For nearly two decades, 1000WATT co-founders Brian Boero and Marc Davison built a business advising real estate companies on strategy, branding, research and creative work. Now they’re taking that work inside one of the industry’s largest enterprises.
HomeServices of America announced Thursday that it has acquired 1000WATT, with Boero joining as chief marketing and strategy officer and Davison as chief creative officer. The roughly 10-person 1000WATT team is also making the move.
Ahead of the announcement, Inman spoke separately with Boero and Davison about why they decided to sell the company they spent years building, what attracted them to HomeServices and how their work will change now that they are moving from outside advisers to company insiders.
Inman: Why was this the right time to sell 1000WATT and join HomeServices?
Boero: We had worked with HomeServices for about a year as a client. Being in the industry as long as I have been, HomeServices was always sort of a giant that didn’t make a lot of noise. HomeServices operated as a holding company. It owned all these real estate brokerages, a franchise, mortgage companies, title, insurance, but kind of left them to operate independently.
What we got involved in starting last year was really activating that infrastructure and that model in a way it never had been before, tying all of those pieces together with tech and data and also telling a story around it in terms of the marketing and positioning and strategy.
That really struck us as a compelling opportunity given what’s going on in the industry. Everybody is accelerating toward that brass ring of an integrated transaction experience, whether you call it a super app or whether you’re pursuing lender-first, like Rocket is.
HomeServices, in some ways, has kind of done the hard part. They built all this infrastructure over 20 years, but just because of who they were, they never lit it up. We got pretty stoked about that opportunity and felt like it was the type of project we wanted to work on and focus all of our energies on.
Davison: I’ve determined that all these mergers are really just about something that I understand is important to business, which is building market share and generating more revenue. All of the financial reasons to do something.
But none of it is done in the spirit of what I believe, what I know Brian believes and what 1000WATT has always believed in, which is that real estate has a responsibility to deliver an important service to the marketplace.
I don’t know how mergers and acquisitions and just being bigger and bigger and bigger is leading to a better experience for people. People deserve more transparency. They deserve access to all the properties. They deserve a better real estate experience.
HomeServices was not interested in having a greater agent count. What they wanted was a better agent force and to build a better real estate agent, which would ultimately lead to building a better real estate experience for people. That’s what we’re about.
For me, it’s being part of Chris Kelly’s vision, which I’m a student of because they’ve been a client for the past 18 months.
I’ve also led the majority of projects over the years with companies that are either part of HomeServices or became part of HomeServices. I got to know the owners. I got to know the people. I got to enjoy working with them because we’re aligned around the same core belief: We’ve got to make this thing better for people.
The brand reasons were really strong. The strategic reasons were really strong. But the overall mission was to contribute to something that is not what everybody else is doing, which is growth for growth’s sake.
There have been a lot of lines drawn in the sand in this industry over the last couple of years, from pre-marketing to off-MLS listings. Do you see yourself playing a bigger role in that broader debate?
Boero: HomeServices is part of that mix and that debate and that competitive race regardless.
There are a few ways to make real estate brokerage and helping people buy and sell homes profitable and make it work right now. One is to pursue the Compass strategy, which is, “We’re going to really try to control inventory and pull as much of it into our orbit as we possibly can.” That’s one way to try to make this brokerage thing work.
The other way is what we’ve called for years and years one-stop shopping or affiliated businesses. That’s a dated and sort of unattractive way to think about it, but it’s another way to make real estate brokerage viable going forward, by providing that integrated experience.
HomeServices, unlike some of the other players out there, actually had a scaled infrastructure to make that happen. They own a top-20 mortgage lender, Prosperity Home Mortgage, with a national footprint. They own 50 title companies. They own a nationwide homeowners insurance company. The infrastructure is there in a way that it’s not, even among the giants that we talk about all the time. It just needs to be activated.
The path HomeServices is pursuing to make brokerage as a model really work seems to us probably more durable and viable, and more righteous in a way, than trying to do it some of the other ways we’re seeing right now.
What changes when you go from advising HomeServices from the outside to actually working inside the company?
Davison: All brokerages have marketing departments. When I joined the industry in 1999, I recognized there was a difference in the definition and understanding of what I knew marketing was based on my tenure on Madison Avenue and what real estate viewed marketing as.
When you look across real estate, where do you see creativity? I don’t. I see a lot of sameness. Everybody is doing the same thing.
We get hired by brokers who have the wherewithal to say, “We need to break out of that sameness. We all produce the same postcards and the same market reports. Basically every single touchpoint is the same with a different logo.” We get hired to fix that. We can deliver the fix. We can deliver the instructions.
What we don’t ever get to do is execute our work. That always ends up internal.
I can’t even count how many pieces of IKEA furniture I’ve built over the years. Invariably, every single time, there’s a bunch of screws and washers and parts that are left out. I’m sure I’m not building it the way the engineers at IKEA imagined it should be built, so whatever I end up with is not quite as good as what IKEA hoped it would be.
The impact that I know I can make from a creative standpoint is that now, when we build that foundation and framework and those first creative deliverables, we’re also going to be responsible for the execution. That’s something we never get to do.
The creators of the creative also being the executors will guarantee that the work goes out right, which will make it more effective.
What’s your mandate going into the new role?
Boero: What we have been working on a lot this year, and will continue to focus on in the near term, is telling the story of HomeServices, what we call the complete real estate experience, which is the integration of all of these things in a really seamless way for the first time at national scale. That is really our mandate out of the gate.
We were involved with HomeServices in branding that program. We called it OnePoint. We took what was sort of unbranded and therefore invisible, named it, branded it and told a story around it that lit up both the consumer benefits and the agent benefits. That’s going to continue to be a big part of our effort going forward.
What happens to 1000WATT itself now — the team, the research, the events and the things you’ve built around the brand?
Davison: The whole firm is moving over. That was the mandate from Day One. You don’t get Marc and Brian. You get 1000WATT. There are about 10 of us. HomeServices owns 1000WATT, but we are still going to be 1000WATT, and they are allowing us to operate. That was kind of the criteria early on.
If you just get Marc and Brian, you can’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to get the 1000WATT output you’ve seen all these years, because that’s the culmination of the team effort. Anybody who likes music would know immediately that if Bono made his own solo record, it would not sound like U2. They not only get 1000WATT, but they retain our process. They retain the way we work.
Boero: Our membership platform, which includes proprietary research on consumer behavior and agent behavior, is now going to be an exclusive benefit to agents, brokers and staff within the HomeServices family.
That’s about 60,000 agents, 46 brokerage companies and 220 franchised offices. That is now going to be exclusively available to those folks, which is exciting for us because it magnifies the scale of our research and marketing platform many, many times.
As far as our events, we’re not going to do standalone events anymore.
We are going to continue to write publicly because this industry, in our view, is too important not to have an opinion on. The Dose, which goes out every Tuesday, we’re retiring. But I write Friday Flash, and I’m going to continue to do that. Marc writes periodically. Jessica [Swesey, 1000WATT strategist and senior copywriter,] writes periodically. We have a point of view, and we’re going to continue to share it even though we’re part of HomeServices of America.
Philosophically, where we sit, there’s very little distance between us and Chris Kelly and how he thinks about the industry.
Both of you have talked about improving the experience for agents. What does a brokerage need to provide agents today that it may not have needed to provide 20 or 30 years ago?
Davison: What is the job of a broker in today’s world? It’s very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Even being a lead-generation device for agents is really no longer a value prop.
Just as a random example, if I were selling cars, I’d want to align myself with a dealership that has maybe the best brand appeal in the marketplace. I couldn’t care less whether it’s the largest car dealership in the world. But if I’m going to go to work every day, tell my friends at a party or work with customers who find out that I’m with a brand they like and admire, that would probably do well for my business and my career.
For an agent, I think being part of a local brokerage that has respectability in the marketplace, that the marketplace is aware of, would highly benefit the agent.
Locally where I live, Long Realty is a 100-year-old company. Everybody knows what Long Realty is in Tucson. They have mind share, and there’s emotional share because they contribute to the community. They’re no longer a lead generator, but they train agents, they coach agents and they give agents better materials. And they advertise and communicate, which creates emotional connectivity in the marketplace.
Where we’re effective is in shaping the story of a brand to be clearer in the marketplace, where agents can go, “You know what? That’s not me. I don’t belong there,” or, “That is me, and this is where I belong.”
When you have more people working for you who are aligned around the same ideal, I think everybody just gets better from that.
Technology and AI have become central to almost every real estate company’s strategy. Where do you see the balance between technology and the human side of the transaction?
Boero: If you zoom out a little bit, what we’re seeing shape up here, and it kind of cuts across the private inventory debate, is competing visions for the future of this business.
One of them is tech-first and tech-driven, where we’re compressing the transaction experience into an app or running it through some combination of AI and centralized transaction management.
The vision that Chris has, which we align really closely with, is that we don’t think most people want that. This is borne out in our research over the last five years. Most people still want a human being with them through one of life’s most weighty and significant moments.
They want a people-led experience that is supported by technology, not the other way around. HomeServices is making a heavy investment in data integration and technology across its enterprise, but they also have people on the ground. They have mortgage people on the ground. Title people on the ground. Agents on the ground.
That hybrid human-tech experience, we think, is the sweet spot for the future of the business. I’ve been around this business for 30 years. Over and over again, the consumer has told us that they want a human guide for this journey.
You’ve spent nearly two decades building 1000WATT. How does it feel to make this move?
Davison: I’m still me. I’m still independent. I think Brian and I have reached a place where we’re being valued for what we bring, and some of that is that independent thinking. I’m not going to show up to work in a suit and tie and be Mr. Corporate. That’s not me.
Every business has a story arc. If you manage to maintain a small business, there is an end to that. The marketplace will dictate that end at some point.
I look at 1000WATT as a great story that followed a really great arc. We were never intended to become huge. The industry could never support a 50-person or 100-person creative agency like ours.
This is the perfect ending of this chapter of 1000WATT. I’m emotionally in full celebration that Brian and I, over a long friendship and business relationship, completed the story for 1000WATT in a beautiful way.
Look where we ended up. We’re not being asked to generate revenue. We’re being asked to take our talents and apply them to a great initiative. All of our people come with us. Everybody has a job. Everybody gets to work together like we always have and do great stuff together.
It’s a love story. Maybe that’s overromanticizing it, but you know what I mean.
Boero: Honestly, it’s a little bit hard to sort out in the middle of it. But to me, this feels like a good time for me and for us to focus. This feels like the right project and the right company and the right enterprise to focus on.
I have been in this industry for 30 years, not just because it’s a way to make money, but because I find this business to be so meaningful and so consequential. It matters how this industry develops, particularly now. That has always kept me in the game.
This feels like a great way for me to continue in that. It matters, and I believe in what HomeServices is doing. It’s a next chapter that feels very right for us.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
