Prior to being named HomeServices’ president and CEO on Tuesday, Kelly had served as HomeServices’ executive vice president since September 2022.
HousingWire caught up with Kelly this week to discuss his appointment and what his plans are as he takes the helm at one of the nation’s largest real estate firms.
Taking over for Blefari
Kelly expressed his gratitude to Gino Blefari for his leadership at HomeServices over the past five years. Blefari is transitioning into the position of chairman emeritus and will serve the company in an advisory role.
“To Gino’s credit, he fully understood the need to have that steady leadership and presence, as we as an industry worked through the challenges over the last couple of years,” Kelly said. “And as we have come out on the other side of some of that, he felt that it would be an appropriate time to announce the change.”
While the chaos surrounding the commission lawsuits — which dominated much of the industry discourse over the past 18 months — seems to have died down, Kelly knows that he’s taking the helm at HomeServices at a turbulent and inharmonious time for the industry.
“There is a lot happening right now in the industry and sides are forming on issues, but we need to remember that real estate is inherently local,” Kelly said.
“It used to be all about the consumer and their specific house in their neighborhood — and it still is — but now it feels like all the conversations we are having about the litigation, the settlement, the business practice changes and now Clear Cooperation (CCP), those are all national conversations, and the changes and developments are happening at a speed we haven’t seen before.”
Kelly feels that these high-level conversations and the speed at which things are occurring are making it challenging for MLSs and brokerages to keep up while ensuring they’re making decisions that best serve their local market.
With this in mind, Kelly said he is focused on working with other company leaders and their brokers to simplify things.
“It is about doing less, but doing less better,” Kelly said.
HomeServices is made up of a collection of independent brokerages, but at the same time it operates at a national scale, creating a delicate balance for Kelly to manage.
“What we want to do is navigate retaining that local branding and entrepreneurial spirit that we have across HomeServices but better connect the backbone of who we are,” he said.
According to Kelly, this means a singular, streamlined set of technology, tools and systems used for operations. It also calls for better connections between agents and HomeServices’ partners — including those in mortgage, title and insurance.
Choosing a direction
In addition to all of the debates occurring in the industry, Kelly is also taking over at a time when the industry is seeing a high level of consolidation.
Recent rumors circulated that Compass was in advanced talks with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices about a possible acquisition. Blefari denied any talks had occurred.
“There are these two paths beginning to form: You either create a national footprint that you can support, or you go boutique, and that midsized firm has really kind of been gobbled up. It really feels like you have to go one way or another,” Kelly said.
“You either have to grow and create scale so you can operate cost efficiently or you have to compress and come down to more of a hyperlocal focus so you have the same cost efficiency. Being stuck in the middle is where a lot of the danger is right now.”
For Kelly, this is why it’s so important to ensure that local branding and independence within the company is preserved, as it provides a place for an entrepreneur to grow their business to the size they want.
“We want to make sure that we are giving our folks a pathway to grow — greasing the wheels for them through the systems and support so they are not out there on an island all by themselves trying to do things. And that goes for our franchise owners and our individual agents,” Kelly said.
As Kelly and HomeServices look to accomplish this, he said it’s important to keep in mind how agents serve consumers. Consequently, how the brokerage serves its agents varies from market to market.
“We try to really to be adaptive to what works in a specific market, whether that is for an agent, a team or one of our franchise owners,” Kelly said.
Blocking out the noise
With so much industry discourse focused on CCP and uniform marketing strategies at other brokerages, Kelly feels the uniqueness of local markets is essential to keep in mind.
“We have several markets that are highly localized, where office exclusives are very common, and that’s because of the particular type of seller with a particular type of property that dominates those markets,” Kelly said.
“But in the vast majority of other markets, most of what we are being asked to help by consumers will absolutely benefit from having the most eyes as possible,” Kelly said. “So for us, that is why it doesn’t make sense to have a uniform system developed around how to market a property.”
Instead, Kelly said HomeServices relies on its agents, who have local knowledge and experience, to guide consumers in making the right decision for an individual property.
Given all of the noise around this and other issues, Kelly said he wants to make sure that he and the firm’s other leaders, franchise owners and agents stay focused on what they can control.
“If it is outside of our control, then let’s put it to the side,” Kelly said. “We can’t control tariffs or mortgage rates, but we can control the number of people we are reaching out to, and the habits and the actions we take every single day.
“I really think it is about narrowing down the scope of things that we put our energies into, so we don’t fall into that whirlwind where we are trying to chase our tail and fix every problem — even the ones that can’t be fixed right now.”