Why Robert Reffkin’s mother is coming to work at Compass

It was real estate agent Ruth Reffkin's birthday on Wednesday. The active Manhattan agent turned 71. And rather than thinking about retirement to spend time with her grandchildren -- whom she adores -- she started a brand new job at her son's company, Compass, a tech-driven real estate brokerage. Why not when Robert Reffkin first set up Compass in 2013? "We had a conversation when the company was still small when Robert was starting, but I wanted it to be his thing and for him not to have his mother around," she said wisely. But three years on, he and his team have built a business with 800 plus agents and 300 staff in cities including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C. -- and in the fall, his birthplace, the San Francisco Bay Area. Ruth, an agent at Rutenberg Realty NYC before this, felt it might be time to look for a new brokerage. When your own mother's name comes up Ruth's name had come up as a potential hire from some of his agents, so Robert di...