Sue Yannaccone is the President & CEO of Anywhere Brands, the residential real estate powerhouse behind Coldwell Banker, Sotheby’s International Realty, Century 21, Corcoran, and Better Homes and Gardens. With over 350,000 agents in its network, Anywhere is the largest brokerage platform in the U.S.—giving Yannaccone a front-row seat to the biggest shifts reshaping housing.
In this episode, Brad Hargreaves sits down with Sue to unpack the post–NAR settlement landscape, the future of buyer-side commissions, and why Clear Cooperation is under fire. They explore how agents are adapting, the realistic role of AI in residential transactions, and the operational challenges of managing tech adoption across a sprawling franchise network. Sue also shares her long-term bet: that streamlined, integrated transactions—not bots—will define the next chapter of real estate.
For anyone navigating the messy convergence of policy, tech, and consumer trust in residential brokerage, this is essential listening.
You can see the full video here on Substack or watch and listen on any of the following platforms:
The Thesis Driven Leader Series is made possible with the support of Neutral.
Neutral is redefining multifamily real estate with a focus on sustainability, resident health and well-being. For example, Neutral is building the tallest mass timber and Passive House residential building in the U.S with a state-of-art wellness club in Milwaukee. Beyond environmental impact, Neutral offers investors access to substantial sustainable tax credits and deductions. Accredited investors can explore available opportunities at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more.
The following transcript is automatically generated. Please forgive us for any errors or misspellings.
Brad Hargreaves: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader Series. I'm Brad Hargraves, founder and editor-in-chief of Thesis Driven, and your host today for the Leader Series. Today we're joined by one of the most powerful voices in real estate, Sue Yannaccone, the CEO of Anywhere Brands. You may not have heard of Anywhere, that's okay, but you've probably heard of some of the real estate brands they own.
Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby's, Corcoran, and many more. That makes Anywhere Brands by far the largest brokerage in terms of the number of transactions that they represent in their family of brands. It gives Sue a really interesting high level view of what's happening across the residential industry and how various macro trends are hitting.
We're having this conversation in the midst of a lot of changes, a lot of transformations in the [00:01:00] residential market and frankly, a lot of uncertainty out in the market right now. Obviously interest rates are high. They've been high for a while. That hits everyone in the real estate industry. But there have also some been some big policy changes that are specific and impactful to residential brokerage.
Last summer, for instance, a lot of people were terrified about the impact of a DOJ case that changed buyer side commissions. It basically said that buyer agent commissions can't be paid by the seller's agent. There's a lot of nuance to that. A lot of people were afraid it was going to get rid of, or dramatically reduce the number of buy-side agents and bring down commissions overall, maybe even they would be replaced entirely by AI.
That never really happened, or at least hasn't materialized yet. But even bigger shifts are on the horizon. For instance, the Clear Cooperation policy is under [00:02:00] threat. If you don't know what that is, that's okay. It's a National Association of Realtors policy that basically states that any listings, any homes for sale that are publicly marketed must be posted to the MLS almost immediately.
The policy, the NAR argues adds transparency that all agents have access to all listings as long as they have MLS access. It's also helpful to companies like Zillow that can just get their listings from the MLS. They don't have to go to multiple places. But it also entrenches the power of the MLS and some argue reduces seller choice.
That is, they have to list their home on the MLS, which, some brokerages don't like. Compass for instance, want to be able to have private exclusives, listings that can only be found via Compass. So we'll talk about some of the dynamics there as well as how Sue sees the future of residential real estate.
But before we do that and welcome Sue to the show. I do wanna thank Neutral, our sponsor for season two of the [00:03:00] Thesis Driven Leader Series. We would not be able to do this without the support of Neutral. They are a multifamily real estate developer, redefining multifamily with a focus on sustainability, resident health and wellbeing.
They have the tallest mass timber and passive house residential building in the US under development right now with state-of-the-art wellness club in Milwaukee. Awesome company. And I really wanna thank them for their support today. If you're interested in getting involved in what they're doing, you can check them out at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more. So now we're excited to welcome Sue to the show and dive into the conversation.
Sue, so excited to have you on the Thesis Driven Leader Series. Thank you so much for joining the show today.
Sue Yannaccone: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited we made this happen finally.
Brad Hargreaves: Absolutely. When we were on the stage together at Blueprint last September, there was attention being paid to this NAR settlement, which had just landed two or three weeks prior, and [00:04:00] there was a lot of consternation out there in the world. And I think now, eight months after the fact, it seems from my seat, it was much ado about nothing. Is that true? What changes have actually, materialized in the market today?
Sue Yannaccone: It's interesting to hear from your seat, that it doesn't feel like that it feels like much ado about nothing, because I promise you, there was significant work and change in how agents operate, how we run our business. Perhaps it's a testament to the industry and the resiliency that agents leaned in to how they have to do business differently today than they did pre-August '24.
Significant changes. I mean, everything from how and what a consumer must do with an agent before they can go even look at a home and tour a property, when things are negotiated during a transaction, so significant differences in the process and how we operate.
It was a significant effort to prepare all our agents for that. Agents are resilient. They lean in and learn a new way to do things, and [00:05:00] we're seeing that in their conversations with consumers, and all of this taking place against the backdrop of a volatile and challenged housing market.
It's an opportunity for agents and we're finding them really lean into expressing their value to consumers in a different way, and I think that's a good thing, right? The change in the behaviors has required that really upfront conversation about what value the agent is providing. That's a really good thing for the industry.
Brad Hargreaves: I think it speaks to your point, to the adaptability of the industry to take these changes, internalize them, roll out some substantial procedural changes, but I think the doom and gloom we were seeing in that period of time that we're going to see a mass exodus of agents from the market, commissions are going to fall asymptotically to zero, we're gonna see AI agents everywhere, and I want to talk on a few of those threads, but largely those changes haven't materialized.
Sue Yannaccone: Yeah we haven't seen that materialization as you're characterizing it there. And I [00:06:00] think that part of it is we're still really new into this change. It's been less than a year that these changes have been implemented, rolled out, fully adopted. It's a transactional business, so these are conversations that happen one at a time with consumers and we report our numbers publicly. We're one of the only in the industry that do.
You can look back on our earnings call from the beginning of the year to dig into what our results have been. I think there's been some shift in the business and I think time's gonna continue to tell as we evolve through it and as those one-on-one conversations occur with consumers, how that impacts the overall economics of the transaction.
Brad Hargreaves: One prediction made last September was that the number of agents, 1.6 million realtors out there today is going to go down. Part of that is macro. Part of that might be out of this settlement and some of the fallout of that. Do you still believe that's the case that number of agents is going to come down over time?
Sue Yannaccone: I [00:07:00] do think we're gonna see a drop in overall agent count. 1.6 million's a big number and last year four something million transactions, that number doesn't really work.
Agents leaving the business is not a bad thing. I believe the business is going to see and continue to see the strong agents doing more business. The hobbyists, perhaps, exiting the business and that overall, that's not a bad thing.
That's not a bad thing for the consumer. It's not a bad thing for brokerages. I think, it elevates the craft, if you will, that these agents and the value that they're providing. Consumers are gonna be demanding more, and that's okay, and I believe that we will continue to see the stronger agents do more business and others exit.
Brad Hargreaves: There's certainly a long tale of agents, a lot of people who do a little bit of interior design, a little bit of real estate brokerage, a little bit of this and that. And we actually, funny enough, out of our education business, launched [00:08:00] a course to try to teach some of them real estate development. Maybe they can build some duplexes in addition to the brokerage. We'll see how that how that goes.
One other prediction I did want to talk about is the role of technology in the market. There was a big part of the debate last year around are we going to see AI agents? Customers saying, " I don't need a human to do this. I'm just going to go talk to an AI, and it's going to be my buy-side broker." Are you seeing that at all in the market? Have any of these AI agents emerged and gotten on your radar?
Sue Yannaccone: Look, one thing, and we talked about it, and it's something I feel very passionately about is remembering the fact that a real estate transaction is inherently a personal experience.
There is a significant amount of human interaction that must occur from a trust-building perspective, from the emotional side of this transaction. While I believe that technology will continue to be a significant enabler [00:09:00] of agents, helping streamline the paperwork and making the back office process easier, even the search process easier.
It's important to remember like on average a person buys and sells a home every 10 years. It's the largest economic investment most people will ever make. So while I am all for and have continued to see the evolution of an innovation of technology in our sphere, I think it would be kind of naive to say that the vast majority of people, of buyers and sellers out there are going to abdicate a huge portion of that consultative approach of that advising that an agent does to a bot right now.
That is not to say that I don't believe there's a significant place in our industry for technology. I just think you're that, and belly to belly kind of conversation that occurs between an agent and [00:10:00] their consumer, it's gonna be hard to replace with a bot and with any AI, in my opinion.
Brad Hargreaves: The flip side of that is, how technology is impacting the work of the agent?
This sort of goes part and parcel with the last question of 1.6 million realtors selling four-ish million homes in a year. I know they're not all full-time, but it seems an inefficient allocation of human capital on a macro standpoint. Are we going to see those top agents using more technology to get more efficient?
And if so, where? Where is that technology going to play?
Sue Yannaccone: Absolutely. We are seeing that today, and I believe we will continue to see that leveraging of technology to create more efficiencies in their day-to-day workflow. We see that in marketing, we are using AI in creating listing presentations.
In the world of photos, if you will. We at Anywhere, within our listing concierge product, won top [00:11:00] uses of AI for a brokerage business last year because we are integrating that into our tools, certainly in document workflow, in lead nurturing so that agents and their teams are focused on higher-quality leads because they've either been nurtured by AI in some way. So we see that a lot, and I see that continuing, that trend continuing because there's only so many hours in a day and when you can leverage technology to drive more throughput, the best are gonna lean into that.
Whether it's email responding, whether it's chatbots on listings, whether it's nurturing leads. Marketing is a huge space where we see AI being leveraged today. That's gonna continue to evolve.
Brad Hargreaves: I'm curious around the technology choices. There are some areas where it's really obvious and you'll want to, as Anywhere, invest in building or choosing the best practice technology.
But you know, [00:12:00] obviously, your agents out there are franchise holders. How much control do you exert over them? How much flip side guidance do you give them on how do you navigate this like brave new world of AI and everything going on out in the world?
Sue Yannaccone: One thing I do is learn a lot from our agents as to how they're thinking about using it.
Right? Because in many ways, these entrepreneurs are already thinking ahead of or implementing in their own business. Maybe haven't crossed my radar or my team's radar yet, right? They're the true practitioners of the business, so learning from them is important.
Obviously our franchisees are independently owned and operated, and our agents are independent contractors, so "guide" is probably the right word for that. We do try and provide significant education for folks. We definitely look at emerging trends and technology, especially in AI, and drive awareness on some of the risks associated with some of that as well.
Right? [00:13:00] Like if you're using AI to write a listing description, that's great. That probably saved you, maybe 20 minutes a listing or something. But if you're not verifying the data, that's on you. We try and balance that education and that awareness, but try and drive them to understand how it can help with a franchisee, how they can potentially remove cost from their P&L by implementing more automated technology solutions to do certain things, especially deal processing and that type of stuff.
But we try and be a source of awareness, and just at least get them to think about, if I'm going to use this, here are my watch outs. Obviously, nobody is out there saying, " Please tell me a way to sign more paperwork in a real estate transaction." Like we, got the market covered.
But they are saying, " how do I make this more efficient and streamlined with technology? What are my watch-outs? What do we need to be careful for?" It's that balanced approach that we try and provide when giving guidance and sharing what we're doing internally with our affiliates and agents, and then learning from them as always.
Brad Hargreaves: Totally. [00:14:00] I'm sure there's a lot of guardrails whenever you talk about the interaction with the buyer on AI. If a buyer comes to an agent says, "Hey, I'd really like to buy in a white neighborhood." Like an agent knows how to handle that question, but of course, like a robot needs to be trained.
Sue Yannaccone: Yeah. There are real risks that you point out on Fair Housing concerns. We have a responsibility, we believe at Anywhere, fully, in transparency options for all buyers and sellers to access information and you have to be really careful with this stuff.
It is that balance of leaning in to understand it, leverage it, but not being just blind faith in the technology. Because the rules haven't changed, the way you have to behave and the fiduciary you have and the ethical responsibility, and we're still learning that and that's an education process that we take very seriously.
Brad Hargreaves: So maybe just like a tactical operational question. How do you [00:15:00] staff that and build that team within an organization, like Anywhere where you've got so many franchisees out there across different brands, how do you build that? Do you go hire technologists, advisors, people who understand this world?
Sue Yannaccone: We have our technology and product team that is enterprise-wide, that looks at both how we're doing that internally and how we're leveraging that as an internal organization. They look at stuff from the product side, what's coming up in the industry, what do we wanna be thinking about?
We have our own teams internally that are our innovation teams that are thinking about new and different ways, and you balance that with your legal teams and your PR and comms teams to bring it all together.
Your training teams, how are we then disseminating this information? How are we reviewing products? What's the balance between risk tolerance and innovation? So we staff for that and then have an overarching process of how we [00:16:00] communicate this all out to our networks, and to our agents, and make it accessible to them.
Brad Hargreaves: So, when you go out and look at the world of technology right now, are there particular concepts or areas you're particularly interested in, or better yet, tools you wish existed but don't?
Sue Yannaccone: Yeah, I'm always looking at stuff and more than anything, it comes to me. I get a lot of information pushed my way on stuff and I have the team look in a lot of that. As I mentioned, I truly don't wanna be redundant, but it really is the most critical area for me is that efficiency gain, whether it be in the front end of the transaction for the agent taking work off their plate, that allows them to be spending more time in the highest and best use of them, which is with their client, out showing homes and negotiating the transactions. I think that's really important. The other thing I would really like to see perfected, right?
Because you mentioned the size and scale of just, take Anywhere. I have six brands. They're global. There's over 350,000 agents. Many of them use [00:17:00] a lot of different tools. There's not really a one-stop, like everybody's gonna use this thing, right?
There is the idea of across the transaction, a tool that is perfected to automatically integrate all these different products and these integration points so that the transaction is super smooth for the consumer. Very difficult. It's a very fragmented user experience right now.
Anything that I see that can more seamlessly integrate the experience from the dreaming to closing phase, if you will, for the consumer and the agent along that journey is gonna be very impactful.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that and it's remarkable. I spend a lot of time in multifamily, as our listeners know, and it's remarkable how analogous the questions and the needs for technology are across the multifamily and residential sectors. You talk to the biggest owners in multifamily, and they're like, how do I tie all these disparate pieces together where there's [00:18:00] different data sets, different technology stacks, they don't all neatly tie together, and that's a negative end user experience.
Sue Yannaccone: It is. You think about it, and you're familiar with this, of course, as I'm sure many in the audience are. We have 500 MLSs in this country. Even just from the jump, the consumer experience is different wherever they are and whatever they're utilizing.
It is this fragmented process across the ecosystem that can be a lot. And that's why, that is why I come back to saying, that human piece, because navigating that complexity from you're dreaming and you're looking to your searching and you're actively out there to now you've got your title, your mortgage, your insurance, the entire process.
And we happen to have that full-service ecosystem here in our brokerage with a fully integrated title business and mortgage. We are focusing on that integrated technology for the consumer and the agent. Because when you go elsewhere, you go over here, then you go over here, you have all these [00:19:00] pieces.
I'll tell you a funny story. I was buying a house myself a couple years ago, and we were sitting in the car, and it was my husband and myself, and we were each on a phone with somebody. He's on with an attorney, I'm on with the realtor. We're at all these different conversations, and he looked at me and said, "Can you not fix this process?"
And I said I'm trying. He goes, no. Like, really you? Yeah. I feel like that's your job. But it's true. We all go through it. And so I think that's where the focus on technology and our industry should be.
Brad Hargreaves: So you mentioned more than 500 MLSs. I actually, for random reasons, had to look this number up the other day. It's 535 in the United States. Obviously they are under some degree of threat right now, with Clear Cooperation perhaps falling by the wayside. The NAR recently released a set of tweaks, I guess you could call them to Clear Cooperation, basically giving agents a little more leeway in private listings for longer periods of time.
Zillow fired back. I was a little surprised the aggressiveness of Zillow's [00:20:00] response, saying that if a listing has been private for a certain period of time, it can never be listed on Zillow. I'm paraphrasing there, hopefully more or less accurately. Where do you think it goes from here? Is Clear Cooperation dead, or is Zillow's volley gonna be able to save it?
Sue Yannaccone: We've been on record pretty clearly. I have been, I wrote an OpEd on it. Anywhere as a company has been pretty clear that Clear Cooperation had room and continues to have room for, not a full repeal, but reform.
Homeowners should have options as it comes to how they market and sell their home. There's always the case for privacy. Everybody likes to tout the multimillion dollar homes and security and privacy, and that's there of course, but there's also reasons why another seller may not want everybody knowing that their house is on the market, and we can talk about those, but I think we can figure most of them out to include multiple different reasons. We were really pushing for reform, not repeal, with some sort of industry [00:21:00] conversation about where we ended up.
National Association of Realtors issued a decision that created this delayed marketing thing. It did leave a lot of questions still, and it left a lot of implementation of it out to the 535 MLSs, which adds continued complexity into the process.
Look, I don't know what's gonna happen with Zillow's response. It's early days in the change that even NAR has come out with. I think people are figuring out what that means and there are a lot of questions, but the key in all of this is, what is the consumer going to do? What does the consumer want?
Because ultimately, that should be driving where we as an industry go. There are lots of reasons why people are on both sides of these debates and if you spend a couple minutes, you can figure it out, but ultimately, that consumer is gonna drive where the industry goes, I believe. And I think that means there's an education process. I think [00:22:00] there's some continuing to look and see, we as an enterprise, are ensuring that our networks, whether it be our own agents with our own business, whether it be franchisees across our multiple brands, won't ever be disadvantaged, no matter which way the world goes.
For me, it always comes back to what is the best thing for the consumer? What is the right way to market that consumer's home and what are the options available for them? Because there is not one-size-fits-all. Every single home is different. Every seller is different. Every buyer is different. And I think that leaves a lot of opportunity for us to think about solutions that solve the needs for those consumers. I don't think we're done. I think this is gonna continue to be pretty fraught. There's gonna be some noise and we're gonna continue to watch what happens here for sure.
Brad Hargreaves: Yeah, I think one of the most fascinating issues in real estate right now, because I think that there's a lot of different layers to it. This was one of the things that brought me in and got me writing about [00:23:00] the brokerage world in residential from commercial, because it's interesting.
This idea that there's an antitrust case out there, or at least there was, against Clear Cooperation, because there needs to be competition amongst MLS systems... never been something that I had considered before until some folks started an alternative MLS. Obviously, ran up against the NAR-endorsed local MLS systems, of which there are 535. It's fascinating, and I agree with you.
This is going to come down to hopefully what is best for the consumer, and how does the seller and the buyer, how do they want their home marketed?
Sue Yannaccone: Yep. Buyers should have access to all the homes that are on a market that they are able to purchase. Limiting that is not ideal and sellers should have the right to figure out how to market their home, and somewhere in there is where this is gonna go, driven by the consumers. Ultimately, it's in my position where it should [00:24:00] go.
Brad Hargreaves: I truly hope you're right there, that it's driven by what is best for the consumer, and not what is best for firms that want to create little walled gardens of listings.
I get why the walled people want little walled gardens of listings. I just cannot imagine that is best when you're talking about consumers. You're not talking about commercial buyers, you're not talking about real estate investors. You're talking about people trying to buy their house.
Sue Yannaccone: And look before Clear Cooperation, this requirement that a home be marketed on the MLS, within 24 hours of any public marketing, has only been in our ecosystem for five years or more. There's always been this marketplace where homes are bought and sold, and we have a phenomenal marketplace here in the U.S. Not everywhere in the world, transacts residential transactions the way we do. And I think it is that. It's what is the right thing for that home and for that seller, and that choice and that transparency is what I am all for.
Brad Hargreaves: Love it. One last question before we wrap up today.
If we're doing this podcast and having this [00:25:00] conversation in three years, what do you think is the single biggest technology trend we are going to be talking about in the residential world?
Sue Yannaccone: Wow. Three years out feels like...
Brad Hargreaves: three years out. We like to stretch it here.
Sue Yannaccone: With the way our industry has been going, Brad, I can't even begin to think where we'll be in three years, right? Everything we've been through in the last 18 months or so here.
I think it is the trends that are favoring simplicity in the transaction. So whether it's gen AI-driven products integrated technology, it will be those things that drive simplicity into the transaction.
And I think about how we do a lot of other things in our life and we open this up talking about the resiliency of agents and how we've adapted to change. I think that the balance of the transaction needs to become simplified and really more integrated, as I've mentioned. We've adopted that in so many other facets of our life technology [00:26:00] to make our lives easier, to simplify everything we're doing.
I believe that's gonna be what we're seeing and that to me will lead to a little bit of a flywheel with us able to close more transactions, to do more business, the stronger agents getting stronger and growth in the ecosystem.
And so that's where I think we're gonna be in three years.
Brad Hargreaves: I love it. Sue, thank you so, so much for joining. We're unfortunately out of time for today, but I really appreciate you joining the Leader series and taking part in this conversation.
Sue Yannaccone: Thank you very much for having me as always, a pleasure to spend time with you.
Brad Hargreaves: Thanks for tuning in today. Next week we're gonna be joined by Jodie McLean, the CEO of EDENS, one of the largest retail owners and developers in the U.S. They own more than a hundred open air retail shopping centers, and really have their fingers on the pulse of what's happening with consumer behavior preferences and the retail industry.
We don't spend as much time on retail as I would like here at Thesis Driven, so I'm so, so excited to have Jodie on the show next week to talk about retail macro trends and [00:27:00] understand how she and EDENS are playing into those trends.
Thank you all so much and see you next week.
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