Real’s Remax acquisition reignites debate over the future of brokerage models

Real Brokerage has spent five years molding how some Canadian agents think about their careers, luring them one by one from competitors. 

Last week, it made waves across the industry with a single headline about a US$880 million deal to acquire Remax Holdings. 

The acquisition of the Denver-based legacy brand by the Miami-based tech-forward brokerage alludes to a question the industry has been grappling with for some time: Is the traditional brokerage playbook still the best model, and if not, how long will it last as the standard?

Real’s big move comes as a generation of agents has grown increasingly drawn to ownership, equity and passive income. Real, eXp, and a crop of homegrown upstarts have built their entire pitch around the premise of earning skin in the game.

But earning that stake takes more than simply signing on. How much agents actually benefit from the model’s biggest differentiators, like revenue sharing, stock options and tech, depends on what they put in.

Agent, recruiter… or both?

Real launched in the U.S. in 2014 and expanded to Canada in 2021. Across its network, Real has about 33,000 agents, roughly 2,500 of them spread across five Canadian provinces, with expansion planned for more parts of the country. 

Amy Youngren, founder of Toronto’s North Group, joined Real in 2022. She had been building a career at Keller Williams and was content there, but Real’s emphasis on tech and revenue opportunities for agents drew her to the emerging brokerage, she told Real Estate Magazine. 

“Real’s economic model is more lucrative,” she said. “Our agents have, and myself, have a more competitive, split and fee model, and we also then have additional income opportunities that you don’t get at a traditional brokerage model, like a stock purchase plan or revenue share options if you want to participate in them.”

In Canada, Real’s commission split is 85/15 up to a cap of $15,000.

Real offers a revenue-sharing model that pays agents from the 15 per cent commission split. Agents can unlock up to five tiers of revenue share based on the number of producing agents they directly sponsor, starting with a max of five per cent of commission for the first tier (up to $4,000 annually) per sponsored agent who meets their cap.

While the option to earn extra income by recruiting is touted by Real as a major incentive, only a fraction of agents take advantage.

“At Real, only 14 per cent of the entire company participates in the revenue share model, which just shows that first we’re focused on transactions,” she said. “The number one priority is production.”

Today, Youngren leads a team of about 20, and estimates about half a dozen of those agents actively participate in revenue sharing.

Her own position in the network is considerably larger. She has built a downline of approximately 3,200 people across Canada and the United States, roughly 70 per cent of them American. 

A handful of those agents have themselves sponsored dozens or even hundreds of others, turning the program into a meaningful secondary income. But she’s clear that kind of result is an exception, not the rule.

 “It’s hard if you want it to scale,” she said. “Most agents are focused on selling real estate and serving clients, as they should be, because that’s an agent’s primary source of income.”

The stock purchase plan is the more popular offering at Youngren’s team, with up to 60 per cent opting in, she said.

Setting up the off-ramp

Ron McIntosh left eXp in 2023 and co-founded KIC Realty as a homegrown Canadian alternative to this emerging brokerage model.

While KIC has differentiated itself in some ways – each market has a physical hub, so it isn’t entirely in the cloud, for example – its model is in the same category as Real, and has reached 170 agents across Ontario, B.C. and Alberta. 

The draw, compared to traditional brokerages, is the opportunity for an exit strategy. 

“I know people that have been at the same brokerage for 40 years. They have no equity in the company, and they have no residual income or a retirement plan,” he said. “We’re offering both,” he said.

Similar to Real, about 15 per cent of KIC’s agents are actively recruiting, McIntosh shared.

“Most agents are going to bring on one or two of their friends,” he said. 

“I think a lot of people come over here with the perception that it’s easy to recruit, and they’re going to get hundreds of agents and make a lot of money in the revenue share, but it’s a lot more difficult than people anticipate.”

Selling the tech stack

Real’s technology platform, called reZEN, is designed to manage an agent’s entire business from a single app, including transactions, marketing, broker communication and financial tracking. Alongside it is HeyLeo, an AI assistant the company has spent years developing, which agents can query about their business, their deals, or their documents the way they might ask a question of a colleague.

Youngren says these tools “absolutely” save time, particularly for team operations. Her administrative staff, she says, have found it meaningfully cuts down on back-and-forth. For individual agents, the pitch is: everything they need to run their business, accessible from their phone.

While many brokerages are buying off-the-shelf tools with these features, Youngren notes that Real tech is proprietary.

Real CEO Tamir Poleg told HousingWire in a recent interview the company intends to offer reZEN to Remax franchisees on an optional basis, not as a mandate. 

He noted that many Remax broker owners are struggling with compressed margins because they are paying for multiple external tools that are not integrated, and still rely on manual processes.

Betting on Real

Part of what made the transition from KW to Real easier, Youngren argued, is that North Group’s brand does most of the heavy lifting with clients. Real’s lesser-known image in the Canadian market was never much of a liability, she says, because each agent is their own brand.

In fact, she preaches agents ought to build a brand so big that it doesn’t matter what team they’re on or what brokerage they’re with. 

But if consumers did show curiosity about the Real brand, the alignment with Remax “knocks it out of the park.”

For Youngren, Real’s acquisition of Remax was a confirmation of a hunch she had years ago about the direction the industry was headed in. 

She was among the earliest adopters in Ontario, the second team in the province to join Real, and says she hasn’t looked back.

“It’s truly been the greatest business decision of my entire career,” she says. “(The Remax acquisition) announcement just reaffirmed that again.”

Whether a combined network of 180,000 agents will reshape the broader industry remains an open question.

For Real, buying one of the most recognized names in real estate is a significant bet that legacy brand equity still matters, even as its very model argues the opposite. Real said it bought Remax for the brand power and worldwide network that would take a Herculean effort to organically scale to. 

McIntosh sees room for everyone.

“I think there is room for the more entrepreneurial-minded agent that does want ownership and residual income, and then I think there’s room for those agents that just want to pay a transaction fee for all their deals,” he said. “There’s room for all of that.”

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