The Brokerage

Compass

Compass Real Estate debuted in New York in 2012 as ‘Urban Compass’ and announced funding of $8 million from an elite group of investors. At that time it was one of the largest-ever seed rounds for a startup.

Investors

By 2018, Compass had raised $1.2 billion in investment capital from Softbank, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce and LeFrak, Kenneth Chenault, Chairman and CEO of American Express, Wellington Management, IVP, Advance Publications and Founders Fund. Softbank’s $450 million investment is aligned with the company’s vision to be in every major city worldwide in the next few years.

The Softbank Vision Fund is the tech and investment firm’s nearly $100 billion fund, with partners that include the likes of Apple, Qualcomm and Foxconn, among others, who have invested in companies that they believe will be market leaders in various categories – Uber, WeWork, MapBox, Slack and now Compass. Investor Information.

Founders of Compass Real Estate

Some of what has made Compass such a confident bet with investors has been the pedigree of the two founding partners. Ori Allon, Executive Chairman, has an engineering background and has sold startups to Google and Twitter. Robert Reffkin, CEO, was Gary Cohen’s Chief of Staff at Goldman Sachs. Prior to Goldman Sachs, he worked at Lazard and McKinsey & Company and in 2005, he was appointed as a White House Fellow to serve as special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. To learn more about the company’s leadership team and their extraordinary backgrounds with companies like Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft and Trip Advisor, to name a few, please click here.

 

In 2018 Compass went from 2,100 agents to 8,000, 477 employees to 1,500, 37 markets to 122, 62 offices to 238, from 370 million dollars in revenue to 900 million, from 15 billion in sales volume to 35 billion. It is the country’s fastest-growing luxury real estate technology brokerage firm and is dominating the luxury market in 80 cities around the country.

With the increasing migration of agents from across the country to Compass Real Estate, comes the expansion of the brokerage firm’s listed properties on the company’s “Coming Soon” page. This is where agents feature their listings at least five days before they are launched on the open market – a great way for buyers to find a property before it hits the MLS or popular real estate search engines.