Preface: Paul Hagey; T3 Sixty Editor-In-Chief
Every year, T3 Sixty digests, audits and presents the residential real estate brokerage industry’s most powerful leaders, largest MLSs and Realtor associations, its leading technologies, and most significant brokerage companies in the Real Estate Almanac.
The compendium provides industry leaders and innovators the critical data to understand where the industry is headed and how, providing insight from who has the most influence in shaping its future to the growing consolidation of MLSs and brokerage companies to the technologies undergirding many of the industry’s biggest developments. The 2022 Real Estate Almanac reports and analyzes audited data from the calendar year 2021.
The SP 200, the first section of the Almanac, reveals Gary Keller, founder and executive chairman of Keller Williams Realty parent company kwx, as the industry’s most powerful leader. The 2022 ranking includes thirty-four leaders who made their debut, including No. 28 Susan Daimler, president of Zillow Group and No. 47 Guy Gal, co-founder and CEO of real estate platform Side, and No. 92 Christopher Alexander, the new president of the newly RE/MAX Canada.
In the Organized Real Estate section, the report illustrates that the MLS industry’s years long wave of consolidation is continuing. It even picked up in 2021. The number of MLSs dropped by 3.6 percent from 2021 to 2022 to 536 MLSs, roughly double the rate of decrease between 2020 and 2021.
The 1,057 local Realtor associations recorded in the 2022 ORE 200 is nine fewer than existed at the end of 2020, a drop of 1.0 percent. The data also shows that local associations continue to get larger with average local association member count growing 8.4 percent from 2021 to 2022. Over the last two years, the average member count has jumped 14.5 percent.
The Tech 500, which ranks the industry’s leading enterprise technologies, presents 369 leading products from 262 companies in 65 functional categories. The 2022 data reflects the ongoing impact of real estate tech consolidation with 38 fewer companies included in this year’s report from the 2021 edition. It introduced two new categories this year – digital payments, which includes the leading products that help brokers, teams and agents digitally manage payments, including earnest money, cryptocurrency and NFTs, and Data Services, which includes products that provide data including public records, MLS data, valuations and geographic boundaries.
The Corporations report, which ranks the US’s largest real estate enterprises, franchise brands and franchisees, shows that the largest companies are even larger in 2022.
For example, the nation’s 20 largest enterprises – led by Realogy Holdings Corp., kwx and RE/ MAX — accounted for 61.2 percent of the total sales for 2021, up from a share of 54.8 percent in 2020, representing the largest year-over-year jump since T3 Sixty became the first company to annually analyze enterprises in 2018. In the four years from 2018 through 2021, the Enterprise 20 market share of national sales volume increased by nearly a fifth (18.8 percent). Market share is determined by using total existing home sales data released by the National Association of Realtors.
The nation’s 20 largest franchise brands also increased their market share based on 2021 sales volume to 46.5 percent from 43.7 percent. Keller Williams Realty with over $500.1 billion in 2021 sales volume again came in as the largest real estate franchise brand, followed by RE/MAX at $341.1 billion and Coldwell Banker Real Estate at $335.0 billion. Sotheby’s International Realty moved up to No. 4 in 2021 with $180.8 billion in sales volume, surpassing Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices with $173.0 billion in sales.
The 2022 Mega 1000 confirmed that the nation has a new largest brokerage in Compass, which moved from No. 3 a year ago to No. 1 in the 2022 report, with a 2021 sales volume of $254.2 billion. Realogy, HomeServices of America and eXp Realty round out the top four, and all had above $100 billion in 2021 sales volume.
The report also reveals the concentration of brokerage production among the industry’s largest companies. The sales volume market share of the nation’s 10 largest brokerages at 23.6 percent in 2021 jumped from 18.8 percent in 2020. The consolidation of production continues as the study expands to the 100 largest brokerages, whose 2021 sales volume market share at 36.9 percent, grew from 31 percent in 2020. Overall, the market share of the Mega 1000 rose from 52.2 percent in 2020 to 59.2 percent in 2021 reflecting growth in sales volume from $2 trillion to 2.7 trillion in one year.
There’s no other resource quite like the Real Estate Almanac; with it we aim to provide real estate leaders and innovators a full, broad picture, with the data to back it up, of how the industry is evolving in real time.
We hope you dive in, and find it useful in building and growing your own companies as we all strive to make the industry the best it can be.
