There's a new real estate company in town, but according to its CEO, its name is relatively unimportant. In fact, Keller Williams Realty, based in Austin, Texas doesn't follow the usual nomenclature of real estate companies, said Mo Anderson, who was in Franklin this week for the opening of the first office in the northeast. The offices are called market centers. Everyone is privy to what's going on, both in terms of business and finances. The agents work together to boost sales and enable them to benefit from a profit sharing program, not just commissions. And while Anderson doesn't like to call it such, the profit-sharing program is based on a type of multi-level system: the more recruits an agent brings in, the more his or her share in the profit sharing. In fact, Anderson said, Keller Williams isn't a real estate company at all: "We are a training and consulting company disguised as a franchise."

Herb and Ruth Taylor, who had Century 21 offices in both Framingham and Franklin, are the first Keller Williams franchises in the Northeast. They expect to branch out throughout New England, Herb Taylor said. The Century 21 franchise was expiring and the Taylors were looking for a different way of doing business, they said during the same interview in their Franklin office.

Keller Williams was started in 1983 by Gary Keller and Joe Williams. It is now operating in 15 states and will be in more than 25 states by the end on 1998, Anderson said. But most likely, there will not be another Keller Williams office anywhere near these two in Metro West: the system does not work that way, Anderson said. The market centers are only opened in high density areas, where the large sales force- usually about 50 agents- can maximize its reach. That's why you won't see an office in every town, perhaps even in every country. The office-front visibility is not important, Anderson said. "We found that people list with an agent, that the name of the company is unimportant," she said. "And that's why we promote the career of the agent." "The agent has the sphere of influence, has the relationships. People look to the agent to service their property," she said. "When I has a name-brand franchise (another big real estate company), I tried to make the agents think it was the name, but when we did 'Keller Who?' we were just as successful," she said. Not only that, when she opened the market center, a furniture company in the area named, you guessed it, Keller Williams, had just gone bankrupt.

"The name could be Dirt Realty, because the relationship with the consumer is with the agent," she said. There are other things that set the Keller Williams model, as Anderson calls it, apart from traditional real estate companies. "Our companies are agent driven, which means that the agents review the financials, know where every penny goes, know the salaries of the staff, what's spent on supplies," she said. "They are knowledgeable about the entire financial statement." That means that employees are interested in turning off the lights, she said: they don't want anything to cut into the profits because those profits are shared among the agents. There may be other firms that do profit sharing, Anderson said, "but not on the broad scope that we do it. It's an interesting model."

"The owner makes the commitment to share profits with the associates, putting them on the same side of the table. They are no longer playing tug of war over the same dollar," she explained. "The profit sharing pool, she said, is "nothing but a pool of money to say thank you to the agents, you have helped me build this company." It's based on what she calls "shoe deal." "Compare it to athletics. For year, free agents have the opportunity to strike a better deal somewhere else and have the right to enter into contractual agreements to promote products," she said.

"For years, the talented athlete had what I call the shoe deal. What Gary Keller has done in reinventing the real estate model is have a shoe deal for real estate agents, and I think that's very exciting." "The shoe deal, for some, the talented will be very, very profitable, and even when an agent has retired in the company, the shoe deal continues," she said. "If someone is killed in accident, the 'shoe deal' becomes part of the estate and continues on," she explained. The profit-sharing pool, which according to Keller Williams literature can be nearly 50 percent of all monthly net profits in excess of $11,240, is distributed through an associates' sponsorship of other associates who contribute to the profitability of a Keller Williams Market Center. "Associates, who are responsible for other associates joining a Market Center, participate in the profits of the Market Center in direct proportion to the actual closed monthly production of associate sponsored as it relates to the closed production of the Market Center," the literature states.

"Ten percent of the profit pool derived from an associate's production is distributed back to that associate and the remaining 90 percent is divided among the associate's direct sponsor into the Market Center and the six other indirect sponsors. The remaining balance is distributed to seven levels of sponsorship."

That balance is set up like an hour glass, Anderson said, with direct sponsor getting 50 percent at the top, the middle at a lower level and the end again a bit higher. This type of system, she said, encourages the best agents to join Keller Williams and then rather than work against other agents, work with them to help them work to their highest potential. "This encourages more and more to come," she said. "We want talented players to come and take new people and develop them into talent. We're willing to franchise, but we're not dying to franchise," said Anderson who also is a franchise holder. "We're motivated to develop careers, helping people develop their own business." "Recruiting becomes easier, because this package is available to the agent, and it's different than anything they've had before," Herb Taylor said. "There is an opportunity for high income, yes, to have a say in the office, to control their own destiny to some extent and to join in profit sharing." And that profit sharing spans the country.

If someone in the Franklin office helps an office in another part of the country get a recruit, even by suggesting to a distant friend they start working there, the person here would get a price of that profit sharing, Taylor continued. "It rewards people for helping them build the company," Anderson said. And they help build the company by being involved in it, she said, under a three component model that includes an administrator of the office, or rather, market center, a team leader, who is in charge of recruiting and building the business by building the agents' careers, and a leadership council. That council, which is made up of the office's top producers, oversees production and is responsible, along with the team leader, to develop strategies to make a production goal.