Former Sam’s Club Chief Member Officer Tony Rogers is moving to a new industry as chief growth officer of Keller Williams and its holding company Kwx, the company announced today.

The 16-year veteran of Walmart held top marketing roles for the company in China and the U.S. before most recently assuming duties as top marketer for its Sam’s Club unit. He left in February just as the club chain was launching its first Super Bowl ad and delivering strong growth, with fiscal fourth-quarter comp sales up 10.4% and membership up 9.1%.

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Austin-based Keller Williams is the world’s largest real estate company by agent count and also largest in the U.S. by units and sales volume, and it’s also on a roll. The publicly held company’s agents closed 1.3 million transactions, up 9.1%, and $532.2 billion in sales volume, up 30.6%, in the U.S. and Canada in 2021.

“I felt like I had accomplished what I was going to accomplish there” at Walmart, Rogers said in an interview. “And we have built a really good team at Sam’s Club.”

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In talking with Kwx CEO Carl Liebert and key members of the Keller family, Rogers said he was impressed by the “caliber of the people and the culture that they talked about,” which he compared to the strong culture at Walmart.

“Every industry now is being changed and disrupted by technology,” Rogers said. “Getting in and understanding how to win in that environment is really fun. And that’s one of the things I learned in retail in the last decade. And I felt that same energy here, that same, excitement, that same entrepreneurial spirit.”

Indeed, Keller Williams bills itself as a real estate technology company. Its assets include an app that incorporates a customer relationship management system for agents, as well as a recent partnership with Real Nex on a commercial real estate CRM system that includes a soon-to-be-launched auction and virtual reality platforms. So the metaverse is at hand even if the company will remain all about selling physical real estate.

But a Super Bowl ad may not be in the future, nor is a big central media budget. Indeed, iSpot.tv shows no national TV spending for Keller Williams over the past year, compared to about $7 million each for rivals Re/Max and Coldwell Banker.

“There are similarities with what I’ve done in the past, but it’s a significantly different model, because the philosophy here is so agent centric” Rogers said. “We really cede a lot of the control of the brand to the agents, and we really try to create an atmosphere where the agents can build their own brand alongside the Keller Williams brand.”