The owner of a number of Bay Area Keller Williams Realty franchises is renaming his group, uniting offices in Northern and Southern California under the same marketing umbrella.
KW SF Bay Area offices — located in San Francisco, Napa, Burlingame, Oakland, Los Gatos and Palo Alto and owned by The Cunningham Group’s owner, Rick Cunningham — will now fall under the umbrella of KW Advisors. Cunningham owns about 20 KW market centers in California and Hawaii and just united 15 of them under the new brand late last week.
Nicole Aissa heads the San Francisco area — which stretches from Napa to Palo Alto — while Tina Jones oversees the East Bay and is based in Oakland, Cunningham said.
Cunningham told me he instituted the rebranding — specifically with the name “Advisors” — because he’s being selective about the agents he hires and provides with back-end legal support.
“Consumers now are expecting a much higher level of education, experience and results from their agents,” he told me.
The rebranding of his existing brokerages is also being done because his agents are doing more business outside of their local areas, Cunningham said.
“Real estate is not so hyperlocal anymore,” he said. “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, who is based in the Los Angeles area, also said he does billions of dollars of commercial real estate every year for Keller Williams and wanted to make sure his commercial agents also had a brand that worked for them.
He said KW Advisors is very growth-minded right now and that he just took on a new Palo Alto office and is growing by a clip of about 16 agents per month.
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 of offices from Napa to Carmel. That collective included about 400 real estate agents serving San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
Keller Williams Peninsula Estates was No. 8 on the San Francisco Business Times list of Bay Area residential real estate brokerages List, with $2.74 billion in sales volume in 2021. Keller Williams San Francisco was No. 16, with $1.19 billion in sales volume last year.
In 2004, Cunningham was recruited by Keller Williams Realty as the first core agent/investor of the Hollywood Hills office, and from there he founded The Cunningham Group, a real estate team within Keller Williams.
Headquartered in Austin, Keller Williams Realty is one of the largest real estate companies
in North America and has other California brokerages that are not part of Cunningham’s rebrand.