HomeServices of America CEO Chris Kelly charts new strategy for 2026

For both HomeServices of America and Chris Kelly, 2025 was a year of change. 

The changes began in April, when Kelly, an 18-year veteran of the firm, was appointed CEO, after Gino Blefari, who had led the company since 2019, stepped down and transitioned into the position of chairman emeritus. 

In the months after Kelly’s appointment, HomeServices of America announced several leadership appointments, including Alex Seavall adding the title of chief operations officer to his existing title of chief financial officer. Candace Adams was promoted to fill Kelly’s vacated role of executive vice president. Renee Gonzales as named vice president of core services integrations, which is a new role, and Jimmy Burgess became as the firm’s first ever chief coaching officer. 

HousingWire recently caught up with Kelly to discuss all of the changes at HomeServices this past year and what is in store for 2026. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Brooklee Han: It has been about eight months since you took the helm at HomeServices. Can you tell me a bit about how these first eight months have gone?

Chris Kelly: It has gone very well, and I think there are two main reasons. One is that I’ve been part of the organization going back to 2007, so I didn’t have to feel my way around a new enterprise or new people. I’ve had the chance to work with so many of our employees and get to know them over the last 18 years, [so] there is a degree and familiarity and comfort with each of them. That has certainly helped to make the transition that much easier.

The second thing is that we moved quickly to establish a team. I have always found that having a team is critically important because there is only so much that any one person can do. It is always about the team. 

What this meant in practice is that we saw a number of people step into new or expanded roles within our executive team and that has allowed us to [move] quickly on our goals and objectives by getting everyone in place within a couple of months of me being named CEO.

BH: You definitely moved quickly with those appointments. I think most were announced by mid-June. What are some of the things that you and the team were excited to accomplish this year? 

Kelly: This year, we were able to start transitioning from past initiatives and goals to where we think the industry is going and where we at HomeServices need to be positioned for the future. 

In May, we gathered all of our team together in person to walk through where we were and where we needed to go. How do you turn the page on three or four years of what felt like crisis mode that we as a company and the industry had been in? We stayed in that mode for too long, and it was creating burnout. We weren’t ever really moving forward because we were just reacting to everything in the moment.

We got back together in November in person to review all the work we had done on some key initiatives. It was good to see that we’ve been working from the ground up. We put together numerous working groups composed of our operating company leaders, business segment leaders, IT and HR, and we work together to identify where we can go forward with HomeServices and where we need [focus].

We also found that we need clarity around our goals and that we need to do less, but better. We can’t chase around every tiny penny. [We must] determine what we think the most important things are for our business and our model and then lean into that. 

As a result, we created several initiatives that are in progress that we will execute on in 2026 to really position ourselves for a lot of success moving forward.

BH: Looking ahead to 2026, with those initiatives in mind, what are some of your big areas of focus? 

Kelly: One of the first things is something I initially said when I became CEO and that is that we really need to go back to the DNA of HomeServices. That is being a full-service model and what we call internally, the complete real estate experience. I think the industry is diverging in two different ways right now.

There will be a model for certain types of agents and consumers that is based on low cost — so virtual, low-fee, cloud based — and then there is another direction emerging which is the full-service model that is focused on creating ecosystems where the consumer and the agent can get everything they need to complete a home transaction in one place. That is what we were founded on and we have had those capabilities since our founding in 1998, but we need to bring those forward into the digital age.

It is about taking that next step forward, having mortgage, title, and insurance that are owned by our company and staffed by actual employees on our team, and now making sure all of those different components can work together more closely. 

An example of this is that our mortgage, title, insurance and brokerage segments were very well aligned in mission and culture, but if a consumer came through one channel that data didn’t automatically transfer over to another channel, even if they were working with both a HomeServices loan officer and real estate agent. We are creating a mechanism that enables us to introduce all of these other services to a consumer in the HomeServices ecosystem at the right time in their transaction.

BH: There has been a lot of buzz around end-to-end transaction platforms this year, especially after Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin. What is your take on competition within this space?

Kelly: I think you have HomeServices and other similar companies on one side and then you take Rocket-Redfin and Zillow on another. Everyone is trying to get to the same point, [an] incredibly seamless, intuitive ecosystem for the consumer to buy and sell real estate.

The reason I put them on different ends of the spectrum is that we’re coming at it from a different starting point. Their starting point has been technology first — very much digital and not a lot of human interaction. We’re starting where we already have an incredible team of actual humans and now we are layering in the technology side of things to make their jobs easier and to meet agents and consumers in the digital space they are so often in today. 

If I’m picking which side of the spectrum I want to be on. I’d much rather be on our side because, at the end of the day, I believe the human relationship — in person — still absolutely matters in the real estate transaction. If you don’t already have that human capital deployed across the field, I think it will be a hindrance to getting to where you want to go. 

BH: As you said, the industry has been in a crisis mode of sorts over the past few years and there is still a lot of noise and chatter today. How are you working to tune out some of that noise and focus on what you need for future growth?

Kelly: On a certain level, you just can’t ignore it. I think our job for our agents and the consumers is to pay attention to some of that background noise to make sure that we don’t fall victim to thinking something will never come to fruition.

What we talk to our agents about is making sure that our communications and messaging to the consumer is not reinforcing things that probably don’t matter to them. What I’ve realized, even with people in my own family, is that they just want to know how to buy and sell a house. We are focused with our agents on how they can better serve consumers. 

One of the biggest traps that we can fall into is continuing to look just within our own industry for opportunities to be better. I think the best companies are always ones that are not just benchmarking against their peers, but against a broader pool. We think we should set the bar higher, so we are looking at companies out there in any industry that are delivering the best customer experience. 

BH: Speaking of all the noise this year, what were the primary storylines you were following? 

Kelly: I think a lot of the stuff we care about consumers could care less about and a lot of that this year was all of the M&A. 

M&A presents great opportunities for growth, but when a lot of it happens, a sameness starts to spread in the industry. There is a real opportunity for every company to look internally and say, ‘How do we be different from this homogeneous sameness that is spreading across our industry through all of these mega acquisitions?’ It is a chance to be different and remain different, so we want to [avoid] following that same course. 

BH: Another big storyline this year is the discussion surrounding Clear Cooperation and private listing networks. What are your thoughts on this?

Kelly: When it comes to the lawsuits and the legal battle between Compass and Zillow, I’m a bit jaded because I’m a recovering lawyer. With litigation like this, I rarely have seen it turn into something positive. Instead, it’s a drain on resources and ends up distracting you from some of your broader goals. I do understand from both sides why these fights are happening, but I don’t think it will actually end up resulting in anything that is beneficial for any of the parties involved.

Specifically on exclusive listings, our stance remains the same, which is that we feel we should not need regulations to tell us to do the right thing. There are certain instances where an exclusive or an off-market, private listing makes sense, but the vast majority of the time it doesn’t make sense. The fact that we need regulation from either the national or local MLS level to tell us to do the right thing, I find to be disturbing and concerning. 

If enough firms decide to go down the exclusive route, everyone else will and now, as a consumer, I’ll have to go to 10 to 15 different websites or brokerages to find out what is actually for sale.

We are always worried about the stickiness between the consumer and the agent, but I think that would be one of the things that actually starts separating the agent from the consumer, because now it is no longer easy to work with an agent since you’ll have to work with several to see what is for sale.

I hope everyone is smart about this and doesn’t look at the short-term gain of potentially double-ending more deals, for how this could change things 10 years in the future. 

BH: Looking at the big picture in 2026, is there anything for the industry in general that you are really paying attention to?

Kelly: With our agents, we are focusing on not perpetuating this false belief with consumers that they shouldn’t be doing anything until interest rates reach a certain level. Rates seems to have stabilized in that 6% range, which if you average out for the past 30 years, is about where things should be.

We expect rates to stay there over the next few years unless something big happens, so we don’t want to be caught in making a big deal about every little change or drop.

We know the vast majority of home purchases are not mere financial decisions, they’re life-based circumstances, they’re goal-driven, and there are a lot of ways to accomplish the consumer’s desires to be homeowners or sell a home regardless of what the market is doing.