Above, Alex Vidal, right, and John Featherston at RISMedia’s CEO Exchange. Photo by AJ Canaria.
Five months after the April announcement of the Real Brokerage acquiring the iconic REMAX brand, Alex Vidal, former president of ERA Real Estate, was announced as the new president of REMAX in September.
Bringing nearly three decades of experience in the real estate industry to his new post, Vidal recently sat down with RISMedia Founder and CEO John Featherston at the company’s 38th annual CEO & Leadership Exchange in Washington, D.C., where he shared insights into the aftermath of the mega deal, and how he plans to balance REMAX’s deeply loyal broker and agent base with the expectations surrounding the technology and resources the acquisition promises to deliver.
John Featherston: What was it about the opportunity to lead REMAX at this particular moment in its history that made you decide it was the right move for you?
Alex Vidal: There are inflection points in your career where when you’re presented with an opportunity that’s once in a lifetime, to be able to lead a top brokerage or real estate franchise system…how do you say no? It was an opportunity of a lifetime. There’s 180,000 agents in the combined company, and 150,000 are with REMAX. And so if we succeed, and we will, it’s a very big success story.
JF: In your conversations with REMAX brokers and agents, what are you hearing from them about how they see their future with the organization, and what are their biggest questions or concerns?
AV: I see a group of agents who are passionate–and that’s putting it lightly–about the brand and what the brand represents and who’s associated with the brand. I think that maybe there’s some polishing that needs to be done to the brand, but when you look on the outside at the consumer–just in the United States and Canada, we do almost 900,000 transactions a year–the consumer doesn’t know that we’ve been bought or what’s going on or that there’s been leadership changes.
And so (brokers and agents) see an opportunity now that they have…a leadership team that doesn’t believe in leading from the C-suite. For us, the opinion is the agents and the brokers are the boss because they’re the ones generating the revenue to the company. The partnership is with the fastest-growing real estate company in the world, Real, and what is undoubtedly the biggest and most powerful brand in REMAX…it’s going to be explosive.
JF: You’ve emphasized that REMAX isn’t going to rush changes simply to show that something is happening. What are the key areas you’re evaluating right now and how will you prioritize which changes to make first to ensure people are positioned to do their best work?
AV: There’s always that unsettling feeling in the beginning (of an acquisition) and maybe we haven’t come out and said, ‘Hey, this is exactly what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it and when we’re going to do it.’ But what we’ve learned is oftentimes leadership would either release things that weren’t working or weren’t working properly, just to be able to say that they did something.
For us, we’re not knee-jerk reacting to the ones that are raising their hand, which is only a few, who are saying, ‘Oh, we need this and we need this now.’ It’s like, let’s take a minute. Let’s figure out what’s working, what’s not working. What do we need to remove? Where do we need to add? Where do we have the ability to plug in and make their lives better and help them make more money? And then also from an employee standpoint, who do we have on our bus within the REMAX network in terms of the pure REMAX employees? Are they in the right seat? And then more importantly, are we putting them in a position to be able to do their best work? And so we’d rather do that than just try to rush things out there.
JF: Tell us about your relationship with Tamir Poleg (CEO, Real REMAX) and how the two of you are working together to align your respective visions for REMAX’s future.
AV: One of the things I love about Tamir is he has zero fear. To be able to lead in this industry, no matter what’s happening with rates, no matter what’s happening with the economy, you have to be able to be passionate about what you’re doing and go all in. And he’s willing to go all in. What I love about my relationship with him is we tell each other the way it is. There’s f-bombs and there’s hugs and there’s jokes galore. It’s as if I was running a company with my best friends and there’s no corporate BS. Tamir will get his hands dirty just as much as anybody else. And it’s really cool. We have a leader and partner that is not saying ‘Go out and do this.’ He’s actually in the trenches with us asking our broker/owners, ‘Hey, what are we doing right? What did we do wrong?’ He’s asking the same question I’m asking our broker/owners, which is, ‘If you were president of REMAX, what would you do?’ And so our relationship…it’s awesome.
JF: For REMAX brokerage owners, there’s a strong sense of loyalty to the brand and what it represents. How do you plan to preserve that loyalty while also navigating the changes ahead and giving brokers confidence in where the organization is headed?
AV: Well, I think it’s just being okay (with) sitting in uncomfortable situations sometimes. The biggest thing we get is, ‘When are we getting the tech’ or ‘What’s going to happen with this or what’s going to happen with that?’ And the reality is we don’t have the answers instantly sometimes, but we’ll have the answers probably within a week or two. But we’re okay telling somebody we don’t know. I think as a leader, you have to be willing to take the hits and trust yourself enough to say, ‘I don’t know, but what I do know is when it comes out, you’re going to look back and be like, oh, got it. It makes sense.’ …being able to say, ‘I don’t have the answers because we don’t want to knee-jerk and do it wrong. We want to do it right. So give us an opportunity.’
JF: I’ve heard from many of your franchisees that they’re excited about the technology this acquisition brings and believe it could be a real catalyst for growing their businesses. At the same time, they’re now in a relationship with Real, a company that competes with them every day—something they’ve never experienced with a parent organization before. How are you addressing those concerns?
AV: I actually don’t think Real is a direct competitor to what REMAX does. And I’m going to equate it to nothing that has to do with real estate.
I was running with my son on the Katy Trail in the middle of Dallas, and there was somebody wearing a ‘virtual 5K’ t-shirt. And I thought to myself, I would never want to do a virtual 5K. Why would I want to do a race and I’m not around people? But there are people that are built that way. And so for me, Real is that company where somebody’s okay being completely virtual, knowing that they’re supported by the tech. They don’t want the oversight or the branch manager or the sales meeting or the brick and mortar and all that. I want to be surrounded by people. I want to feel the energy. And so I don’t look at Real and REMAX as competitors because it’s who wants to run the virtual 5K and who wants to be the person running the marathon with 10,000 other runners. The question becomes…what can we learn from Real (that) is going to make our race around 10,000 people better?
JF: How are you closing out this first year with REMAX? What are you going to be doing over the next three months to ensure you’re going into 2027 the right way?
AV: The first thing is listening. My number one KPI (key performance indicator) is growth and it’s not Real-REMAX’s growth. It’s not Real’s growth. It’s REMAX’s growth. We have 150,000 agents throughout the REMAX system. They’re already the highest-producing agents in the world, but just because they’re the highest producing agents in the world doesn’t mean they’re not capable of doing more. So what can we do there? What can we do to help our existing franchisees recruit more? What can we do to grow from an M&A and what can we do to grow from a conversion perspective?
I also have to meet with all of our employees, which are a lot, while I’m meeting all of our different brokers and just really making sure that we are supporting, that we have the team in place and I am using technology and systems to free them up to do their best work to support our franchisees and our agents in the marketplace.
This is a long game. We’re not going to turn REMAX around in a day. And I’m okay sitting in that ugly hair phase to get to where we’re going to be. But I know what it looks like on the other side of an acquisition because I was with Compass for eight months during that acquisition, and I also know that it’s totally possible to turn a brand around. We did that at ERA, and ERA was the fastest and most explosive brand growing in that building by the time I left.
JF: You’re on the road, constantly going out and shaking the hands of the agents, team leaders and brokerage owners who are part of the organization, and you’ve taken the lead from Dave Liniger (Chairman and Co-Founder of REMAX) to go out and re-energize the brand. And I wish you a lot of luck.
AV: Thank you. What an agent does is no different than what a branch manager does, and that’s no different than what a franchisor does. If you’re on a listing presentation and there’s a thousand things you can do to get a home sold, but the seller only cares about these three, why are you going to talk about the other 997 things? So for us, I don’t necessarily need to do a thousand things. I’d rather do a lot less and do more of a lot less. And we figure that out by talking to those who are actually using the tech or using the systems or using whatever it is in the field. When (the feedback) is, ‘Hey, we really want this,’ we’re going to pressure test it with other brokers, figure out if they want it as well. And if that’s a yes, it still needs to solve for two things. It needs to solve for the ability to help our agents make more money, and more importantly, help our agents live a better life.
