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After navigating a year of tumultuous change, real estate agents need a plan for navigating what is shaping up to be a challenging market, Anywhere Brands President and CEO Sue Yannaccone said Thursday onstage at Inman Connect New York.
But while brokers and agents need to continue adapting to changes like AI, there’s nothing fundamentally broken about the residential real estate brokerage or franchising business models, Yannaccone told Inman founder Brad Inman.
After kicking off the discussion by thanking Yannaccone for her leadership in speaking out for reform at the National Association of Realtors in the wake of a sexual harrasment scandal, Inman got down to business.
He set the stage by noting that Anywhere — whose brands include Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty — currently has a market capitalization that’s roughly 50 times smaller than Zillow’s.
“When I look at that, I wonder if there is a need for the traditional industry players to reinvent themselves,” Inman said. “Not on culture, not on education and training, but a more fundamental pivot — so you don’t become one of the Kodaks that got disintermediated by the cell phone.”
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Yannaccone noted that Anywhere and Zillow are in different lines of business — macroeconomics and interest rates have a big impact on brokerages — and suggested that enterprise value is a better metric to look at than market cap.
“It’s very easy to open up your phone, look at a stock ticker and say, ‘Oh, my God, that company’s worth X, Y or Z,’ right?” Yannaccone said.
(Zillow’s market cap — the total value of the company’s outstanding shares — was about $18.8 billion Thursday, while Anywhere Real Estate Inc.’s was $427 million. But Anywhere’s enterprise value, which includes adjustments for net debt, cash and cash equivalents, was $3.4 billion, while Zillow’s enterprise value was $17.6 billion.)

Sue Yannaccone
“When you look at the fundamentals of a company like Anywhere, we are profitable, we generate free cash flow, we do over one million home sale transactions a year, and we run six of the 15 largest brands in the franchise space today,” Yannaccone said. “In Q3 alone, I think we did over 250 home sales worth over $10 million each. So, you know, we are focused on the sound fundamentals of the business, which are allowing me to continue to invest in our agents, in our franchisees, and then helping them to serve the consumer more.”
As to whether the industry needs to make a fundamental pivot to survive, Yannaccone maintained that Anywhere has been evolving — and that the industry has been following it.
“We’ve been around for decades, and our industry has seen a lot of change,” she said. Anywhere and its predecessors “have pivoted consistently in order to deliver on those sound fundamentals and continue to deliver for our brands, for our agents, for our consumers. I think what I’m seeing today is actually more companies out there pivoting toward what we have.”
Trimming the owned brokerage footprint
Inman agreed that the franchise business is “a pretty good model” but wondered whether Anywhere would like to divest itself of the real estate brokerages it owns.
According to the company’s most recent quarterly report, franchisors (independently owned brokerages affiliated with Anywhere Brands) closed about 529,000 transaction sides in the first nine months of 2024, while brokerages owned by Anywhere closed 190,000 sides. During that period, the franchise business generated $399 million in operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), while Anywhere’s owned brokerages racked up a $66 million loss, as measured by operating EBITDA.
Yannaccone said that Anywhere’s owned brokerage business — and its joint ventures in mortgage and title insurance, Guaranteed Rate Affinity and Title Resources Group — give it valuable insights into the needs and challenges its franchise affiliates face.
“When you’re running a franchise business and you also are in that business, it gives you an extremely strong understanding of what your customer on the franchise side is going through every single day,” Yannaccone said. “I ran 500 offices for Coldwell Banker Realty. That gives me a very different perspective when talking to my affiliate on the street.”
Pressed by Inman, Yannaccone confirmed that Anywhere is closing some of its owned brokerage offices.
Anywhere Advisors’ owned brokerage group operated approximately 600 brokerage offices serving 54,400 agents as of Sept. 30, 2024, down from 630 offices serving 57,600 agents at the same point in 2023.
“Yes, we are reducing and reevaluating our footprints,” Yannaccone said of Anywhere’s company-owned brokerages. “But for me… this is pivoting. This is being agile. This is being innovative. The market has changed. How many people have offices today, or how many in the room go into an office every single day?”
“Our owned brokerage businesses, whether it’s Coldwell Banker Realty, Sotheby’s International Realty or Corcoran, are always going to have offices,” Yannaccone continued “That is part of who we are. It’s part of our DNA. Do we need as many of them? No. What’s important to me and to our company is that we continue to serve and deliver on our promise to our agents to meet them where they are when they need that support.”
Investing in AI
Noting that companies like Zillow, Realtor.com and Homes.com are all investing heavily in AI, Inman asked whether Anywhere can keep pace.

Brad Inman
“One thing that happened in the mid-90s, when the internet came around, is the traditional firms didn’t invest in the internet, and that’s why they lost their position,” Inman said. “Are you capitalized to invest in [AI]? It’s going to cost a ton of money.”
Anywhere has been investing, and continues to invest, in AI, Yannaccone said, pointing to Coldwell Banker’s Listing Concierge program as an example. A Coldwell Banker exclusive, Listing Concierge used generative AI to produce marketing plans for 12,000 listings during the third quarter.
On a Q3 earnings call with investors, Anywhere Real Estate CEO Ryan Schneider said “nearly every area of our operations can benefit from generative AI” as the company continues to pursue a seamless, digitized transaction experience with bundled title, mortgage and insurance services.
“We’ve been leveraging AI and generative AI in our business, as it relates to tools that help us leverage data to help our affiliates grow their business and look at things differently,” Yannaccone told Inman.
“I can look at what can help make an agent successful, based on significant years of data of performance within our brand. I can understand what kind of agent may likely outperform in the future, and how to do that. What are affiliates using and not using? How do we feed that into our marketing tools? All of that, as well as making really sound internal business decisions.”
Reform, don’t repeal Clear Cooperation
Asked about Anywhere’s stance on the Clear Cooperation Policy debate, Yannaccone restated a position she staked out in an October Inman op-ed — that reform, not repeal, is the wisest path.
Anywhere documents obtained by Inman in August suggested the company favors eliminating “restrictions on co-mingling of MLS and non-MLS listings, even as an optional rule” and scaling back the Clear Cooperation Rule “so that sellers, agents, and alternative providers have a broader range of marketing and service options.”
Plan for high mortgage rates
Asked what agents and brokers should be prepared for in 2025, Yannoccone said they should be ready to help clients cope with high mortgage rates.
“Hope is not a strategy,” she said of expectations that mortgage rates might come down this year.
“We’ve got a tough mortgage rate environment right now,” Yannaccone said. “Everybody’s been hoping it was going to change. But people still need to move — people moved when mortgage rates were 18 percent, right? So it’s about leaning in and saying, ‘How can I help my consumer understand what affordability looks like for them today? What other financing options are out there for them today? How do we think about the long game in this?'”
“We just went through a lot of change, guys; we know how to do it,” Yannaccone concluded. “Lean in and continue to learn your way through it, because there is business to be done, and those that are well versed are going to do a great job.”