From a slower housing market to the industrywide business practice changes, there is no doubt that 2024 was a challenging year for real estate brokerages, but Anywhere Real Estate believes these challenges have helped to set it up for success in 2025.
The brokerage giant recorded revenue of $5.7 billion in 2024, up $56 million year over year. Despite this increase, Anywhere still recorded a net loss of $128 million, which is $31 million larger than its loss in 2023. The net loss came as transaction count dropped 3% year over year to 700,589 sides, while its average sale price rose 7% to $497,494.
These numbers are not what Anywhere wanted, but company executives were pleased to note that the brokerage recorded $125 million in cost savings in 2025.
“We generated these savings by simplifying, automating and streamlining our operations,” Anywhere CEO Ryan Schneider told investors and analysts on the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 earnings call on Thursday morning.
With Anywhere expecting the housing market to remain “challenged” due to the lack of supply putting pressure on sales, Schneider said Anywhere is looking to generate another $100 million in cost savings in 2025.
“We’re focused on new technologies and automation to new cost-saving opportunities that really didn’t exist before,” Schneider said. “We are reinforcing our commitment to permanently lowering our cost base and enhancing our earnings power.”
To achieve these cost-savings goals, Schneider said Anywhere will look to further pursue technologies that enhance productivity and performance. Schneider praised his company’s usage of artificial intelligence, including its AI integrations for its leads business as it tries to better identify and target consumers who are most likely to become buyers.
“We are now able to better match these higher-quality leads with our best-performing agents faster than before, and these leads are seeing a 40%-plus improvement in conversion rate,” Schneider said.
He also noted that Anywhere’s use of generative AI has helped to improve operational efficiencies, as Anywhere processes about 15,000 documents a day.
“With generative AI, we have the ability to process these with fewer than half the team in a fraction of the time with a significant reduction in error rates,” Schneider said. “And in our most recent pilot, we’ve seen error rates fall to as low as one in 5,000 documents processed.”
While Anywhere executives attribute the slower housing market to inspiring some of these savings and technology developments, they also chalk up the company’s growing franchisee count to the business practice changes resulting from the commission lawsuit settlements.
“The value proposition we offer to franchisees has a lot of good things in it, including the lead side, the brand side, some of the back office stuff, etc.,” Schneider said. “But, you know, there are a lot of people who really realize the power of being part of someone who can both take care of you better in litigation but also help navigate industry practices changes.”
Anywhere expects this organic growth to continue in 2025. But Schneider also said the company is ready to explore M&A opportunities this year as he expects to see a lot of industrywide consolidation.
“We’re seeing more firms looking to sell across brokerage, adjacent services and proptech. We’re well positioned to explore these opportunities, not only because of our liquidity, but we also believe our assets enable us to provide unique solutions with the most synergies, the easiest integration and ready-to-use technology,” Schneider said. “We would be excited to augment our growth through M&A opportunities at attractive economics.”
In addition to expecting consolidation in 2025, Schneider said he also anticipates that the debate over the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) Clear Cooperation Policy will continue to rage on. Unlike other companies that are advocating for CCP to remain as is or for it to be repealed, Anywhere is calling for reforms of CCP.
“Our position is that the rule should be relaxed to provide more flexibility to sellers. However, we oppose a blanket repeal as we believe transparency and access to all available inventory are in the best interest of both sellers and buyers,” Schneider said.
“Those advocating for full repeal are primarily advancing their own interest, as there’s clearly an opportunity for players with listing scale to create private off-market listing networks that only select agents can access, which clearly could enhance near-term economics. We believe this is bad for consumers, and we think it’s best to do what’s in the long-term interest of the consumer.”
But Schneider noted that if the industry moved to private listing networks, Anywhere, with its massive scale, would be well positioned to capitalize on this change.
“We actually have the most listings in the industry across our brands,” he said. “If the market evolves to favor private off-market listing networks, we are ready to capitalize, and we will ensure our agents and franchisees are never disadvantaged.
“The scale of Anywhere offers significant benefits, and we’re prepared to leverage all of our advantages to make sure our agents and franchisees have everything they need to succeed in a private listings world.”
Schneider noted that Anywhere has its own government relations team in Washington, D.C., to advocate for this and other issues. “Obviously, our trade group has some issues and we’ve got to take more leadership,” he said.
Looking forward, Anywhere executives are looking forward to a year of growth in 2025. This could be fueled by its late 2024 launch of Reimagine 25
“We launched Reimagine 25 to transform how we operate as a company going forward, seizing new opportunities to unlock by generative AI and other emerging technologies to deliver better experiences for our customers faster and at lower cost,” Schneider said. “Reimagine 25 enables us as early adopters to jumpstart a more innovative future and will serve as the foundation of our continued efforts to lower our cost base.”
