Ryan M. Schneider has been named president and chief operating officer at Realogy and has been appointed to its Board of Directors. He will become Realogy’s CEO on Dec. 31. Richard A. Smith, Realogy’s chairman and current CEO, will retire on Dec. 31 after 21 years at the company.
Michael J. Williams, Realogy’s lead independent director, will succeed Smith as chairman of the company’s Board of Directors.
Schneider joins Realogy after nearly 15 years of senior leadership experience at Capital One Financial Corporation. From 2007 to 2016, he was president of Capital One’s Card division, its largest business, where he oversaw all of Capital One’s consumer and small business credit card lines in the United States, U.K. and Canada. He managed a staff of more than 10,000 employees and reported directly to Capital One’s CEO. Under Schneider’s leadership, the Card division’s assets nearly doubled to $90 billion through organic growth and acquisitions, and net income grew to consistently be more than $2 billion a year, the company says.
He also brings franchise experience from a prior role running Capital One’s Auto Finance business. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schneider was a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he focused on financial services clients.
“Realogy benefits from a portfolio of many of the industry’s best-known brands, and as the leader in U.S. existing home sales, the company’s scale and resources are unmatched in the industry,” says Schneider.
Smith says: “As we look to the future and the company’s next phase of growth, I believe now is the right time to transition to new leadership and Ryan Schneider is ideally suited to lead Realogy forward. I was initially prepared to stay on into 2018 to help facilitate a transition of responsibilities, but I am so confident in Ryan’s proven leadership abilities and the company’s clear strategic growth plans that I believe now is the right time to accelerate my retirement to the end of this year.”
Smith has led Realogy’s business operations for the past 21 years, including 10 years at the helm of Cendant Corporation’s Real Estate Services Division, from which Realogy was formed as a spinoff in 2006.
Realogy Holdings Corp. includes brands Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Coldwell Banker Commercial, Corcoran, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty. It also owns NRT, Cartus, Title Resource Group and ZapLabsSM, an in-house innovation and technology development lab. Realogy is based in Madison, N. J.
