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On Feb. 22, RE/MAX LLC revealed in its fourth quarter earnings report that it would be parting ways with its president of three years, Nick Bailey, and replacing him with Amy Lessinger, who at the time was the senior vice president of region development.
Lessinger was announced as president as RE/MAX announced its sixth consecutive quarter of falling revenues — a phenomenon that is not unique to RE/MAX, with real estate transactions down across the industry.
Since assuming the role, Lessinger has focused her efforts on stabilizing RE/MAX’s falling agent count and recapturing the franchisor’s No. 1 market share. Inman caught up with her to discuss her first few months on the job.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: Tell me a bit about your background and the work you did before becoming president.
Amy Lessinger: I joined when I was 26, 26 years ago, so back in 1998. I was an agent and I went on to become a team leader and then, in 2005, we bought our first brokerage, and we built that with partnerships to three offices with 130 agents, which was awesome.
We sold that back in 2020 and had the opportunity to come here and use all of that experience to impact our leadership team, so I joined RE/MAX LLC as the vice president of regional development. At that point, I was in charge of a small team overseeing the West; about 18 months later, I was promoted to overseeing the United States and a team of about 65. And then, in February 2024, I was named as President.
How has your transition to president been?
It’s so amazing, you know, I’ve been a part of this network for so many years and pretty much my responsibilities are to drive the business both globally, worldwide, overseeing the delivery of all our tools, our support and our services to our franchisees and agents as well as, of course, setting the vision for the brand going forward.
During your recent keynote, you stated your goal to recapture RE/MAX’s number one market share. Would you say that’s your No. 1 priority as president right now?
Absolutely. Our vision is to be the worldwide real estate leader, that is first and foremost, and that trickles into being No. 1 in every market that we serve. And so that is our dominant focus — providing that growth and giving our affiliates the most competitive advantages to succeed, no matter what the market conditions are.
Could you expand on some of the specific actions the company is taking to recapture that market share?
Two of the top priorities are pretty clear: stabilizing and growing U.S. agent count is super important, and I think where our biggest opportunity is there is to continue to help our brokers and our agents lean into the RE/MAX value proposition.
What that means is that when we help our agents lean into the tools, the technology and the support that we offer, what we have found is that leads to greater opportunity for agent productivity. When they become more productive, they become more professional, and that ultimately leads down the pathway to agent success.
And then, of course, innovation becomes key as well as adaptability. All of that is going to be a key because, obviously, you want to innovate and adapt as you go forward because you have different opportunities.
Another thing you mentioned during your keynote was the MAX/Tech platform. What are the adoption rates looking like for that platform?
I’m not prepared to give you specific rates of adoption today, but what I can tell you is that it has been enormously well-received. As with everything, adoption is truly how you gain success in leveraging a tool like that and our adoption rate well exceeds your norm for the industry standard, so that’s really exciting for us.
However, with anything, adoption takes time, and we have more opportunity there to help our affiliates truly lean in and leverage that platform, because the platform is designed to help them work smarter, not harder, and help them do more in less time.
RE/MAX is one of the brokerages that settled the commission lawsuits out of court early on. Has there been any noticeable impact from that?
Bottom line, we think that it was a great decision. If we hadn’t settled, our affiliates would be facing the same liability that affiliates of Home Services of America are, and, in addition, without our settlement in place, about 10 of our RE/MAX brokerages that exceed that $2 billion mark would be left unprotected.
So we feel very strongly that our decision to settle and focus our efforts on helping our agents succeed, no matter what marketplace conditions are dictating, was our key focus, and so we think our decision was a good one.