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One of New York City’s top-producing teams grew big enough during its time with Compass that it’s branching off and starting its own firm under the white labeling brokerage, Side.
Nearly every member of the team followed Louis Belisario and Joe Cruz to launch Revived Residential and Revived Commercial, Cruz and Belisario told Inman on Friday.
As the Belisario Cruz Team, the group was fourth overall on the list of New York’s real estate teams with over 20 agents, according to RealTrends, with $155 million in sales volume. The team leaders said in an interview they had grown big enough under the Compass brand that they were ready to strike out on their own.
“We felt that our brand and our reputation was strong enough in the industry to take this venture on and kind of run it ourselves,” Belisario said. “At Compass, you’re kind of in a big box brand, which is great, [but] we felt that our names and reputation at this point in our career, we didn’t need that to leverage business anymore.”
Belisario, Cruz and their team had been with Compass since 2018. Cruz said the team was No. 1 for volume in Brooklyn. All but one member — who Belisario said had been with Compass long before joining his team — left Compass with Belisario and Cruz.
“The vote of confidence on that was the most meaningful part of our move,” Belisario said.
“The risk is obviously there, but the excitement and the positivity is really what we’re focusing on,” he added. “We have the know-how to do it. We are totally excited about it.”
Belisario and Cruz made the announcement in an Instagram post on Thursday, which was also announced via a New York City newswire.
Side will act as the broker of record for Revived Residential and Revived Commercial, and Belisario and Cruz are the broker-owners.
“Now we actually have ownership of our own team,” Cruz said. “We were already basically running our own business. Now we own it.”
“We have our own brand now and we feel the Side platform still gives us the ability to have ownership, run and operate our business, but have all the tech that we need in this era,” Cruz added.
