Real estate brokerage and services company Anywhere Real Estate announced last week that it is appointing Tony Kueh as its first chief product officer. In his new role, Kueh will lead the company’s product strategy, innovation roadmap and technology investments.
The Anywhere franchise, formerly known as Realogy, includes brokerages, consumer programs, lead generation, relocation, and title settlement services.
Prior to joining Anywhere Real Estate, Kueh’s 23-year-old career spanned numerous leadership positions, including advisor at EQBR, investor and co-founder at MYNTD, VP of products at VMware and senior group manager at Microsoft Corporation.
Other organizations Kueh has worked for include Qualcomm Incorporated, Palm, SAP, PasswordBox, NeuStar, BluText — which Kueh founded — and MobileRQ.
“Kueh has a long history of successfully incubating and rapidly growing innovative technology businesses in a broad spectrum of areas including mobile, semiconductors, enterprise/SaaS, and AI/ML while leading cross-functional teams including product management, marketing, strategy, and engineering,” a spokesperson at Anywhere said in a statement.
Kueh said the real estate industry is “ripe” for a transformation, one in which modern design can be merged with mobile, cloud, AI and machine learning technology to improve customer and agent experiences.
“I’m very excited to lead at Anywhere and look forward to working across the enterprise, network of affiliated owners and franchisees, and the broader ecosystem to build transformative digital products,” Kueh said in a statement.
In his new role, Kueh will work in collaboration with Anywhere COO Melissa McSherry.
Prior to stepping in as COO at Anywhere, McSherry worked as SVP of global head risk and identity solutions at Visa, founder and CEO of Firinne and SVP of card partnerships at Capital One.
McSherry now leads the product, technology, enterprise marketing and customer experience teams at Anywhere.
According to recent reports, Anywhere’s 2022 Q2 earnings declined by 6% YoY to $2.1 billion, but the company has remained profitable. The company also tallied $343 million in net income for 2021. The profitability is a turnaround from its $360 million loss in 2020.
Earlier this month, the company settled a legal battle that started in 2019 with real estate brokerage Compass. In its lawsuit, Anywhere accused Compass of “unfair business practices and illegal schemes to gain market share at all costs,” including allegedly offering inflated compensation packages and encouraging new recruits to share “confidential and proprietary information.”
In February 2021, Compass filed a countersuit against Anywhere for “lying, stealing, and cheating” in order to limit Compass’ growth.