement to advance more women leaders in real estate, although Yannaccone says such decisions are always based on “genius over gender” and, therefore, Anywhere’s new women leaders bring serious chops to their roles.
Recently appointed Anywhere Franchise Brands President and CEO Liz Gehringer, for example, was formerly the general counsel for the franchise group, a chief ethics and compliance officer for the Anywhere enterprise, and spent time in operations at Coldwell Banker. New Coldwell Banker Realty CEO Kamini Lane had been running the owned-brokerage segment of Sotheby’s International Realty. Meanwhile, Kate Rossi, appointed as president of agent engagement and sales leadership development, is a 40-year real estate veteran and former executive vice president for Coldwell Banker.
Yannaccone also named Amory Wooden chief marketing officer of Anywhere Brands in 2022, overseeing marketing for CENTURY 21, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate and ERA. With a strong background in digital marketing, including stints at StreetEasy and Zillow, Yannaccone feels that Wooden has “a skillset that leans into the future of marketing and a fresh perspective.”
“We’re very, very proud of the advancement and the support of women in our organization,” says Yannaccone. “There’s a value in representing what your customer base looks like, and that’s really important to me.”
The trickle-down effect of scale
From the rebrand to the new leadership structure, the changes at Anywhere were made with a common goal in mind: to allow brokers and agents to reap the rewards of the company’s scale by leveraging data, honing the suite of tools and technology available to them, and making continual progress on the long-term objective of simplifying the transaction experience.
“Consumers want to do business with brands they trust,” says Yannaccone. “There’s the stability that comes from being a legacy company, as well as the knowledge. But it’s also the data and the insights that trickle down—the products and tools we’re investing in that you would not be able to get on your own. Agents in non-affiliated type companies don’t really have access to that.”
Wooden lives and breathes this. “The brands are so unique and different, and the networks and the needs are so unique and different,” she says. “But we believe there are efficiencies that can be gained by scaling some things, especially on the digital and technology side of the house. We want brokers and agents to spend less time on marketing and back-office tasks and more time being successful in selling.”
Anywhere’s scope and scale lends itself to developing the technological efficiencies Wooden describes. “We have some competitors that are very big and have a ton of agents, but they don’t have the depth and variance in the type of agents, the type of businesses, the type of history and heritage that we’ve had,” says Wooden. “If we’re utilizing data and technology in the right way, the learnings and the insights that we can yield are just incredible.”
Utilizing that vast amount of data Anywhere has at its disposal has allowed Wooden and her team to track the effectiveness of the firm’s technology offering and ensure it’s delivering for brokers and agents.
“Every single brand out there has these long lists of products, tools and technologies—it’s table stakes,” says Wooden. “Where I want to do better is proving out what is actually helping be more successful in the market. It’s about quality not quantity. If something’s not going well, let’s fail fast, let’s move in a new direction. And if something’s working well, I want to double down on that.
“With our scale at Anywhere, we have so many use cases to really leverage the power of the network,” she continues. “I can say to someone, ‘Here’s one thing for you to learn this month, and I promise you it’s going to make you more successful and I’m going to help you learn it.’ That is what we can offer our network.”
The right resources to succeed
This powerful combination of trusted brands and scalable resources has positioned Anywhere to benefit from the current flight-to-quality trend among agents looking for brands that can help them succeed in today’s market.
Yannaccone points to Anywhere’s investment in tools like RealVitalize and MoxiWorks, as well as scaled Learning Platforms for brokers and agents, available through their individual brands. “We have found that agents who took their brand’s learning courses displayed greater improvement in their sales production in the 12 months following the coursework than the 12 months prior—an average improvement of 20% higher closed volume,” she says.
Anywhere has also given brokers a way to increase revenue through a new joint venture option, Upward Title, giving franchisees the opportunity to leverage the firm’s nationally scaled title/settlement resources. This allows affiliates to increase their margins by focusing on new parts of the business they wouldn’t have been able to on their own.
Anywhere also helps facilitate brokerage growth through the Affiliate Insights platform. Launched in 2022, Affiliate Insights taps into Anywhere’s extensive data capabilities across its brokerage/franchise network to create easy-to-use dashboards that aid in the proactive management and growth of a brokerage.
As Yannaccone says, “Affiliate Insights is not about recreating the wheel, because the data is already there. My teams in the field are now able to look at reporting that is all pulled together in one place, and really use those insights to deliver strategic and clearly directed value that is unique to that broker,” she explains.
“It’s an incredible tool for brokers because it really puts the data in their hands,” adds Wooden. “The opportunity is the ability to track and share in the right way—to enable people to have the bigger picture so they can choose their journey, but have actual understanding behind it.”
Anywhere also focuses on broker growth through its Ascend leadership development and succession planning program for franchisees and employees, and its new spin-off program, Accelerate. Accelerate offers tailored professional development for those who go through the company’s Inclusive Ownership Program, an initiative that provides financial assistance and guidance to diverse brokers seeking to affiliate with an Anywhere brand. Twenty-six broker/owners graduated from Accelerate in 2022.
The success of last year’s graduating class is “extremely gratifying” for Yannaccone. “It’s another example of us doing the action behind the words.”
Keeping it human
One of the easy swipes to take at a company the size of Anywhere is that it’s too big to remain rooted in the personal relationships at the heart of the residential real estate business. But for Yannaccone, that’s overcomeable—and it starts at the top.
“As a leader, it’s about staying very connected,” she says. “It’s about not ever thinking that you’re done learning from your customer or from anybody as to what is needed. We’re a relationship business. Technology will continue to augment, not replace, the human element.”
Wooden agrees. “My goal is to help agents focus on the relationship side of the business,” she says. “No agent got into this business saying ‘I would just love to play with marketing products all day long and track data and usage.’ They got into it because they are great at relationships. They’re great at selling. They know homes. They know markets. So what we are trying to do as an organization is enable and empower them. That is never meant to get in the way of the human relationship, but rather, to help support and enlarge the time spent on that human relationship.”
Whether it’s technology, education or leadership, the advantages inherent in Anywhere’s scale are copious. And those advantages will only increase. “I’m very excited about the future of this business and the opportunity that we have as an organization,” says Yannaccone. “It’s the culture and the technology, and when we bring those two together, I’m so excited about what that means for transforming the business. I’m excited about the opportunity, and I think we’re uniquely positioned to do it.”
For more information, please visit https://www.anywhere.re.
