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HomeServices of America veteran Chris Kelly was appointed CEO of the real estate company last week as Gino Blefari stepped down into an advisory role.
Kelly brings a wealth of experience to the position, with 25 years in the industry now, 18 of which have been spent at HomeServices.
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Kelly has the credentials, but adopts the role of CEO at a challenging time. Industry groups and organizations have split into factions over how to market and sell homes while balancing the needs of consumers and agents alike. The market has been among the most tumultuous agents have dealt with in recent years, and uncertainty over tariffs is threatening to push consumers to the sidelines of the transaction yet again.
With these industry shifts in mind, Inman recently spoke with Kelly to get his take — and to set the record straight on recent reports floating around about Compass potentially having an interest in purchasing Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. Here’s what the CEO had to say, edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: You’ve been with HomeServices for quite a while now. When you started at the company, did you ever dream that you would one day become CEO?
Chris Kelly: It’s funny. It’s not something that I personally started off [thinking]. My first role was in 2007 as general counsel of ReeceNichols, and I was really, really fortunate to work under the leadership of [then-CEO] Jerry Reece at the time. And I remember Jerry Reece at one point told [then-CEO of HomeServices] Ron Peltier, ‘Hey, Chris could run Reese Nichols for us someday. Heck, he could run all of HomeServices.’
It was the confidence he showed. And he said, ‘Gosh, if Jerry believes in you, then maybe that’s something you can work towards.’ And 18 years later, here we are. But I’ve just been really, really lucky to have some great mentors and some great leaders throughout HomeServices over my 18 years.
How rewarding. Do you have a particular vision in mind for the future of the company, and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices specifically?
On the broader scale of HomeServices, there’s two things that we really want to focus on. They obviously kind of go hand-in-hand, but one of those is, we really want to make sure that we work towards creating a unified backbone across HomeServices. Our past model, everyone knows has been more of a pure holding company. Buy companies, completely leave them alone. And what we want to do is retain the local branding, the local culture, everything that makes our companies very special in their unique markets.
But we also understand, real estate has shifted. We want to make sure our agents are able to compete at a national scale as well. So we want to make sure we build a backbone to where, across HomeServices, our agents and consumers are working from a unified set of tools and technologies that allows them to better connect with themselves across the country.
And this ties into the second point, which is really leaning into what has always been in our DNA, which is the full-service brokerage model of brokerage, mortgage, title and insurance. Physically, I think we do that better than anybody else because we wholly own those different operations. If you walk into one of our real estate offices, all of those services are under one roof. But we also know that real estate has been digitized and we want to make sure that experience that we physically have always provided can also be provided in that digital world as well.
So, when I’m working with a consumer as an agent, the ability to have all of those services together in one place, from a digital standpoint, also becomes part of the HomeServices model moving forward. So those are two of the really big things we want to focus on moving forward.
Very nice. I want to ask you about something that happened a couple weeks ago — there was some talk about a potential deal [between Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices] and Compass. Was there anything behind that? Were you all actually in discussions with them?
What happens is, when you work for a company the size of Berkshire and any big conglomerate like that, I’m sure people call all the time with questions, you know, ‘Are you interested in this? Are you interested in that?’ We do that at a brokerage level as well. We have conversations with folks all the time. So, where conversations turned into stories? I’m not sure.
But the good thing is, we can say there is no contemplated, no pending transaction with Compass or any third party at this point. And we’re hopeful that these management transitions that we’re making are kind of reflective of our parent entity’s complete, full faith in us moving forward.
I see. And Gino Blefari’s stepping down didn’t have anything to do with that?
Gino, to his credit, this is something that he had thought about and he wanted to make sure that he did it at the right time for the enterprise. We really went through a pretty challenging time over the last year-and-a-half — the whole industry did. Gino, to his credit, really did understand that. It was important to him to help shepherd us through those challenging moments. And as we’ve come out on the other side and we and the broader industry are kind of turning the page on that chapter of real estate and we’re moving forward under the new rules and everything else that are now put into place, he felt this was the right time to do it.
I see. And even so, the industry is continuing to experience turmoil, particularly with the private listings conversation going on now and Zillow’s new listing standards. What do you make of all this?
It’s interesting because a lot of these discussions on how a listing was entered or what the status was — and this is probably one of the biggest changes that’s happened in real estate — you’d have these MLS committees that would come up with it. But these were really interesting local discussions. You had it locally with your MLS and what you did in Dallas might look a little different than Minneapolis or New York. And these conversations have really turned national in scale. So we’re having these broad conversations on what to do with the listing, how the listing has to be labeled across the entire country around these really disparate, sometimes very different markets.
For HomeServices, our view is that the vast, vast, vast majority of sellers and listings benefit from the widest exposure possible and in most of those markets, that means putting the property into the MLS. We also know that we have some markets and some consumers that we work with in various markets where an office exclusive makes sense for them. And in our view, when we do an office exclusive, it’s because we think it’s the right thing to do. The agent and the seller have determined that is the correct way to market the property at that local level. It’s not part of a broader national push that every property should be marketed under some type of certain system.
So we understand the need for office exclusives. We believe the vast majority of properties should have the widest exposure.
The one thing we want to make certain is that, sometimes saying the property is on-market gets conflated with being on the MLS. And the MLS is a really big, important part of the market and in some of our cities, it’s the biggest part of the market. But what we don’t want to have happen and what I think the DOJ is most interested in is, it’s not whether a property is listed exclusively or on the MLS, it’s do the rules create an artificial moat or barrier to competition?
What we want to make sure is that Clear Cooperation does not create a moat around the MLS that keeps them from innovating, keeps them from competition. We as brokerages have to compete every day with a new model that comes out and you either sharpen your tools or you fall by the wayside. MLSs are really, really good at what they do. They’re excellent data aggregators. They’re a great open marketplace. But there are other vendors out there who are trying to get in that space and might have some new way of doing something that would be really great for consumers and agents. We just want to make sure that these rules, Clear Cooperation or otherwise, don’t create these moats that prevent innovation and competition within different segments of our industry. I think that’s what the DOJ is most interested in and what they’re still looking at.
I wanted to ask too — there have been so many policy changes in the industry lately. Do you think NAR is handling all this in a helpful way?
I’ve had the opportunity to be in several meetings with Nykia Wright and her team. Three years ago, one of our agents was the president of NAR, Leslie Rouda Smith, and I was a liaison so I had a chance to be a little more intimately involved than I have typically been in the past. I do believe the association is always trying to do what’s in the best interest of its members, what’s in the best interest of consumers out there.
I know what Nykia walked into was a big task, right? I mean, there was obviously cultural reforms that had to happen while also trying to manage through litigation and then what were going to be the business changes out of that.
So having gone through that herself as a business, I admire anyone who comes out on the other side of that and she’s been very forthright and honest, I think she’s trying to do what’s best. I know she’s making changes within the association. So I think she deserves the leniency that I think we’ve given to her to get through these changes and best position NAR as a leaner association that is more focused on driving what is right for its members and for the consumer.
Any thoughts on the spring market?
We just got some data yesterday, at least within HomeServices, and we’ve noticed that our pending [sale]s are finally above what they were in 2024, so that’s an encouraging sign that we’re seeing for the first time — that kind of pending numbers eclipse.
We’re tracking closings to see if they follow that same trend line. So, the spring market certainly is in effect at this point, and it looks to be — again, it’s all relative to what we’re comparing it to — but it does seem to be, within our companies, to be a little bit stronger spring market than what we had last year.
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