Austin, Texas-based real estate franchise Keller Williams announced on Thursday it is expanding further into Europe with a new master franchise in Germany. This marks the firm’s 18th franchise in Europe.
“Ten years since the launch of KWW, our continued rapid pace of multinational growth showcases how entrepreneurs globally are thriving at Keller Williams,” said Keller Williams Worldwide (KWW) president William E. Soteroff in a prepared statement.
Swen Nicolaus, founder, managing director and regional operating principal, will lead KW’s Germany division.
“We are delighted to be able to bring the most successful broker platform in the world to Europe’s most successful and largest economy,” Nicolaus said.
Nicolaus’s professional career spans more than two decades in the real estate and finance industries. He has held several leadership positions, including chief capital officer of digital mortgage bank Molo Finance; director of capital markets at Funding Circle in the United Kingdom; head of mortgage portfolio trading and securitizations at Computershare in the UK; portfolio manager and chief investment officer at JPMorgan Chase, and a nearly decade-long stint in various roles at Deutsche Bank.
“With Swen, we have found an ideal partner who will implement our proven systems and models, world-class training and the robust benefits of Command—our smart, multilingual CRM-plus solution to grow real estate businesses across Germany,” Soteroff said.
The franchise is the tip of the iceberg for Keller Williams, which plans to open its first market center in the second quarter of 2023 and will also focus on opening more locations in the top seven markets in the country.
According to the statement, KWW also has plans to expand into Africa, Central and South America, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia.
The company currently has 160 market centers and 4,806 agents across Europe, with master franchises in the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, France, Monaco, Poland, Greece, Czech Republic, Romania, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Albania and Switzerland, according to a press release.
Founded in 1983, KW currently has more than 1,100 offices and 200,000 associates. Since January 2021, the brokerage’s international division, KWW, grew by 20.5% with more than 18,000 agents outside the U.S. and Canada.
Per the statement, the franchise’s agents outside the U.S. and Canada closed 77,800 transactions in 2022 — up by 22.5%, and $15.7 billion in sales volume — an uptick of more than 29% from 2021.
Keller Williams and RE/MAX led the 2022 RealTrends 500 list of the top 50 one-year movers by percentage transaction sides.
