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The residential real estate industry may not be perceived to be as digitally aggressive as Wall Street titans and multinational manufacturing conglomerates. But in reality, some of the largest, most established realty franchises, such as Re/Max and Keller Williams, have made all the right moves, pursuing digital transformations built on the cloud and primed to make the most of emerging AI opportunities.
“The only thing we have on premise, I believe, is a data server with a bunch of unstructured data on it for our legal team,” says Grady Ligon, who was named Re/Max’s first CIO in October 2022. While the Denver-based company’s cloud transformation long preceded Ligon’s arrival, with various business units adopting AWS and the IT team already developing cloud-native applications, in hiring Ligon, Re/Max’s top brass decided to “bring it all under control” of its first CIO.
As for Keller Williams, Chief Technology and Digital Officer Chris Cox sees the cloud as an engine for innovation. “We made a commitment to be truly cloud native and build an architecture that wasn’t burdened by any legacy infrastructure,” says Cox.
Both Ligon’s and Cox’s IT teams have dipped their toes into the AI waters, thanks to their cloud migrations, and plan on seizing on the promise of generative AI to empower the hundreds of thousands of agents and brokers who work in their respective networks as part of longstanding transformational journeys that prove that the residential real estate industry’s digital-fueled AI moment has arrived.
Empowering agents with data
Re/Max’s Ligon, who previously served as CIO of Prudential Real Estate and Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, oversees a cloud estate that includes Oracle Financials, Personify for membership management, and Inside Real Estate, a third-party industry SaaS platform tailored for brokers and agents. The Denver-based realty chain has also developed a homegrown Salesforce-based business intelligence app running off Tableau to power its global network of roughly 145,000 brokers and agents, Ligon says.
The CIO delights in detailing the work of Re/Max’s technology team, which is building the pipelines and cloud-native applications to deliver agents in the field the most refined and insightful data from more than 500 MLS listing serivces in the US and Canada as quickly as possible.
That data team, dubbed ’73 after Re/Max’s 1973...