The two real estate platforms have been growing on the same trajectory at Keller Williams for more than a decade, their founders said, and during this challenging period in the industry, it made sense to combine forces.
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Teams and agent-oriented tech and agent services company Place has acquired all-inclusive platform Livian, the companies informed Inman on Thursday.
With the acquisition, Livian’s team servicing platform will now be completely integrated into the Place ecosystem. Livian’s ranks include more than 300 agents and over 50 employees.
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Adam Hergenrother
Livian founder Adam Hergenrother told Inman that both Place and Livian had been on similar trajectories for years, and as the industry has faced a growing number of challenges in the way of economic headwinds and increased industry scrutiny, it made sense for them to combine their forces.
“[Place co-founders Chris Suarez and Ben Kinney] and I have been really good friends for over 15 years,” Hergenrother said. “We’ve taken a lot of vacations together, masterminds together, personal training together, and so we both launched expansion basically in the same year. Back in 2012 was the first time we moved from our original location, and back then we called it ‘duplication.’
Chris Suarez
Place co-founder Chris Suarez said that he and Kinney began to talk with Hergenrother about the possibility of a formal partnership about five years ago, but then became more serious about the idea in the last six months.
“It feels like a very natural, unforced acquisition and partnership,” Suarez said.
“We started having conversations of what would their world look like if they had the technology tools that we were using on our platform, and I think over some long conversations with Adam of what he was building and the traction that they had up until this point, and where we were on the roadmap of delivering a solution for teams, he began to believe that his teams could get there a lot faster if in fact they were on the Place platform. So it was kind of a natural progression.”
Kinney also expressed his enthusiasm for the deal, saying in a statement, “Equally exciting is the opportunity to welcome our long-time friend, Livian founder Adam Hergenrother, along with the talented employees, agents and business owners, to our rapidly growing company.”
Place was founded at the end of 2019 by Kinney and Suarez and launched publicly in early 2020. In 2021, the company completed a Series A funding round that raised $100 million in a deal led by Goldman Sachs. At that time, the company hit “unicorn status,” or a valuation of at least $1 billion.
Ben Kinney
Livian was launched by mega team leader Hergenrother in 2021, and was born out of his rebranded Keller Williams expansion team, the Vermont-headquartered team previously known as Hergenrother Realty Group. In the fall of 2021, the company received an investment from Keller Williams, which also gave Keller Williams an ownership stake in Livian.
Hergenrother told Inman that Keller Williams relinquished its ownership stake in the company earlier this year, and was not involved in the company’s decision to partner with Place.
Hergenrother will continue to hold an executive-level position at the company, although an exact title has not been decided upon yet.
“As the industry tightens and becomes more difficult, economies of scale and having additional resources for all of our people is most important to us,” Hergenrother added. “People are lonely right now — people are just struggling in the industry and in general. This is for everybody. It’s more upbeat, [there are] more models, training, systems, tools, the ease of transactions — all those things that we can do that support our people, not only the more profitable they become, but the better life that they get to live. And that’s really important to Ben, Chris and I.”
Today, Place has partner real estate teams across 49 U.S. states and Canada supported by more than 1,000 employees. Place’s platform now also includes consumer services, like mortgage, title and escrow, and insurance products.
