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Keller Williams logged a milestone Monday: The major real estate franchisor has shared more than $2 billion in profits with its agents since the program’s launch in 1987.
The company, which has 174,000 agents, celebrated at 11 a.m. Central on a live “Growth Call” with top leaders from its more than 1,000 franchisees, also known as market centers, in the U.S. and Canada.
“This achievement is a quantifiable testament to our strong, growth-minded culture,” said Mark Willis, KW CEO and president, in a statement.
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Keller Williams also shared on Monday that between Jan. 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, its franchisees gave more than $148 million in profits to their affiliated agents. In a statement, Gary Keller, KW’s co-founder and executive chairman, said the profit share program allows franchisees to treat their agents as partners and allows agents “to build their businesses inside our franchise model, which is as powerful as if they owned a brokerage themselves.”
“This profit share milestone results from how we think of our relationship with our business partners,” Keller added. “Profit share is an equal opportunity, unequal reward. Those that put in effort will get the lion’s share of the results.”
Keller Williams is a private company, which means it is not obligated to share any financial information publicly. The franchisor is a defendant in several antitrust commission lawsuits and settled the cases earlier this year for $70 million.
Although that settlement has received final approval from a district court, several homesellers are appealing that decision, alleging the payout is far too low and objecting to the deal’s release of franchisees from liability without requiring them to pay anything to the people they allegedly harmed or change anything about their practices.
Keller Williams’ profit share program specifically is also the subject of multiple lawsuits due to a now-scrapped plan to slash profit sharing for defecting agents. The agents behind the suits alleged the plan would have amounted to breach of contract and unjust enrichment on the part of the company. Those suits are ongoing.
According to the company, through June 30, 2024, 137 KW agents have earned more than $1 million in lifetime profit share while 386 agents have earned more than $500,000. Tens of thousands of agents have earned at least five figures in profit share in that time frame:
- 3,077 KW agents have gotten more than $100,000 in lifetime profit share
- 6,648 KW agents have gotten more than $50,000 in lifetime profit share
- 28,827 KW agents have gotten more than $10,000 in lifetime profit share
“Profit share is the engine of our culture,” said Shawn Rawls, an Atlanta-based KW agent, in a statement. “It gives everybody a seat at the table.”
Through Keller Williams’ current profit sharing model, associates who are with the company for more than seven years receive a portion of their former market center’s profit for life. Market centers take slightly more than 50 percent of their profit, then sponsored associates split up the rest.
The model works like a pyramid, with each associate taking 50 percent of that profit, then the rest being split among their sponsoring associate, and that associate’s sponsoring associate and so on, up to seven levels.
“Each of these programs are set in motion when an associate joins a Keller Williams office and names one person as the individual primarily responsible for bringing them to the company,” a white paper from Keller Williams describing the model states. “It may not have been the first person or the last person they talked to about Keller Williams.
“It may be someone from their Market Center, or it could be someone from another region, province, or country,” the paper continues. “It is the person who was most impactful on their decision to join the company.”
According to KW, agents can designate a beneficiary to receive their profit share distributions when they die.
“Profit share is a legacy that you can leave,” said Jessica Starr, a Simsbury, Connecticut-based KW agent, in a statement. “You can leave it to your loved ones, or you can leave it to a trust.”
