RE/MAX has spent the past three years forging relationships with hundreds of multiple listing services and cleaning data — all while quietly building a new data company, it was revealed Wednesday by CEO Adam Contos at the brokerage’s annual R4 convention in Orlando.
On stage, Contos revealed the nature of the company’s data strategy for the first time and unveiled the new company, G73, which will operate under the RE/MAX Holdings umbrella.
“Everybody is fighting for data because data is valuable,” Contos said during the hybrid virtual and in-person event. “Data is the oxygen that powers a lot of our successes in the industry.”
The company’s new data play isn’t about a real estate agent’s database or book of contacts, but, instead, focused on “harnessing data from multiple sources to help us guide our decisions, cleaning it, making it more complete and turning it into a direction that is actionable,” Contos said.
Three years ago, RE/MAX launched a data firm called “Seventy3,” an homage to the year RE/MAX was founded by Gail and Dave Linger. The company was launched to consolidate RE/MAX’s data efforts and build relationships with multiple listing services because data in the real state industry is incredibly fragmented, Contos said.
“We have data coming from every which way here,” Contos said.
Contos said the project was a major undertaking, but now RE/MAX has agreements with more than 450 multiple listing services and all of those disparate feeds go into the company’s cloud server. RE/MAX processes 11,000 new listings, 248,000 new photos, 55,000 listing updates and answers 2 million queries daily.
Last year, the company took another step and acquired Gadberry Group, an Arkansas-based location intelligence data company. The acquisition gave RE/MAX access to detailed data on almost every address in America, according to Contos.
“Combine Gadberry data with MLS data and you have a competitive advantage like never before, a more complete picture,” Contos said.
RE/MAX has now combined its data firm Seventy3 with Gadberry Group to create the newly named G73, a company that powers RE/MAX entire data play.
“G73 is a tool that will build other tools,” Contos said.
G73 is now the data source that powers RE/MAX’s newly revamped consumer search site and app, which the company unveiled last year at its annual R4 conference. RE/MAX now populates new listings to its website in 7.5 minutes from the time those listings hit the multiple listing service.
“That is incredibly fast for this industry,” Contos said. “Our data is better. It’s the complete package.”
The company’s data arm is also the heart of its booj platform for agents, which the company launched 18 months ago at a conference in Chicago.
RE/MAX’s effort to build a data center for its own affiliated agents comes at a time when many across the industry are undertaking similar efforts, in an attempt to exert more control over the data being generated by the work of their own agents.
“If you’ve had concerns, and I’ve heard these, about anyone in the industry controlling your data or using your data, please set them aside. Because as part of RE/MAX, you’re not dependent on anyone for fast, clean and intelligent data anymore.”
