Turn up the volume on your real estate success at Inman On Tour: Nashville! Connect with industry trailblazers and top-tier speakers to gain insights, cutting-edge strategies, and invaluable connections. Elevate your business and achieve your boldest goals — all with Music City magic. Register now.
The experts said 2025 would be big for mergers and acquisitions — and last week, they were right.
That’s because on March 3, Keller Williams revealed it would take on a major investment from private equity firm Stone Point Capital. The companies have declined to say how big the investment is, or how much of Keller Williams Stone Point now owns. But even without those details, the story is the biggest real estate M&A news in recent memory.
But a big question now lingers: What happens next?
Private equity firms don’t make investments on a whim, which means Stone Point must have a plan in mind. Stone Point itself has not responded to Inman’s requests for comment, both before and after news of the deal broke.
To understand what might be possible, Inman reached out to industry experts to learn what strategy might be deployed. They pointed to a handful of other acquisitions as examples of assets Stone Point is mostly still holding. And ultimately, they said, the goal may be to build something bigger — or even eventually take Keller Williams public.
Whatever happens, though, the objective is surely to make money from Keller Williams.
Case studies in buying and holding
A number of industry insiders pointed out that Stone Point’s investments in real estate companies have followed a similar pattern — observations that suggest the past could be a preview of what’s to come for Keller Williams.
In October 2020, for example, Stone Point made what it called a “strategic investment” in Lone Wolf, a real estate technology company that provides transaction management and back office support, among other things. At the time, Stone Point said the deal would contribute to Lone Wolf’s growth and innovation. Then, two months later, Lone Wolf acquired W+R Studios, a company offering leading tech tools for real estate agents.
Greg Robertson
Greg Robertson, co-founder of W+R Studios, described Stone Point as a firm that’s strategic and intentional about its investments in real estate companies.
“Stone Point has been, through their operator, smart on the acquisitions they’ve been making,” Robertson told Inman.
And significantly, Stone Point still owns Lone Wolf to this day.
Another case study in Stone Point’s modus operandi began in 2021, when the firm partnered with Insight Partners to acquire CoreLogic — which was a publicly traded company at the time — for $5.9 billion. Four years later, Stone Point retains its stake in CoreLogic.
Stone Point also invested in the commercial real estate platform Ten-X in 2008. It then took 12 years before, in 2020, Stone Point sold Ten-X to CoStar.
A platform play or an IPO?
Industry insiders who spoke with Inman had theories about what might come next. Clelia Warburg Peters, a managing partner at Era Ventures, speculated that Stone Point might have been interested in Keller Williams’ platform and how it might connect with products from CoreLogic or Lone Wolf.
In other words, Stone Point could hope to assemble some sort of bigger tech-centric real estate company, with the various firms it now owns (or, partially owns) serving as building blocks.
Clelia Warburg Peters
“You could imagine a scenario where this was a platform play for them, and they’re trying to roll something up in some way,” she said. “It could also be that they intend to manage the assets totally independently. And they just felt like their particular expertise in the residential market allowed them to underwrite this investment better than other people could.”
Alternatively, Warburg Peters was skeptical that Stone Point would follow the same playbook another private equity company, Apollo Global Management, took with Anywhere. In that case, Apollo bought Anywhere in 2007, took the franchisor public in 2012, then sold its remaining shares in 2013. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apollo’s strategy with Realogy involved “saddling it with debt near the peak of the housing market.”
Stone Point, however, tends not to do that, Warburg Peters said.
“Private equity owners are famous for using the cash on balance sheets of the companies that they have, and then taking on debt that they use to make the company grow faster,” she explained. “But Stone Point is less aggressive about that than some other players in the market.”
Another theory is that the Stone Point-Keller Williams deal is a means of finally bringing the franchisor to the stock market.
Victor Lund
“Keller Williams was very transparent about their desire to go public and they haven’t been able to click with a banker to make it happen,” said Victor Lund, managing partner at WAV Group. “And they finally made it click.”
For years, Keller Williams has been believed to be eyeing a chance to hold an initial public offering, a move that would inject the franchisor with hundreds of millions in cash to fuel its next steps and turbo charge its growth trajectory.
In 2021, Inman asked then-CEO Carl Liebert if Keller Williams was working on an IPO. Liebert replied that he and Gary Keller were “preparing the company for optionality and how we think about our future.” Liebert also said there was “more to come” and that there was an opportunity for the company “to go do something big in the future.” The comments only intensified speculation that an IPO was in the offing.
But soon after, amid quickly rising borrowing costs and a rapidly slowing housing market, the pandemic-era IPO spree ended, and talks of bringing Keller Williams public were apparently shelved. At least publicly.
But Lund said Stone Point’s involvement raises the possibility to change that — at least when the time is right.
“Private equity does that,” Lund said. “That’s where it really started was bankers coming in and saying, ‘Let me relieve you of some of your ownership stock. We’ll contribute really good executive leadership to your company as a result of being a partner. In this case, they have a founder who wanted to take his company public, and they specialize in that.”
Robertson also mentioned this theory, observing that all of real estate’s now-buzziest companies are public.
“I know Mr. Keller over there has tried to bring Keller Williams public — but he just missed his window,” Robertson said. “If Real is out there public, Compass is out there public, and eXp is public, why wouldn’t Keller Williams be public?”
The goal is to make money
Of course, no one outside of Keller Williams and Stone Point knows the exact strategy, and it’s possible even within those companies there’s some flexibility about what lies ahead. But the takeaway from those who spoke with Inman was clear: Private equity firms are out to make money, and ultimately it’s that objective that will drive decisions such as whether to hold an IPO.
“A private equity company may or may not ever take a business public,” Lund said. “If they’re producing great returns for investors, there’s no point. We haven’t seen Keller Williams’ financials so we don’t know what they are.”
Whatever the specifics of Stone Point’s strategy, however, Warburg Peters pointed out that private equity firms do not buy companies with the goal of holding onto them forever. The idea is to enlarge the company’s value — “growth can come in a few different ways,” Warburg Peters said — and ultimately get out ahead.
In other words, the marriage of Keller Williams and Stone Point isn’t meant to last forever.
“Usually,” she said, “the hold period is seven to 10 years. Could be a little more could be a little less.”
