The residential real estate industry may not be perceived to be as digitally aggressive as Wall Street titans and multinational manufacturing conglomerates. But in reality, some of the largest, most established realty franchises, such as Re/Max and Keller Williams, have made all the right moves, pursuing digital transformations built on the cloud and primed to make the most of emerging AI opportunities.
“The only thing we have on premise, I believe, is a data server with a bunch of unstructured data on it for our legal team,” says Grady Ligon, who was named Re/Max’s first CIO in October 2022. While the Denver-based company’s cloud transformation long preceded Ligon’s arrival, with various business units adopting AWS and the IT team already developing cloud-native applications, in hiring Ligon, Re/Max’s top brass decided to “bring it all under control” of its first CIO.
