Turn up the volume on your real estate success at Inman On Tour: Nashville! Connect with industry trailblazers and top-tier speakers to gain insights, cutting-edge strategies, and invaluable connections. Elevate your business and achieve your boldest goals — all with Music City magic. Register now.
Compass CEO Robert Reffkin on Tuesday slammed the National Association of Realtors, saying the trade group props up inexperienced agents and restrains the growth of real estate’s most successful players.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL INDEX SURVEY FOR FEBRUARY
Reffkin made the comments during his company’s earnings call Tuesday, during which one of his main arguments was that in the near future the “gap between Compass and the industry will only accelerate.” However, while Compass’ earnings numbers do indicate that the company is pulling ahead of some competitors, Reffkin suggested that NAR may not benefit from the growth of companies such as his.
Robert Reffkin
“Specifically, because NAR’s revenue model is based on the number of agents in the industry paying dues, I believe they don’t want large brokerages and top agents to gain market share because it would result in less agents in the industry and less revenue from agent dues,” Reffkin said.
Reffkin later argued that “the trade group’s business is a volume business.” And policies, he said, have been designed to hold back “large brokerages and top agents,” with the result being that “NAR’s rules artificially prop up the least experienced agents and the smallest brokerages.”
He contrasted this with Compass, which he said is populated by more experienced and more productive agents — something that benefits those agents and their brokerage, but which doesn’t necessarily result in more revenue for NAR or NAR-affiliated multiple listing services.
Inman has reached out to NAR and will update this story with any comment the trade group provides.
Reffkin has over the past year become a somewhat frequent critic of NAR, with many of his critiques focusing on the trade group’s Clear Cooperation Policy. The policy requires Realtors to put listings into their NAR-affiliated MLS within a day of marketing them. Reffkin has criticized the rule on various grounds.
During Tuesday’s earnings call, he reiterated those criticisms, saying the rule “harms homeowner value by taking away homeowner choice.” He also said that a trade group in the U.S. should not be allowed to dictate how consumers market their properties, and that “consumer protection requires consumer choice and Clear Cooperation takes away consumer choice.”
However, Reffkin predicted that in 2025 Compass will benefit because “NAR will no longer be able to have anticompetitive rules that prevent large brokerages and top agents from competing freely and gaining market share.” In addition to Clear Cooperation, Reffkin also pointed to new NAR rules — which resulted from a commission lawsuit settlement and went into effect in August — as something that will benefit his company.
“The artificial market restraints that limited market share gains for the best agents and the best brokerages are now gone,” Reffkin said. “As a result, the cream will rise to the top faster than ever before in our industry, which should disproportionately benefit Compass because we have the best agents in the industry.”
Reffkin went on to say that agents come to him with questions such as “why do I have to pay NAR?” and “why is it I can’t watermark my own photos?”
At the same time that Compass has become a crusader against Clear Cooperation, it has also positioned itself as a kind of case study of what a post-Clear Cooperation brokerage landscape might look like. During a previous earnings call, for example, Reffkin compared the future of real estate listings to the video streaming industry, which is dominated by a handful of different players — Netflix, Disney+, etc. — all with their own exclusive content.
Compass sees itself as a kind of Netflix in this analogy, and Tuesday’s earnings report provided an updated look at Compass’ exclusive content — which is to say, listings that are unique to the Compass platform. The report states, among other things, that “homeowners are marketing more than 7,500 listings as a Compass Private Exclusive or a Compass Coming Soon, which are only available by working with a Compass agent or by searching Compass.com.” And as of this month, more than half of the listings Compass holds — or 55 percent — began as either a Private Exclusive or Coming Soon.
The report, citing internal company research, also argues that listings that began with exclusive pre-marketing “were associated with a 2.9 percent higher average close price compared to Compass-sold properties that were not pre-marketed in 2024.”
During Tuesday’s earnings call, Reffkin described Compass’ exclusive listings as a competitive advantage for his agents — agents who are working for a brokerage that Reffkin believes will only become bigger and more dominant over time.
“The best agents are going to thrive in the new future,” Reffkin said during the call. “They’re going to gain more market share and earn more money, which is ultimately best for the consumer. Because unlike NAR, which gets paid per agent, the consumer doesn’t want an industry of over 1.5 million agents. The consumer just wants to work with the best agents.”
