Earlier this year, Keller Williams, the country's largest real estate brokerage, proudly declared that it's now a technology company. It was a bold stance for the nation's largest real estate brokerage.
Some saw an innovative new mission fueled by a booming company. Others laughed at the idea of such a transformation for an industry, that until the past five years, has largely missed opportunities to innovate via software innovations.
"What the hell is Keller Williams doing?" read part of one headline in real estate news site Inman.
But, since debuting the Keller Cloud and a batch of applications running on top of it, such as the Kelle AI assistant, the huge real estate company is off to the races and building custom apps for its armies of agents. And it has an eye on a few consumer-facing apps, too.
“We’re blazing the trail. From a tech perspective, it’s exciting,” said Daniel Morris, director of product management and part of a rapidly growing team of developers, engineers and designers.
Morris left one of Austin's most promising new startups, CognitiveScale, to take a lead role developing the Keller Cloud, which is a platform that connects the company's vast proprietary databases with a collection of other data, including information share through partnerships with Nextdoor and others.
Like many in Keller Williams new Labs office on South MoPac, Morris' background was purely in tech, with a resume including stints at Rackspace and IBM.
“I knew zero, other than I bought a sold a few homes, about real estate before I came here," he said.
Part of the draw, at least for Morris, is the 181,000 or so agents the new tech team has to work with as both inspiration and beta testers.
“As a product and design team, we have a ton of resources," Morris told me during a chat at Keller Williams' offices. "There’s no shortage to that. What’s unique about what we’re doing, and it’s a hard conversation to have with other tech companies, is that we don’t make money selling tech. We really don’t. But if every Keller Williams agent closed one more deal in the next 12 months, that’s a huge win for us and a huge win for agents."
Building and Validating Quickly
Keller Williams' big play to become a tech company has it roots in decisions made about three years ago, Adi Pavlovic, director of innovation, told me.
At the time, Pavlovic had been with the company a year or so. He was researching whether Keller Williams had achieved a true lead in the real estate industry. Meanwhile, he was also monitoring the growth of venture capital investment into promising real estate software companies.
That's when Keller Williams hired Josh Team to become its lead innovation officer. At the time, they had been dependent on a lot of long-term, third-party vendor contracts. But they saw opportunity in connecting their siloed data to new apps. They felt they had a clear advantage customizing products for agents in-house.
“You look up and it’s like 'I can talk to agents every single day,'" Pavlovic said. "If you’re building products, that’s a gold mine.”
Since then, the team has been expanding and building new products. They doubled the size of the tech team in the past seven months. They have more than 70 people in their Austin offices devoted to tech development -- in addition to remote developers and partners, which would bring it into the hundreds. They have about 20 tech positions open now.
Many of those positions would involve working with agents in the field and validating new ideas in concert with them. Thousands of agents are already deeply involved in providing feedback on new products.
“We would literally give them iPads and they go in and critique designs or do designs themselves and that’s how we make them not only think about what they want but how they want it,” Pavlovic said.
Atop the Keller Cloud, the team has built KWConnect, which is like a social network for conversations about best practices and sharing of the company's internal training content. Meanwhile, KWCommand combines an agent's day-to-day operations by bringing together contact and relationship management, lead generation and marketing, and personal goal tracking. Both run through a voice-controlled assistant, Kelle, which, to date, responds in text, not speech. But the company is already testing new voices with agents, which prefer a woman's voice by a 90-10 margin.
Keller Williams hasn't acquired any other tech companies yet. But the team there says they are constantly evaluating options and having conversations with local startups.
But, for many, the idea of an in-house team at a huge company like Keller Williams may still seem foreign. The allure, however, is having your customers right there on the same team.
“We don’t build technology for agents, we build it with them," Pavolic said. "They 100 percent aligned with us. And our joke is that if it’s not good, it’s your fault. But we’re doing this together.”
