Anywhere Real Estate at KBW Conference: Embracing Tech Amid Market Challenges

On Tuesday, 20 May 2025, Anywhere Real Estate (NYSE:HOUS) presented at the KBW Virtual Real Estate Finance & Technology Conference. CEO Ryan Schneider outlined the company’s strategic initiatives, highlighting both opportunities and challenges in the residential real estate market. Despite a difficult housing cycle, Anywhere remains optimistic, focusing on technology and cost management to drive future growth.

Key Takeaways

• Anywhere Real Estate aims to cut costs by $100 million through its Reimagine ’25 initiative.
• The company outperformed the market in Q1 2024, especially in the luxury sector.
• Agent recruiting increased by 30% year-over-year.
• Technology investments, particularly in generative AI, are a key focus.
• The company reaffirmed its 2025 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $350 million.

Financial Results

• Q1 2024 Performance: Anywhere outperformed the market, with substantial gains in the luxury segment.
• Agent Recruiting: Up 30% year-over-year, surpassing competitors.
• Reimagine ’25 Initiative: Targets a $100 million cost reduction through digitization and AI.
• 2025 EBITDA Guidance: Maintained at $350 million, with potential upside as the market normalizes.
• Technology CapEx: Increased from $50 million last year to approximately $80 million this year.

Operational Updates

• Luxury Real Estate: Continues to lead in sales, gaining market share.
• Franchise Business: Attracting private capital investments.
• Integrated Business Model: Encompasses brokerage, title, mortgage, and insurance services.
• AI Implementation: Enhances marketing, document processing, and agent payments.

Future Outlook

• Demographic Tailwinds: Expected to support housing demand due to the large cohort aged 25-40.
• Luxury New Development: Launching a project in Nashville this spring.
• Technology Focus: Continued investment in automation and AI to enhance services.

Q&A Highlights

• Spring Market: Muted activity with units down but prices under upward pressure.
• Luxury Market: Outperforming overall trends with rising units and prices.
• Home Prices: Demand exceeds supply, contributing to price increases.
• Convertible Bond Maturity: Likely to be addressed through a market debt deal.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - KBW Virtual Real Estate Finance & Technology Conference:

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: My name is Tommy McJoint with KBW Research, and we’re pleased to be joined by Ryan Schneider, to talk about evolving residential markets. Ryan is the CEO and president of Anywhere Real Estate, which is a leading integrated full service provider of residential real estate services encompassing franchise, brokerage, relocation, title, settlement, and mortgage. Anywhere supported 950,000 home sale transaction sides last year, which represented around 12% of the national market share. The company’s well known brands, which you may know, include Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Century twenty one, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran, ERA, and Sotheby’s International Realty. There are more than 300,000 affiliated agents part of the enterprise globally.

So, Ryan, that’s just a bit of an introduction, for Anywhere. I’ll hand the mic over to you for any introductory comments, and then we will jump into some questions.

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Well, first off, Tommy, thank you and KBW for having anywhere and myself here at this great event, and thank you to all the people who are, listening in. We look forward to tackling your questions as we go forward here. Look. You know, our industry is in a challenging housing cycle, and it’s been that way for a few years now. But that doesn’t change my excitement about, both the financial octane that we generate here at Anywhere Real Estate even in tough markets, but especially the opportunities we have to deliver financially for our shareholders and our debt holders, in, you know, more normal housing markets, you know, which inevitably in the cyclical business we will return to.

You know, we have a really unique position out there in the industry, if you think about us, with some real advantages across the brands. Tommy mentioned our luxury leadership, our franchise business, and our integrated business model. You know, so for example, you know, we continue to sell more luxury real estate than anyone else, and it’s not really that close. We’re gaining share in luxury, and, you know, we lead the industry in selling everything. Million dollar plus, 2,000,000 plus, 5,000,000 plus, 10,000,000, 50, hundred million dollar plus homes.

And luxury is a wonderful place to be just given the really attractive economics and just the great brands that, you know, are required to compete there. Our auction business is selling luxury properties in places like New York City and Dubai where we ran auctions, you know, in the last quarter. And, you know, we’re doing things like expanding, you know, our luxury new development business outside of our core business into our franchise network, launching our first project in Nashville this spring, with that. So luxury is a wonderful thing. We still, even in a tough market, generate just incredibly strong economics from our high margin franchise business.

And, you know, for the first time in a long time, you saw important private capital begin to invest in franchise brokerage in the last quarter. And with our leading franchise position, we like that kind of endorsement of the great business that we’ve got and the, you know, excitement about the whole sector that people have. And then we also run, you know, an integrated brokerage title mortgage insurance business that tries to help the consumer through every phase of the transaction. And if you saw the big m and a that’s been happening in our industry, it’s been other people trying to recreate that portfolio, whether it’s Zillow going at it from one perspective or Rocket Mortgage or, you know, Lower, another company that just did a deal, all trying to put together the pieces of brokerage title and mortgage because there’s great economics there. But you can only do it if it’s integrated, and we’re the only brokerage competitor in our in in our core markets that actually has all those pieces to compete with those other folks trying to assemble that.

We are all, of course, as you would expect, staying very focused on our expenses. Our reimagine ’25 effort is all about digitizing our company, automating it, and using generative AI. It is the anchor of our hundred million dollar cost target that we’re committed to hitting this year. And I really like how we’re trending on that. And then finally, I love how we’re trending on growth.

You know, we outperformed the market in q one. Our luxury business substantially outperformed the market and other luxury players in q one. And our agent recruiting is up 30% year over year. It’s up over a % versus some of our biggest competitors. And we continue to welcome, you know, a double digit number of new franchisees to our company, you know, in q one and look forward to going from there.

So we’ve got a lot to execute on. It’s a very tough market out there, but I like our absolute and our relative performance and especially our financial octane as the housing market improves with all the changes and positive innovations we’re making for our company, for our agents, and for our franchisees. So with that, Tommy, I’ll turn it back to you for any questions that you and our audience have, and I’m looking forward to this discussion about housing in anywhere real estate.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Sounds good. Yeah. Appreciate that. We’ll we’ll dive into a a lot of those topics over the next hour here. And just a reminder to our audience, if you do have a question, can submit it through the the chat feature, and we have a a dashboard open that we’ll we’ll be monitoring those throughout.

So, yes, starting off, Ryan, on your first quarter call in late April, you pointed to volumes being roughly flat year over year in April, and you have such a good vantage point with all the data you see. As we have moved a few weeks further into the spring season, how are volumes trending in May? Is it is it still a function of prices up, units are down, it sort of offsets? How how would you characterize the the the spring season so far?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. So look, we haven’t disclosed any new May data because, you know, the data we have for May is really only through about the middle of the month. It’s not much more than we had when we gave the April data. But, you know, the spring season, you know, has has been a little muted compared to q one. Right?

It’s it’s been a little more flat with that same trend of units being down and and and prices still having some upward pressure is supply, it remains the biggest issue. Now one thing we do see happen in our portfolio that we saw in April and, you know, I’m confident will continue is the outperformance of luxury. So luxury in our portfolio was outperforming, you know, the overall book in the market again in April, and we are very excited about that, you know, because we like the returns on it, we like the brand positioning there. But, you know, we have seen the more volatility in both the macro and in the market in April kinda mute a little bit of the strength we saw in q one. Still, you know, figuring out what this selling season’s gonna look like, but that’s that’s what we definitely saw in April and and, you know, the pheromones of May haven’t really left that zip code yet.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. To to clarify on that on that point on luxury, with how much home price appreciation there has been, has just the bucket of what is considered luxury expanded a lot and that’s why it’s improving or is luxury luxury actually doing better?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: No. It’s luxury actually doing better. You know, luxury has a couple things going for it, you know. And and in our book, you know, while the whole market has units down and price up, in our book in the first quarter, luxury units are up and prices up. Right?

That’s where some of the share gains are coming from and and some of the excitement. You know, look, you know, luxury is mostly immune from interest rates. Right? You you got a lot more cash deals happening there. You know, markets like New York City have kind of an all time high of cash deals going on lately, but we see that across all geographies of just luxury is much more immune to interest rates.

You know, and then luxury is a little bit less swung, I think, by some of the headline risk that, you know, comes out of the macro volatility that I referred to. And and then finally, obviously, there’s just a lot more, you know, building of luxury homes. And the supply of luxury homes is a little stronger than obviously the supply of entry level or kind of mass market homes. So luxury is real growth in luxury, you know, independent of just the price inflation part. And that’s why we, you know, are always clear about, you know, 5,000,000 plus, 10,000,000 plus, 2,000,000 plus just to, you know, not make it something driven by homes tipping over the, say, $1,000,000 threshold.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Yeah. That’s that’s a good clarification. I guess within the concept of of home prices, you know, the resiliency of of home price appreciation, to keep rising has been interesting to watch over the past few years and even to today. Is there a price point when home buyers will eventually balk and especially given a backdrop of potentially higher for longer interest rates?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Well, we haven’t seen it yet. Right? I mean, and and, you know, I I I joke often, you know, the, you know, the the the, you know, the best time to buy a house was fifty years ago from a value standpoint. The second best time is probably now because we just haven’t literally seen it. And by the way, I don’t think it’s healthy.

I’d rather have a market with more units and lower price than what’s happening now. But the reality is, Tommy, the demand and supply, even at rates that are approaching 7% interest, is so out of whack that, you know, any quality home going on the market in almost any geography is selling and getting multiple offers. I mean, you know, 50% of our homes are selling in in fourteen days or less kind of thing, and that hasn’t changed in the last few years. And so, you know, there may be a price point at which, you know, people cry uncle, but we sure haven’t found it yet. And again, even at these high rates, the demand is still, you know, swamping the supply leading to this price inflation that we’re seeing.

And so I don’t like it from a health standpoint, but I think it is the reality out there. You know, occasionally, you see a headline of of a little price softening out there. We’ve seen a little bit of that in in in in Florida recently, for example. But it’s it’s not prices declining. It’s just prices rising less, basically.

So, you know, it’s we’re we’re stuck in this tough position with so low supply and still so many people, you know, who need a place to live that that I just don’t know what’s gonna turn the tide on that. It may happen, but we sure haven’t seen it yet. Mhmm.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Yeah. And as far as you are aware, from a demographics perspective, there’s no reason that existing home sale can’t get back to above 5,000,000 or 5 and a half million, a more normalized figure. Right?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Oh, they should get back. I mean, if you really look at it, I mean, you look back thirty years, you know, we’ve had two years of about four to 4,100,000 units of sale. It’s kinda people are forecasting, like, 4,100,000 units this year again. Like, we haven’t had years like this in three in a row for an incredibly long time and and, like, thirty years ago. And and we’ve added, like, 30,000,000 Americans since then.

And so, you know, whatever that is, you know, seven and a half million new households. Like, we are really operating under what should be the normal, especially given the size of the generation of, you know, people who are between ages, you know, 25 and 40 kind of in their prime home buying years. And it’s toughest at the entry level. That’s where the price inflation is the biggest. That’s where the units are the you know, down the most.

That’s where the lock in effect of, you know, 80% of people having mortgage rates below 5%, you know, is the strongest. It’s hard out there. But but demographically, housing absolutely should have a lot of head tailwinds behind in the future. And that’s why I get excited about the progress we’re making right now on cost, on luxury growth, on, you know, integrating title and mortgage, and how much that can pay off for anywhere shareholders and debt holders as we, you know, get to more normal housing markets with our financial octane.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Yeah. And it makes sense that maybe with some of the pull forward in volumes when existing home sales got closer to the 6,000,000 level back in ’21 or so. It makes sense that a little bit of that was pull forward, but we’re now, you know, three plus years on from that that pull forward. So agree it

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Well, it

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: it seems like it depends

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: on And, Tommy, look, there’s credible arguments by, you know, economists, not not me, but other other people that, you know, with the demographics, with the growth in population, you know, our run rate should be closer to 6,000,000, right, than 5,000,000 or five and a half million. You know, we’ll see. Obviously, it’ll come together, but there’s definitely, you know, a big gap between what we should be doing on home sales and what we are. And I think, you know, people feel the pain of it. It’s a it’s a bipartisan issue even if solutions are hard.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. And just a last question on the the sort of the housing fundamental side. You mentioned the luxury side, and and that’s, you know, a bright spot. The low end is is the entry level homes are feeling at the toughest. How’s just the middle market, you know, of of the country, your your kind of average price points?

How how’s that part of housing doing?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. I mean, it’s still struggling with with unit sales a little bit down, not as far down as the first time home buyer, and they still have price inflation. So it really is in the middle between tapping in luxury and what’s happening in the in the first time market. But, you know, but overall, again, you know, you’ve got a market that was up 3% in volume in q one. We were up 6%, but the mark was up 3%.

You know, units were down, you know, you know, three or 4%, price was up five or 6%. Like, that’s kind of what is happening in the more middle market out there just, know, in the in in the world. And so it’s got the same dynamics. Obviously, it’s a place where rates matter, mortgage rates matter, the lock in effect is legit. And, you know, you know, and and again, home buildings, you know, we need as many homes built as possible, and those folks have their own pressures, and there’s less homes coming to market.

And that definitely bites not just in the first time, but in people who wanna buy that, you know, step up house, you know, they’ve got the same built new new construction challenges, that the first time folks face.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Even with this, you know, what I’ll what I’ll characterize as a fairly difficult backdrop, you know, given your scale and and your focus on expense, you know, efficiencies, you know, you are still able to invest in whether it be technology or data or offerings for your agents. Maybe talk a little bit about where you are investing those resources. It’s an industry where you do need to stay ahead of the competition. So where do you think it’s it’s important to to allocate capital and resources to right

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: now? So look, you know, we, you know, we we spend a lot on on on these things though judiciously, and we’ve cut hundreds of millions of costs over time. But, you know, we’ve, you know, we’ve increased our technology CapEx this year from about 50,000,000 last year to around 80,000,000 this year, just because of the opportunities that generative AI is is bringing us. And we do that because we think it’s an awesome investment from a bottom line standpoint in terms of lower cost, terms of a faster better experience for people or faster. And, you know, we really are focused both on customer facing examples, but also, you know, how we just run the company examples.

So, you know, you know, I’ve given examples publicly of how, you know, our listing concierge product, we put AI in there around photo selection and, you know, be able to take something that used to take a human being hours to actually construct the marketing campaign of that, you know, AI can now do in minutes. You know, I’ve talked about how we process documents and how we used to have a 20 people working 8AM to 5PM processing documents, you know, with a 4% error rate. And now, you know, we’ve got you know, we call him Otto. You know, he’s our AI guy doing it twenty four seven, you know you know you know, supervisors checking his work, we don’t need anywhere near the number of people, you know, and his error rate is now, you know, below 1% kind of thing. So, you know, better, faster, cheaper on how we actually run the company.

So, you know, doing things that both face the agent and franchisee with help them with their customer and how we run the company is is both tracks of investment we’re doing. And, again, most of our increase and excitement and payoff is coming from what’s behind me on my screen. Right? How do we simplify things, automate them, and then use generative AI to deliver them, you know, at at scale? And and we’re really excited about it.

It’s an anchor in, you know, how we’re gonna take out a hundred million of costs this year, but also makes us better and faster and helps on the value proposition part. And there’s probably something in those results that are driving the recruiting benefits that I mentioned in my opening, you know, where we’ve really had a nice run of recruiting from our competitors, especially some of the bigger ones, in a way that, you know, hopefully will continue to help us on the market share growth. Again, organic market share growth too, to be clear.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Yes. And there’s naturally some build versus buy decisions around investing in these new capabilities on the technological front. And you have hinted at some of your comments that exploring potentially prop tech opportunities to acquire and the overall acquisition landscape, I think it is there for you. But perhaps specifically related to technology side and the build versus buy decision, how are you approaching that?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. So we’re we’re very transparent about we are an open architecture company, you know, which means we build some things ourselves and provide them to our agent franchisees, but we also partner with or occasionally do a little m and a to get a technology to open up to our agents and franchisees as part of our value proposition. We don’t charge a technology fee like some other industry franchisers do. We included in our core value proposition. And, you know, we we you know, in a way, in the independent contractor world, you know, product adoption is pretty different than it is in an employee based world.

And so, you know, we have a strong belief that the ability of any one company to meet all of their customers’ needs when you’re talking hundreds of thousands of agents across different brands is is is somewhat limited. And so you want to provide some things that you’re great at, like we do with listing conciers or or or social conciers or design conciers or some of the other products that we provide people. But you also wanna utilize, you know, Moxie Works, you know, very strong technology to give people the option to use that to run their business, you know, or or with the world of APIs we live in, support really easy integration into great other products that again can be part of our proposition. So, you know, that’s that’s why we’ve kind of been pretty public about this open architecture approach. And again, we invest to develop some things on our own.

We also invest with partners to deliver them to our agent franchisee customers.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: In adjacent to the technology side, Anywhere has emphasized growing its ancillary services, be it idle, mortgage settlement. Those obviously are important for also strengthening partnerships with your affiliates. You guys have a program called Upward Title that you guys have been investing in. You also have the joint venture with Guaranteed Rate. Talk about the the sort of the status and the the rollout, how penetrated those programs are, what sort of adoption and and take ups you think on those?

Just give us an update on those.

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Sure. Yeah. So let me just step back first and, you know, remind everybody if you aren’t familiar with our company, you know, we’re, I believe, the only player in the brokerage ecosystem that has a national scale title business and mortgage business. We also run an an insurance, agency to support all that stuff. So we actually can meet customers’ needs for all parts of the real estate transaction kinda nationally, and and we generate good economics from that already.

But there’s a big strategic opportunity. You know, the the biggest takeaway I’ve had, Tommy, talking to venture capitalists about real estate in the last six months is basically the the feedback that, you know, people investing to disrupt the agent, that investment is dead. And we see that all the time with people calling us to sell us their prop tech company that was trying to do that or how other business models that were trying to disrupt agents or trading or whatever. And the the venture capital money has shifted to how do you capture the whole consumer transaction? This end to end transaction across brokerage, title, and mortgage, you know, or and or insurance, etcetera.

And, you know, so far this year, we’ve seen Rocket Mortgage make two big acquisitions that kinda tries to stitch some of those pieces together. We’ve seen Zillow try to make some of those deals in the past to stitch those together. We saw a company called Lower by a small, you know, company that has a bit of a portal to try to stitch some of that stuff together. And then, obviously, we have the ability to stitch that together across brokerage, title, mortgage, and insurance. And so, you know, it’s I find it quite interesting that the that where the world is going is in this race to bring together the consumer, and we have our approach to doing that or our opportunity that our brokerage competitors don’t.

And then on that, we’re gonna be competing with, you know, these other players. And we go after that in in a couple ways. One, I mentioned how we run our own brokerage title and mortgage to do more on an integrated basis. I can come back to that. But to your question on upward title, that’s another example where we have, you know, franchisees who they run their businesses, they do great, but they aren’t big enough to have their own title company.

And there’s both title economics for them, but there’s also that more integrated customer experience for them that they can’t do on their own. So what we’ve been doing is putting together these JVs of multiple franchisees in different geographies, California, Southern California, Florida, Texas, Washington State, Pennsylvania. You know, we got, you know, we got about 10 of them or so is kind of the where we are right now, and and, you know, we think it can get to, like, 25 of them, where we run the JV because we have the expertise. We let them bring in these transactions in a way that everybody gets good economics, and you get more integration with the transaction itself. And then it helps us because it’s a value proposition we can kinda uniquely deliver to franchisees and build tighter relationships with our franchisees who participate in these things.

And so, you know, for me, Upward Title is, you know, an example of helping our franchisees go after this kind of integrated opportunity with the customer that the world is chasing and that we have a really advantaged position to chase both in our owned brokerage business we run, but also here with Upward Title and our franchisees. Very exciting, you know, our the ones we launched, you know you know, you know, eighteen months ago, they’re they’re running ahead of where we thought they would be typically. The ones we launched in 2024, you know, we like their early returns, and we’re gonna be launching more this year and next year because strategically, we think there’s not just good economics and good franchise value prop there, but it is where the world is going when you watch other people’s m and a and, you know, you watch our efforts across those different products.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Yeah. Totally agree that that integrated consumer experience is the the holy grail that that everyone is is going after, and you certainly can can see that showcased in in some of the acquisitions that you have seen from up and down sort of the the vertical chain there. Given you know, let’s switch gears a little bit just to to to one of the hot topics across the industry, you know, talking about Nora’s revisions to to clear cooperation. And just for a quick background here, the the new multiple listing options for sellers policy, it effectively allows agents and and sellers to have more delayed marketing flexibility.

And the revision also delegates more authority to local MLS organizations to interpret the rules they see fit. The revised rule, in our view, you know, appears to open the door for more private listings or office exclusives. And some of your competitors and and portal partners have taken really hard line stances at at one end or the other, and I would characterize anywhere standing as as more in the middle ground. So so first off, is that fair? And could you elaborate on what the the middle ground approach here entails?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: So I don’t think it’s fair, to be blunt, Tommy. I appreciate you trying to protect me a little bit maybe with that, but I don’t think it’s fair. Look. We’re an aggressive advocate for transparency because we believe it’s best for consumers, full stop. And we think people are advocating for every customer should use private listings, you know, that is in the brokers’ interest, not the customers’ interest.

Now, let’s be clear. We sell 6% of our listings privately. Right? We have the leading luxury brands in real estate, and there’s a lot of reasons that when a private listing happens, it skews luxury. Okay?

We are not against private listings. We sell some, and we will continue to sell some. We will support our agents on that. Absolutely. But the idea that everybody should have a private listing, I think, is fundamentally flawed because it can it can and if I did it, it would lead to some benefits for me in the short term.

I could get more double sided transactions and stuff like that, but customers, I think, would end up getting lower prices for the vast majority of the 94% of homes. And so, you know, we are very clear. We think the transparency is good. We are much more down the path of, you know, the approach Zillow is taking, you know, to ensure that, you know, you know, that listings are publicly available. And we think it’s good for buyers and sellers for that to happen, And we’re gonna keep advocating for that.

Doesn’t mean there’s not a role for private listings or customers shouldn’t get to pick how they sell their home. There is. But again, it’s a niche small thing, which we again are like the leading player of with our 6% of deals because of our luxury leadership, and our agents know when it’s right for the customer. And the idea that I should tell my agents, it’s right for the customer in every situation, you should do it with all your clients, that is, I think, very bad for our industry. And part of the reason we’re having a lot of recruiting success right now is we are absolutely outperforming against companies that are pushing their agents to do private listings where they don’t think it’s right.

And we’re getting agents to come join us because we don’t want they don’t like that. And they understand that if they have a listing that should be private, we support them in that. We’re great at selling that stuff, but that we’re not trying to make them do it for our benefit against the customer.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Okay. Yeah. I I appreciate the the the bluntness there. And and the 6% number that you gave it, presuming it it skews higher luxury. Absolutely.

And that’s across the industry. Yeah.

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: So, you know, you know and because, again, there’s more you know, the more unique the property, there’s you know, and, you know, when people talk about privacy concerns, well, know, most people don’t have privacy concerns when selling their home, but the few people that do tend to be at the high at the higher end, you know. And when you have more unique homes that a private listing approach might be more more effective, that’s often more in the luxury area. So it’s a really interesting and kinda sad that we’ve kinda come to this as an industry, And I think there’s still some innings to go in this one, but, know, that’s what we do and how we think we should be doing business and we think we gotta, you know, if you do what’s best for the customer, it’s gonna work out really well usually. You do what’s best for yourself sometimes, you can you can lose sight of of the customer.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. When these changes first got announced, I I do recall some some comments from you about to the extent that the market does go that way and private listings become a lot more abundant, with your leading market share, you’re well positioned to benefit from that. Maybe just a logistical question kind of around that. I mean, sort of office exclusives are private listings marketed internally within a brokerage. Anywhere has, you know, many different brands and franchises.

Is there a way to see your entire market share across all your brands and new private listings? Or is that not permissible?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: I mean, there there could be in the future, and that’s what I mean. You know, again, I I have this belief about what’s right for the customer, but, you know you know, if the market turns out to be one where private listings becomes the norm, you know, and we get fragmentation, you know, and and things aren’t displayed publicly and all that kind of stuff. Couple things. Right? We already have the technology to do the private listing sharing within our our three owned brokerage brands.

So these are national realty, Corcoran, and Coldwell Banker. And then, you know, in the month of June, we’re gonna be rolling out the technology across our franchisees, you know, to do private listings in a few different ways if we need it down the road. And then, you know, how much you can share across brand and across franchisees is a little bit still of, like, the flux of of bluntly some of the both rule making, but also enforcement. Right? One of the reasons, you know, I’m troubled by our ecosystem today is you have, you know, some MLSs that are enforcing their own rules in these things, which opens to doors to, you know, some bad behavior kind of thing.

And so, you know and I think NARS really kinda lost its way in terms of providing the industry leadership. I think we’ve seen that. So I that’s why I say I think this game will keep evolving. And my message to my agents and my shareholders is, you know, we believe in the transparency for almost all situations, obviously, and that’s our default. But if the world ends up in this place we don’t think is great, we actually probably would do quite well there.

But again, I’m worried it’s only a quite well in the short term for the industry. But we have the technology, you know, we have the scale to do more private listings than anybody if we chose to push that. But I don’t I don’t wanna lead to that. Right? But I wanna make sure people know that we’re not gonna be we will not let ourselves be disadvantaged, you know, as this world evolves.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. That’ll make sense. And looking, you know, ahead five, ten years down the road, you know, what do you envision the the structure of listings look like? Is is it a lot still like today where there’s private listings that are still just the anomaly and just used for a small percentage of transaction? And do MLSs, you know, still have relevance?

Maybe you could opine. I know it’s, asking you to to look into the crystal ball, but Yeah. So

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: I look. I think the decisions people make here in 2025 will be actually very large determinants of what 2030 and beyond look like. You know? In particular, you know you know, The US is a pretty unique system that, you know you know and if any of you tried to buy property internationally, and you can talk to our agents if you’d like, like, you know you know, the fact that properties are publicly marketed in The US, you know, in a way that they are is relatively unique. But there’s no reason it has to stay that way.

And so, you know, I’ll be interested to see what choices, you know, MLSs make around things like private listings and rules enforcement. And, you know, the choices that that portals make about, you know, how they want to display information or not. And you could see a world where, you know, everything fragments. Right? And we turn the clock back, you know, to, you know, much more walled gardens, much more, you know you know, direct syndication only to select partners kind of thing.

I don’t think that’s great for the customer on either the buyer or the sell side, but it could happen if people make what I think would be shortsighted decisions here in 2025. But, you know, my hope is in 2030, we get the benefits for the consumer of, you know, as many people looking at their house as possible, which I think is what gets them the highest price on their house. And then if you’re a buyer, an easy way to see what are all the options there out there, you know, to make your life as frictionless as possible and give, you know, everybody an equal chance to find the home of their dreams.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Yeah. So those changes, you know, we we talked about there. We’re really focused on the the listing side of things. There were also some business practice changes that I would characterize as more focused on the the buyer side.

So let let’s talk about those a little bit. As a reminder, these went into effect last summer, and effectively made it so that, you know, buyer agent agreements became mandatory, and then it also removed, offers of buyer agent compensation from listings getting posted. You know, all in all, we we listen to a lot of market commentary from you, your your peers, you know, other players in the industry. It actually doesn’t sound like the transition was perhaps as, you know, messy. That’s that’s the word I use, as as some would have thought.

Do you agree with that assessment regarding that transition?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: I am incredibly proud of how Anywhere led our agents and franchisees through that transition, and I’m incredibly proud of how our agents and franchisees themselves did through that transition. It’s crazy. It’s been nine months. It was, like, nine months like like, yesterday was nine months, I think, exactly. And, you know, being prepared to navigate that with clear buyer agreements, but also a clear articulation of your value as an agent, I think, was really important.

And, you know, we’ve we’ve been happy with the results. You know, it’s there’s a lot of positive feedback about how buyer agreements have created, you know, certainty for agents with their buyers in both directions and transparency, and that’s really good. You know, the the the decoupling of buyer, you know, agent commissions, you know, has has not changed the economics at least yet. You know, it’s been sequentially flat for about nine months now. It’s down a little bit year over year in the low basis points range, but, been basically sequentially fat flat for nine months.

And then, you know, we’re starting to use these buyer agreements, you know, for other things. Right? We’ve we we are now in three geographies piloting, putting title and mortgage opportunities for customers into the buyer agreement. Let’s get to them earlier in the process. Let’s market to them earlier.

You know, let’s go direct to the consumer effectively in the market of that as we, you know, utilize these things that are now part of our ecosystem, you know, for kind of growth, you know, know, in that kind of integrated business, you know, thing that we’ve been talking about. And again, I’ve been really impressed by how our how well the job our agents and franchisees have done navigating this change.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: That’s interesting. The the sort of the the pilot program that you just talked about there. And so I I’m trying to think about some of the, I guess, rules and regulations around that. And so there’s nothing that precludes you from incorporating that into the the buyer agreement upfront?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. We think we’re totally compliant with everything. There’s no nobody’s getting a spiff or anything like that. We’re very respite focused around here. You know?

And and it’s and it’s really just, you know, you know, you know, and again, we’re, you know, let’s, you know, let’s, you know, see if you wanna do the mortgage preapproval as soon as you’re signed the buyer agreement so you can go into the house with certainty with our mortgage partner Guaranteed Rate, you know, our Guaranteed Rate Affinity joint venture. Like, let’s let’s do marketing early in the process, not late. Because today, you know, we capture a bunch of title economics and mortgage economics in the transaction, but they tend to happen, like, when the transaction happens. And so this is a way to get much more upstream with the consumer on these two things they’re gonna need in the process and put ourselves in front of them from a marketing standpoint. You know?

No. We’re not asking for money. We’re not asking for them to, you know, lock into our mortgage and not look at others. We’re just, you know, opening the door to effectively marketing earlier, and we think there could be some incremental opportunities there. We have this new part of our world of these buyer agreements.

Let’s use it not just for compliance. Let’s use it for growth. Let’s use it for a better customer experience. Let them feel that more integrated experience with our agents on the whole transaction from moment one. And I I don’t and I wanna add insurance into that too.

We haven’t piloted that yet, but I wanna do that too.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Yeah. That’s, interesting. And, obviously, it feeds into the customer convenience, and I would totally agree that in today’s, you know, competitive market out there coming into a home buying process with, you know, mortgage preapproval is is so pertinent. Right? It’s a you you need to be armed with that, it feels like.

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Absolutely. Yeah. And let’s get it to them as early as possible, and let’s get our stuff in front of them as early as possible. So, again, you know, we know what we can capture doing things the the kind of pre buyer agreement way. Let’s use these buyer agreements for growth, not just compliance.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. And so, you know, with the buyer agent agreement, you know, we we see our eyes that that point of friction might either one, you know, cause more potential homebuyers to forego agent representation, or two, negotiate more, and and that drives commission rates down on the buyer side. I don’t think we’ve actually seen that come through in in any data points. Is there anything that you can share around, you know, either of those two points?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. No. We we haven’t we haven’t seen that. We definitely haven’t seen the forego, and I think that’s true in the public data too. I mean, the one thing we’ve seen that we’ve talked about or two things I’ve talked about publicly, I’m, happy to talk about them again, is, you know, there there is some of the pain of the commission that’s being moved into the negotiation of the deal, you know, before sometimes these things were stated upfront.

And sometimes now, you know, it’s more part just the negotiation of the deal, especially at the higher end. And then second, there when you look at the year over year change in average broker commission rate, it is a little larger down on the buy side in in luxury. Just a few basis points, but but you can see the difference, and it is actually consistent with hypothesis of a little more negotiation by the most sophisticated buyers kind of thing. But, you know, it’s sequentially overall flat and, you know, and it’s and even the the the luxury year over year drop is is, you know, it’s a very gradual slope. It’s not a cliff or anything.

So, you know, we really haven’t seen this stuff. There’s a few dynamics, like I mentioned, that are changing out there. I think we gotta watch it closely because it’s only been nine months, but I do think our agents have done a very good job on this. And I think people actually get real value here. Like, I mean, you know, you’re you know, sometimes people on our on our Wall Street calls forget that for most people, this is, you know, a very rare, very infrequent transaction, you know, and and having a, you know, Sherpa to get you through it and make sure you get the best overall deal economically to get to the house you want or sell the house that you’ve got is incredibly important.

And that’s always resonated, and that’s why, you know, discount brokerages have have really struggled for a very long time in life. And even since this the new rules came into effect nine months ago, you know, we haven’t seen any move to discount brokers in the market. Right? It’s just there’s there’s value there and people, I think, you know, continue to see it. Mhmm.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Yeah. That’s that’s all fair. Yes. Let’s see. I’m going to take a question from the audience, and we can jump over a little bit of talk about some of the financial stuff.

This is actually a financials question. What is the most likely source of funds that the company will use to address the convertible bond maturity?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. I I mean, I think it’ll be a a you know you know, we’ll do debt deal, you know, in the market, you know, at a time when we think it’s right. You know, obviously, we’ve gone to the market in the past to do pretty meaningful refinancing. You know, we’ve had pretty good timing success in the past. Hopefully, we can continue that trend.

But, you know, it’ll be a a refinancing of the of the debt. You know, I I think, yeah. So that’s that’s where we go down. I I think, you know, second lien’s probably more likely than unsecured, but, you know, we’ll keep you posted and we’ll go

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: to the market when we think it’s the right time. Okay. Then another question on the expense side. You have identified hundreds of millions of expense opportunities. Are there still areas where you think you can wring out additional efficiencies?

And then how much of those expense reductions could potentially come back if we suddenly see a rebound back up to, you know, the more normalized 5,000,000 existing home sales level that we talked about earlier?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. Most of our expense reductions are are not gonna come back. We’ve done a couple slides in our investor quarterly things that show our cost reduction and show the temporary things that we’ve done in the past, that we think would come back. But, like, most of what we’re doing this year is not in the comeback kinda category. You know, more interestingly, we’re out of the, like, ringing cost out of the system game.

Right? We’ve we’ve taken out a huge amount of cost over the last six or seven years. You know, we used to have 12,000 people to run the company. Now we do it with, like, 8,000 tons of, you know, simplification and and digitization and automation kind of thing. And and and, you know, the the the kind of ringing costs out of the system reductions, those have been done.

We’re now in the, you know, automation and generative AI journey of cost reductions. We’ll still do some office, you know, footprint and real estate stuff, but most of the future, not just ’25, but I predict you to you, we will have cost reduction, you know, public goals in ’26 and ’27 is about reimagining how we run our company, both for our agents and franchisees and internally. That’s our reimagine ’25 program. You know, it is the anchor and and I believe the majority of our 2025 cost reduction hundred million. And again, that all comes back to, you know, how do you digitize things and then automate them and then even use this generative AI.

And so new technologies and new ways of doing things are unlocking things that didn’t used to be cost opportunities for us. Whereas the, like, you know, tighten up on t and e kind of opportunities, those are law those are you know, that’s the past kind of thing. So we’re focused on that future.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: I guess I almost interpret what you just said there is almost as much finding new revenue opportunities as it is sort of saving side. Is that am I misinterpreting that?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Or No. Totally. My my goal is and our our when we say we we have a reimagine 25 program that, you know, will actually be multiyear, but we started ’25. It’s about better experiences, faster, lower cost. Right?

Cost is one of those three things. But better experiences help your value proposition. Right? We are paying agents faster than before because we’re using AI on some of the agent bank and wire information. Right?

You know, as a pilot that we’ve we’ve recently launched. You know, we are, you know, delivering our listing concierge project not just faster and more efficiently, but it’s got better info and results and impact because of some of the AI things we’ve infused in it. You know, we’re doing a pilot with Amazon, AWS right now about really actually selecting the best photos. Right? That’ll help market homes and help, you know, help people sell their homes faster.

And all these things lead into a value proposition that lets you recruit agents better and, you know, recruit franchisees better and retain agents better. So there’s clearly gotta be a lot of revenue opportunities with some of the automation and generative AI opportunities that the world is uncovering. But there’s also the cost stuff, and we really like to try to emphasize both.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. When you have a large, you know, enterprise, the the status quo is dangerous. Right? And then people get used to doing things a certain way. Yeah.

You have an organization with 8,000 people. How do you motivate people to actually, you know, take that AI training? How do you motivate them to, you know, actually think about doing things differently when they’ve been, you know, sort of maybe perhaps stuck in their ways for decades?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Yeah. I mean, it’s a cultural leadership thing. And and, you know, for people listening, Tommy and I were talking about this before we started. He was mentioning how, you know, you know, his firm is, you know, you know, getting people to sign up for different AI things. You know, we’ve made we’re making it part of our culture.

You know, we do you know, we have our employees every employee in our company is doing AI training, you know, and and our our latest round of that here in April and May, we’re at 98% completion kind of thing. Right? I want everybody to understand and be facile with this because, again, I’m old enough to remember when the Internet entered the business world. And I remember when companies had Internet teams just like companies now have AI teams. Well, you know, it became part of how everyone did their job and it reinvented all kinds of things.

And I and, you know, you’ve gotta really orient your people around how important this is no matter what your job is. And then you gotta have these examples whether it’s brokerage document processing or AWS photo selection pilot or listing concierge or other customer facing things that show people that they can help us actually drive revenue and or lower cost. You know? And when I say better experiences faster at lower cost, I mean our employee experiences too. I want their experiences working here to be better.

I want the things we do internally to be faster, and I want them to be more effective. So it’s a cultural thing more than anything, I would say, Tommy, and I’m sure KBW is doing an awesome job equally on the culture side of it. But, it’s so much fun, and there’s and that’s why it’s not ringing costs out. It’s literally uncovering these new revenue and cost opportunities from these technologies that didn’t even exist before. It’s not unique to real estate obviously, and, you know, it’s just an exciting time to be alive.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. And just one more question on the on the financial side. You know, you recently did reaffirm your your 2025 guidance for $350,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. And that presumably contemplates existing home sales somewhere in the low to mid $4,000,000 range, depending on which forecast you look at. Investors do wanna know though how much bottom line upside there is when inevitably we do eventually see a rebound back up to that 5,000,000 home sale level.

Are there any breadcrumbs you could help us, you know, think about triangulating what the upside is?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: You know, look, a year or so ago, we kinda, you know, made it clear that, you know, at kinda like 5,000,000, I think it was about a 600,000,000 of EBITDA kind of if you do all the puts and takes of the inflations, the the headwinds, the tailwinds kind of stuff, you know, and that’s at, like, 5. And then, obviously, if you get up to the numbers, they get much, much bigger, much fast. Like, it’s a real scale business here for us. So we’ve given a few of those breadcrumbs in the past, but, you know, every time we take more costs out, you you know, we’re making more progress on that. Every time we have more of that recruiting success, we get more, you know, tailwind when the market comes back.

And so, you know, we’re still targeting 350,000,000 of EBITDA this year. We’re still targeting cash flow that looks about like last year if you just exclude the one timers kind of thing. And, you know, and that’s at a 4,100,000.0 unit market. So, you know, think about the octane we’ve got in the $5.05 and a half, 6,000,000 unit market. It gets really exciting real quick whether you’re looking from an equity or a debt standpoint, we believe.

And that’s why it’s tough market out there. It’s been tough for a while, but, you know, our company engagement scores are like one point off our all time high. They’re that, you know, people are excited and, you know, people are, you know, feeling a lot of optimism, whether it’s from some share gains, the luxury success, you know, how other people are investing in our sector and what that means for our, you know, advantage assets. So, you know, there’s a few breadcrumbs we’ve done in the past, and, the math is not that hard either, to be blunt. I think our investors usually do a great job of of, ballparking that when I’ve seen them share it with me.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Mhmm. Great. Well, I’m checking our dashboard here and that answers all of the the questions that came in through q and a, and and we are up on our time. So Ryan, any concluding remarks you wanna leave us with?

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Look, thank you for having us, Tommy. Really appreciate it. And thanks everybody for listening. If you have questions or wanna get us know know know us more, our investor relations team is always standing by. And, you know, we look forward to continuing to deliver this near term financial octane, more importantly, you know, set the company up for, know, kind of upside that Tommy was talking about there with that final question and how that pays off, you know, you know, for our equity and debt holders and what what is a cyclical industry.

Tommy McJoint, KBW Research Analyst, KBW Research: Great. Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan. Appreciate your time.

Ryan Schneider, CEO and President, Anywhere Real Estate: Thanks so much. Everybody have a good day. Bye bye.

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