AUSTIN, TEXAS (February 15, 2016)– Keller Williams, the world’s largest real estate franchise by agent count, has named Josh Team as the company’s first chief innovation officer. Team will lead global innovation solutions and forge high-level partnerships aimed at disrupting and enhancing the home buying experience.
“We have set out on an ambitious course of innovation fueled by a deep commitment to investing in new ideas and solutions,” said Chris Heller, CEO, Keller Williams. “A visionary leader, Josh’s experience working with Fortune 50 companies is key to driving our strategic initiatives and industry partnerships.”
Working with leaders across Keller Williams, Team will lead projects aimed at envisioning and developing new platforms and solutions, scaling next-generation tools for Keller Williams and collaborating with companies and entrepreneurs on the leading edge.
“Looking for a home online is broken,” said Team. “There should be a natural experience that allows us to search in a more human and less systematic way. So, we are revisiting the whole experience.”
Central to the company’s ongoing innovation strategy are the creation of the KW Innovation Coalition and KW Labs. Keller Williams is aligning with existing innovative, cross-industry companies through the KW Innovation Coalition as a means to collaborate and innovate faster to serve shared consumers.
KW Labs will serve as a space for sharing experimental technology between agents and innovative companies of all types.
An engineering prodigy, Team has more than 17 years of experience in software engineering across multiple industries, including finance, travel and advertising. He previously served as chief innovation officer for Rapp, a marketing services agency, and as vice president of technology for Splash Media, a social media solution provider.
In 2015, Business Insider named Team one of the “30 Most Creative People in Advertising Under 30.”
“Many of us are data rich but insight poor,” Team said. “Our first and largest opportunity is to turn data into insight for our agents and then for our consumers through the agent.”
Austin-Texas based Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is the largest real estate franchise by agent count in the world with more than 790 offices and 134,000 associates across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. In 2015, Training Magazine named Keller Williams the No. 1 training organization across all industries in the world.
Since 1983, Keller Williams has grown exponentially and continues to cultivate an agent-centric, education-based, technology-driven culture that rewards agents as stakeholders. The company also provides specialized agents in luxury homes, commercial and farm and ranch properties.
For more information on Keller Williams, visit www.kw.com. (www.kw.com).
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