The word of the year in residential real estate is “reset.” Clelia Peters, managing partner of Era Ventures, moderated and opened a panel discussion on Tuesday at Inman Connect San Diego, asking three brokerage leaders to define it: a reset from what? And to what?
None of them answered the same way.
“I don’t really see it as a reset,” said Aaron Kirman, founder and CEO of Christie’s International Real Estate SoCal. “Everyone likes to say it’s a new reset, it’s a new day. I think it’s the new normal.”
Aaron Kirman | Christie’s International Real Estate
That distinction — reset versus new normal — became the driving force of a conversation that ranged from brokerage consolidation to team economics to how much credit artificial intelligence actually deserves for agent productivity.
The panelists agreed on the direction of the industry, but they disagreed sharply on what’s driving it and who benefits.
Scale is ‘massively important’
Mike Miedler, CEO and President of Century 21 Real Estate, put a number on the trend that none of the other panelists challenged: the top 1,000 companies in the U.S. — out of roughly 70,000 total — controlled about 48 percent of market share in 2017. By 2024, that figure had climbed to roughly 62 percent.
Mike Miedler | Century 21
Chris Czarnecki, CEO and President of Keller Williams, said scale is “massively important” and that it comes with significant capital investments.
“If you’re in the middle of the spectrum — something larger than a very small team — it’s tough, because whether you have agents new to the business or mid-career agents or top agents, those folks have different needs, and delivering on those needs has a cost,” Czarnecki said. “Scale is the way you can accommodate those folks meaningfully and really deliver the services.”
Czarnecki said he thinks there’s more consolidation to come.
“We’re seeing a lot of regional consolidation with our franchisees, and we’re talking to mid-sized brokerages thinking about an exit, especially after the past four years or so,” he added.
Kirman believes “bigger is not always better.” He said consolidation is obviously very important across industries and will remain so. But as time goes on, Kirman said, those who use AI and help their agents understand that specialization is also very important will be the winners.
“If you look at the industry as a whole, 95 percent of the business is done by 10 percent of the agents today,” Kirman said. “If I were a betting man, I’d say in 10 years, 95 percent of the business will be done by 5 percent of the agents.”
As an industry, Miedler said there’s a lot of discussion around lead-based marketing, private listings and a kind of “us vs. them” mantra right now.
“You hear it framed as conflict: conflict between brokerage philosophies, conflict between portals and MLSs, conflict between data and transparency,” Miedler said.
Miedler added: “If we get too caught up in the drama of consolidation — who has what, should it be public, should it be private — we’re forgetting about our consumers.”
“At the end of the day, we, as an industry, need to be very cognizant of what’s right for the consumer and how we can help our agents become better advisors to the people who need them,” Miedler said. “Consolidation and scale don’t automatically make our agents better for our consumers.”
Credit: AJ Canaria Creative Services
The team economics problem
One of the panel’s most candid moments came when the conversation turned to teams. According to the panelists, it is one of the defining structural shifts in brokerage economics.
Czarnecki argued that individual agents are increasingly outmatched by teams simply in terms of marketing capacity. Social platforms, paid media, AI tooling and daily client contact now require more bandwidth than most solo agents can sustain.
“I’d almost argue the individual agent is going to have a hard time competing against the team,” Czarnecki said.
Chris Czarnecki | Keller Williams
But Kirman offered a more complicated view from the brokerage side of the ledger. Team margins, he said, run “substantially less” than what a brokerage nets from an individual agent, even as team production scales into the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sides.
It’s a tension the panel didn’t fully resolve. Teams are producing at a level brokerages can’t ignore, while compressing the profitability brokerages depend on to fund the technology and support those same teams expect.
“We see people who’ve been in the business for four years with amazing teams doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales — and it’s something to be proud of,” Kirman said. “But we need to be cognizant of how that affects brokers in different ways, for better or worse.”
‘AI only gets you so far’
Kirman also pushed back on the idea that AI is what’s making agents more productive right now.
“AI only gets you so far. We are storytellers, we are historians. AI gives information, but it doesn’t give more than that,” he said. “Great agents in the marketplace bring something AI has never had, and that’s where we add our value.”
Kirman added that information is so free-flowing today that buyers and sellers know almost as much as agents do. “But the nuance of the neighborhood, the nuance of the transaction, the context — that’s what’s going to matter more,” he said.
That skepticism came with a caveat. Every panelist described deploying AI somewhere in their own operation — for transaction paperwork, for lead generation and, in one case, to source a listing lead a pair of 24-year-old agents didn’t know they had.
Kirman said the young agents came to him with a $200 million listing. He asked how they landed it, and it turned out one of their AI tools had flagged it. They brought in their business manager, and it came together.
“Those two agents didn’t even know that lead existed at first. That’s the beauty of today’s world. Through all these systems and new technologies, anybody can reach anybody,” Kirman said. “It’s a sky-high-level thing, and that’s what I’m most excited about — unlimited potential, top to bottom.”
The takeaway the panel agreed on
Strip away the disagreement over causes, and the panel’s consensus landed somewhere plainer than “reset” or “AI revolution.”
Scale is consolidating at the brokerage level, teams are consolidating production at the agent level, and the tools available to both have multiplied faster than most operations have figured out how to use them.
None of the panelists argued that’s a bad thing for a well-positioned agent. All three argued it’s an increasingly bad time to be positioned nowhere in particular.
“There’s a lot of chaos right now, but you have to go back to basics: being with people, talking to people, collaborating, sharing best practices, pushing yourself,” Czarnecki said. “No matter what happens with AI and consolidation, it’s about how you handle those moments. That’s never going to change.”
