HomeServices of America has spent much of 2026 trying to become a more assertive national real estate company without simply chasing growth for growth’s sake.
This year, the company rolled out OnePoint, its effort to more closely connect brokerage, mortgage, title and insurance; partnered with Cotality on the Broker Listing Exchange, or BLX, to centralize listing entry and distribution; added in-house mortgage servicing through Prosperity Home Mortgage; and most recently acquired real estate strategy, branding and research firm 1000WATT.
The moves reflect a broader effort to turn HomeServices from what CEO Chris Kelly has described as a historically decentralized holding company into a more active parent organization.
But Kelly told Inman the strategy is not simply about getting bigger.
“Every time we’ve made an acquisition, we ask a question: Is it additive?” Kelly said. “Are we adding something by doing this?”
In a conversation ahead of the 1000WATT acquisition earlier in October, Kelly discussed HomeServices’ evolving role, future M&A strategy and an increasingly contentious industry fight over listing distribution that he described as a “manufactured crisis.”
From holding company to parent company
Kelly said HomeServices’ evolution has been driven partly by the changing economics of brokerage and partly by a competitive landscape that has become increasingly national.
“We were almost like the real estate version of Berkshire, which is: buy companies, leave them alone, and don’t change anything,” Kelly said.
However, that model has not entirely disappeared, he said. HomeServices still allows its operating companies to maintain their own identities, cultures and approaches to their local markets. But Kelly said the company has increasingly recognized that some capabilities need to be built and delivered at the enterprise level.
“Over the past 10, 15 years, we’ve certainly seen the economics of real estate brokerage change and alter to where we had to start doing things more at an enterprise level in order to continue to be competitive with the agent and competitive for the consumer,” Kelly said.
The competitive landscape has changed, too, he added.
“You go back 10 years, you look at the top 10 brokerages, most of them were regional with the exception of a handful,” Kelly said. “You look at the top 10 now, it’s almost all national.”
That shift, Kelly said, forced HomeServices to rethink how a company built around strong local brands could compete nationally without stripping those brands of their individual identities.
“Local real estate matters, but it has become kind of more of a national competitive landscape,” Kelly said. “And in order for HomeServices to make sure that our agents and our companies were represented on that national level, we had to evolve kind of who we were, too.”
Kelly on the private listing fight
That evolution is taking place as some of the industry’s largest companies remain locked in a broader debate over listing distribution, private inventory and phased marketing strategies.
Kelly has previously spoken in favor of listing transparency. When asked whether his views had changed in recent months as the fight intensified, he said they had not.
“My belief is that, no, it is not just a marketing thing,” Kelly said. “I think it is a business practice that is couched in the form of marketing and the term ‘seller choice’ because it sounds better than coming out and saying what it’s really about.”
Kelly said he believes much of the debate is ultimately about monetization and controlling where consumers look for listings.
“‘We want to divert eyeballs from one place to another’ — all of that sounds very self-centered and not altruistic and good for the community and for the industry,” Kelly said. “I wish people would just embrace what it’s really about.”
He specifically highlighted buzzy industry terms and marketing strategies designed to make those practices more appealing to consumers and sellers.
“You come up with terms like ‘seller choice’ and ‘three-tier marketing’ to basically couch this idea of something that sounds really good in kind of a more sellable fashion,” Kelly said.
Kelly went further later in the conversation, arguing that the industry has spent the past year fighting over a problem that did not previously exist at the scale now being portrayed.
“We’ve complicated something that is fairly simple,” Kelly said.
He compared the industry’s fight over office exclusives and off-market listings to an episode of The Office in which Michael Scott organizes a fun run to raise money for rabies.
“It’s like, there wasn’t really ever a problem to begin with,” Kelly said. “We can talk about listing distribution and content ownership rights and everything, but it feels like we’ve been manufacturing a crisis that actually never really existed.”
Sellers, he argued, were not broadly demanding less exposure for their properties.
“The sellers weren’t out there forming picket lines going, ‘We’re so tired of our listings being viewed on these certain sites. We want more limited distribution,’” Kelly said.
There have always been properties and sellers for whom limited marketing makes sense, Kelly added. But in his view, the industry had largely figured out how to handle those situations before the current debate erupted.
“When it’s the right type of seller, the right kind of property, you market the property a little differently, maybe in a more limited capacity,” Kelly said. “We had all figured it out, and all of a sudden this kind of manufactured crisis took over the past year.”
Why 1000WATT matters
Kelly said 1000WATT will play a role in helping HomeServices navigate those kinds of industry debates, but he does not view the team as simply an internal marketing shop.
“One of the things I really like about Marc [Davison] and Brian [Boero] is, I don’t know if they would consider themselves contrarians, but they always do have a very unique way of looking when everyone’s running in one direction in an industry,” Kelly said.
“They do a really good job of saying, ‘Hey, maybe before we run that direction, let’s stop and ask why, or let’s look at it from a different angle.’”
Kelly described Boero and Davison as “insider-outsiders” — people with decades of experience inside residential real estate who have nevertheless spent much of their careers advising companies from outside their walls.
“They’re not going to be pigeonholed in just the marketing side of stuff,” Kelly said. “We really want them involved in all of HomeServices.”
Kelly said that perspective will be useful not only in branding and creative work, but in conversations about what is actually in the consumer’s interest as the industry changes.
“If you really are working in the best interest of the consumer, then success, money, everything else follows,” he said.
More M&A could be coming
The 1000WATT deal and the addition of mortgage servicing were the two major capability additions HomeServices wanted to complete this year, Kelly said.
Once the company finishes rolling out its unified agent platform and further develops OnePoint, he said HomeServices could be positioned to return to more traditional brokerage M&A.
“We have certainly been having lots of conversations with other brokerages over the past six, 12, 18 months,” Kelly said.
HomeServices typically tries to build a relationship with a company before pursuing an acquisition, he said, in part because it tends to preserve the identities of the brokerages it buys rather than fully absorbing them into one national brand.
“If you’re just absorbing something and whatever they were in the past goes away, I think you can move more quickly,” Kelly said. “I think you lose a lot when you do it that way.”
The company’s recent investments, Kelly said, are designed in part to give future acquisition targets something tangible to plug into.
“We wanted to have something to bring them onto,” Kelly said. “As we kind of get through this period and we really have our platform, it becomes a much more attractive destination for some of the companies that we’re talking to.”
