Trends 2025: Franchise giants, rising brokerage brands to watch
Well-known franchise brands have proven their staying power, but more brokerage brands are scaling up nationally, capturing agent and consumer attention.
Editor's note: Since 2006, the Swanepoel Trends Report has provided in-depth research and analysis to help leaders understand the forces shaping residential real estate. This exclusive series of excerpts highlights each trend featured in the 2025 report, which was released in November 2024.
The U.S. Real Estate Brand Catalog: Brands play a key role in real estate, with each evoking different perceptions and expectations — and that's by design, through marketing, culture and business practices. Franchise brands have significant reach, and many are household names. But national brokerages have grown to become some of the largest enterprises in real estate, with many taking root across the country.
The following excerpt, taken from T3 Sixty's 2025 Trends Report, identifies top franchise and national brokerage brands, while the full chapter provides a comprehensive brand catalog.
Brands play an immensely important role in real estate. Broadly, they represent the value agents and consumers place in them. Looking more closely, they also communicate the level and type of service provided, the resources offered, the costs involved and the general experience expected with the brand.
Types of real estate brands
A brand represents the value attributed to a company. This brand perception is influenced by marketing, experience with company representatives, technology, service quality and more.
In 2025, there are two primary categories of national real estate brands:
Franchise brands: Involves licensing branding and systems to owners of brokerages, which often comes with a royalty on commission income. Sometimes brokerages cover the fees; in other systems, agents also pay royalties.
Brokerage brands: The brand of a brokerage, which includes that of the company and managed by those within. Team brands live within brokerage brands. Brokerage brands can be paired with a franchise brand, stand alone, or leverage co-branding with a network such as Leading Real Estate Companies of the World (LeadingRE).
Franchise brands
Since taking root in the early 1970s, franchising has become a dominant business model of the residential real estate brokerage industry. The industry has 39 franchise brands, according to T3 Sixty's research. Based on T3's definition of a national brand — a brand that has a presence in more than 25 states — 18 of these operate nationally, while the others operate regionally, in a handful of states or in just one state.
These franchise brands include several well-known, long-standing ones such as RE/MAX, Century 21 Real Estate, Coldwell Banker Real Estate and Keller Williams Realty; a handful of newer, fast-growing national brands such as Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Christie's International Real Estate, Realty One Group, HomeSmart, Engel & Völkers and NextHome; and a cadre of regional brands in the U.S. such as Corcoran Group, Howard Hanna Real Estate, Windermere Real Estate and John L. Scott.
Collectively, franchised brokerages account for the vast share of the nation's existing home sales. Although financial information is not available for all franchisors, especially the smaller ones, affiliates of the nation's 20 largest franchise brands by 2023 sales volume did nearly $1.5 trillion in sales, approximately 46.4 percent of total existing home sales that year.
Brokerages
Brokerages are the specific entities that hold brokerage licenses, legally represent buyers and sellers in transactions, and directly operate the day-to-day duties of supporting agents and helping consumers buy and sell homes.
T3 Sixty defines a national brokerage brand as a brokerage that has owned operations under a single brand in over 25 U.S. states. Among the nation's 50 largest brokerages (by 2023 sales volume, based on T3 Sixty data), these include Compass, eXp Realty, Fathom Realty, Jason Mitchell Real Estate, Redfin and The Real Brokerage.
Some national brokerages also maintain local brokerage brands. Notable examples include HomeServices of America, which owns and operates brokerage operations throughout the U.S. via over 30 local brokerage brands, including Edina Realty, Ebby Halliday and others. Howard Hanna similarly operates under the distinct brokerage brands of its acquisitions, including Allen Tate Realtors in the Carolinas and F.C. Tucker in Indiana.
Read the full chapter to see the brand catalog: Digital and printed copies of the 2025 Swanepoel Trends Report are available for purchase at T3 Trends.
Note: T3 Sixty and Real Estate News share a founder, Stefan Swanepoel.