A surging real estate market in recent months helped turn the beginning of 2021 into a major success for Keller Williams, with everything from sales volume to transactions to agent counts surging, the company revealed in a new earnings report.
The report, out Tuesday, shows that between January and March of this year, Keller Williams agents in the U.S. and Canada closed 272,688 transactions, which was up 21.3 percent year over year. Sales volume during that period came in at $98.1 billion, up 39.7 percent compared to the same period in 2020. Outside of anglophone North America, the company’s agents closed 13,088 transactions and did $2.5 billion in volume, up 58.7 percent and 100 percent, respectively.
The report did not include overall company revenue or net profit numbers. Keller Williams is not a publicly traded firm (at least not yet), so it isn’t required to disclose information the way public companies are.
Still, Tuesday’s report does offer useful insights into the company’s fortunes.
In addition to increased transactions and sales volume, for instance, the report also reveals that Keller Williams added a net of 3,909 agents during the first quarter of the year, bringing the global agent count to 180,376. In the U.S. and Canada, the company has now 167,464 agents, while elsewhere it has 12,912 agents.
Carl Liebert | Photo credit: Keller Williams
In the report, CEO Carl Liebert said the first months of this year mark “our third successive quarter of historic growth for Keller Williams.”
“We kicked off 2021 by breaking our production records again,” Liebert added. “Our continued remarkable pace is due to the strong dedication and commitment of our agents to serve their clients at the highest levels in the midst of a hypercompetitive housing market.”
When Keller Williams last reported earnings in February, it said that during the final three months of 2020, company agents closed 350,692 transactions, an increase of 27.9 percent from the year prior. Volume was up 16 percent during that period, to $407.4 billion.
Despite the generally positive results in Tuesday’s report, however, it does reveal that during the first quarter Keller Williams agents only took on 162,084 new listings — down 4.6 year-over-year. The drop is likely due to a historic inventory shortage, which has been a recurring theme in the industry lately and which other companies have indicated could ultimately prove to be a problem down the road.
Still, potential inventory issues notwithstanding, Tuesday’s report highlighted a number of other victories for Keller Williams. Among them was the revelation that Command — an artificial intelligence customer relationship manager that debuted just over two years ago — achieved 158,326 active yearly users in the first quarter of 2021.
Additionally, since the tool launched, agents have added 69.7 million contacts to the system, the report adds. The average cost per lead for agents using the platform was $2.24.
Marc King
The report also notes that the first quarter of the year has been an active one in terms of executive hiring, with leaders such as Marc King, Chris Cox, Stacie Herron and others joining the company in top positions.
The earnings report ultimately concludes that Keller Williams “achieved significant growth and technology milestones, and topped franchise and corporate culture rankings” during the first three months of the year.
“At Keller Williams, we remain committed to providing agents with the best culture, training, coaching and technology to continue to outpace the market of the moment,” King added. “We believe our results speak best on those efforts.”
Correction: International transactions and volume were up 58.7 percent and 100 percent, respectively. This post originally misstated those percentages.
