The owner of a string of Keller Williams Realty franchises in the Bay Area has placed a new emphasis on providing advice.
Rick Cunningham – who owns KW offices in San Francisco, Napa, Burlingame, Oakland, Los Gatos and Palo Alto – is renaming his group under the umbrella KW Advisors, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
Cunningham, who heads the Los Angeles-based The Cunningham Group, owns 20 KW offices in California and Hawaii and has united 15 of them under the KW Advisors brand.
He has rebranded with the name “Advisors,” he said, because he’s being choosy about the agents he hires and to whom he provides back-end legal support. Also, he’s rebranding because agents are doing more business outside of their local areas.
“Real estate is not so hyperlocal anymore,” Cunningham told the Business Times. “I don’t want to call it KW San Francisco when they have clients who are buying second homes in Napa and they think they can’t use their agent. The reality is they can.”
Cunningham said he does billions of dollars of commercial real estate every year for Keller Williams and wanted to make sure his commercial agents had a brand that worked for them.
He said KW Advisors is very growth-minded, having taken on a new Palo Alto office. It’s adding 16 agents – now called advisors – each month.
“Consumers now are expecting a much higher level of education, experience and results from their agents,” Cunningham said.
Keller Williams Realty, based in Austin, is one of the largest real estate companies in North America. It has other brokerages in California that aren’t part of the Cunningham rebrand.
In 2004, Cunningham was recruited by Keller Williams as the first core agent/investor of the Hollywood Hills office. From there he founded The Cunningham Group within Keller Williams.
In 2020, Keller Williams Realty formed KW SF Bay Area, a collective that brought together agents and operations from KW San Francisco, KW Peninsula Estates and The Cunningham Group’s network from Napa to Carmel. That collective included about 400 real estate agents serving San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
The Keller Williams Peninsula Estates office did $2.74 billion in sales last year, while Keller Williams San Francisco did $1.19 billion in sales.
– Dana Bartholomew
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