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CHICAGO — Thad Wong had his eye on Compass, but he needed to wait for the brokerage to pass the test.
After more than two decades creating, growing and nurturing @properties, Wong set a specific stock price at which he would engage Compass in a merger.
But until the stock hit that price, Wong was committed to winning.
Speaking exclusively with Inman from his art-filled Goose Island office with windows overlooking the former printing plant for the Chicago Tribune, Wong recounted specific moves he and co-founder Mike Golden made in the 25 years they spent building the No. 1 brokerage in Chicagoland, marketing decisions that boosted the visibility of the brand, and a high-stakes pursuit of one of the most iconic luxury brands in the world.
Wong helped launch @properties in 2000, just four years after getting into real estate. He and Golden grew it into a powerhouse that generated just under $570 million in 2023.
Wong was a vocal critic of Compass in recent years, saying in an interview from January 2023 that it had “done so much damage to the industry.”
About two years later, Wong and Golden inked a deal to sell all of their companies to Compass in a whopping $444 million deal.
There were plenty of reasons to team up with his former competitor, he said. And the deal didn’t signal any plan to move on from real estate.
“Retirement isn’t a game plan. I don’t think I’ll ever retire,” he said. “Not because I’m a workaholic, but because I think I have a very balanced life.”
In a sweeping interview, Wong talked about his pursuit of Christie’s International Real Estate, his business strategy, outlook on the real estate industry, and how, he says, there could never be another @properties today.
This is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and brevity.
How many leaps of faith were there along the way? Were there many times when you felt like you were stepping out on a limb?
No, because I always felt like we could do it. In a lot of these markets, when you talk about expanding an office, you can do it around a leader, right? So, for instance, Hinsdale. I would have never grown into Hinsdale without Tricia Riberto. We never would have been No. 1 in Arlington Heights without Stephanie Szigetvari.
In some markets, there are specific leaders that you take in order to open offices. In Elmhurst, we got a phenomenal bank building that gave us significant office space that was great, high exposure and really affordable, so that we could have a large office space when other offices were squeezing and making it smaller.
Sometimes it’s a top producer or team. And usually it might not be the most significant producer, but it’s the most well-liked. So I don’t really feel like we ever opened an office, and we were worried.
The affinity for the @ brand in Chicago is wild. I can’t think of a brokerage in other cities where the agents have the brokerage’s bumper sticker on their cars. There are @ murals and the Love brand all over. Who was the mastermind behind it?
We’ve had three different CMOs in the history of @. I’ve worked super closely with all of them.
I wanted to have the branding and the messaging that would be in all the communities that we served. That if you saw an @ sign, that alone would represent @properties. So if I wanted to own the @ sign, that would be the easiest, least expensive way to do it.
We gamified it with our agents, where we would take photos of cars. We’d give $100 when it was spotted. You’d put those magnets on, and then it became a sense of pride.
It’s pretty ballsy to take over the @ symbol. Did you think that? Like, we’re just going to own this. We take over the @ symbol before it was the @ symbol.
I didn’t know how big the @ symbol was going to become. This was right when people were just getting email addresses. I thought every time someone writes an email, they have to hit that @ sign. If they can think of me every time they hit that @ sign, that’s incredibly inexpensive marketing and branding. That’s more valuable than a Super Bowl ad.
You mentioned the different leaders in the different offices when you were expanding out to different markets. It made me think of retention and recruiting. I’ve heard from other brokers about when you tried to recruit their agents. How much have you focused on recruiting and retention?
We were the best at that. I will tell you, and I mean this very humbly, but our organic growth is the least expensive growth. We never bought a company until later on, after we brought in a private equity partner.
Organic growth is all about relationships. So that’s what we built all of our growth on. The history of @ was totally built on relationships and organic growth.
Which is probably why the relationships were so meaningful. Compass could not have as much impact against us as they did other companies because of the culture and the meaning behind the relationships. And also the commitment to tech and marketing. It’s just a very different company than a lot of the rest.
You took on private equity in 2018 and said it was because the valuation was so insanely high you couldn’t not do that. And then, within a couple years, you bought Christie’s International Real Estate.
When you say leap of faith, that was the only leap of faith. We had just gotten into the franchising business by franchising @. But it’s very rare that you can buy an international brand that has so much credibility.
There are really two brands in real estate that just exude luxury, and that’s Christie’s and Sotheby’s. And that’s because they are the No. 1 and No. 2 auction houses around the world.
So the ability to buy that and to be able to plug our technology into it, our marketing, our talent in business, and to be able to expand and grow a global network, you have one shot. So you can either take that shot and take that on or not.
What did you do as part of your pitch?
We custom-designed a briefcase. We custom-designed a leather folio. We custom-designed a hardcover book. We sent it to every board member. We created a custom video about the company, about Christie’s incorporating the auction house, about the technology — beautiful video, one of the best we’ve ever done, super emotional.
We treated it as if you were a top producer going after the No. 1 listing of your life. And you need to either get that listing or not. When that’s the choice, win or not, you do everything. So we literally did everything humanly possible that you can think of to differentiate ourselves, to make sure that nobody else would come close to beating us.
Did Christie’s Real Estate signal like, ‘Hey, we’re open for sale?’
The people who would be interested in buying it were aware. I know of people who were also in the exact same process.
Compass?
Can’t — the NDAs on that are so tight that I’m aware, but can’t say.
In 2023, you said Compass had done so much damage to the industry and that Compass acquiring Christie’s would have spelled the end to a lot of different companies.
It would have been. I got thank yous from independent brokerages and the CEO of LeadingRE when we acquired Christie’s [International Real Estate]. Had Compass acquired Christie’s at the time and aligned that brand with their growth that they had been experiencing around the country, I think it would have been over for so many of the large independents that were focused on luxury.
It would have been such a dominant addition to their company at the time that it would have been heartbreaking for people.
What would the damage be?
When I say damage, it’s that Compass’s entry into the market was to raise a ton of capital, grow through changing the margin to the benefit of the agent, so you could accelerate agent recruiting, organic agent recruiting. You spend this dough on acquiring agents instead of acquiring companies while simultaneously building some technology that’s competitive.
But do it at a much larger scale. Kind of take the roadmap of what we did in Chicago and scale it around the country, but by bringing agents over with offers that would not be able to be matched for a company to stay solvent.
Credit: @properties
But it’s the inverse of what you did here when you guys only bought something if you could pay for it.
Yeah, but there’s different ways of growing a company. You can grow a company in an old-school, traditional mom-and-pop way, which we did. Or you can grow a company by bringing on investors, having them bet on the leaders to go in. And they played a very different game of going public and having a higher multiplier.
It’s an interesting dynamic with you and Compass, from my point of view.
You can say they’re here now, and they’re the largest by volume, and they are pushing the market. And most advancement now in the industry is coming because of Compass driving that, right? If you were to take Compass out of the industry right now, you wouldn’t have the same innovation. You wouldn’t have the same marketing.
It would be a very different temperament because when you have somebody that is pushing you, pushing you, pushing you, that you feel threatened by, you have two choices. You either give up or you improve.
Back to the comment in 2023, you said at the time Compass was doing damage to the industry.
Oh, for sure. So, doing damage to the industry, 100 percent, in the sense that we had a very competitive landscape of brokerages based on this set of margins. We all knew what we could afford, what we couldn’t afford. If all of a sudden you have a competitor, because they’ve raised a ton of money, comes in and changes that margin so you’re not competitive, the damage to the industry is that the lack of investment in innovation, the lack of investment in advancement in marketing, the lack of investment in culture, all the things, which was Compass’s strategy to grow.
How do I change the margin to cause rapid damage to a company so that I can attract the agents to, in turn, grow to a scale where I can generate profitability? And it was a successful move for them, right? But in that moment when they were doing it, that’s what we were living in, 100 percent.
What happened between then and late 2024, when you sold to Compass?
Once I saw their stock dip below $2, and that was, in my opinion, an inflection point for their company. That was either do or die.
They were being tested on whether they were gonna be the future of real estate, or they were going to be the past. Because it was just getting to a valuation that was too low for them to sustain themselves. And slowly you started to crawl out of that, and when it got back to over $3, that’s when I knew.
You knew what?
I knew that they would end up being the dominant force in residential real estate, and you either partner with them or you compete against them. At that point, it was perfect timing. I’d had my private equity partner for about six years, so they were coming close to an exit.
I had to start preparing for an exit. This is about a year before I announced the deal with Compass. We had options, we had private equity, we had high net worth family, but my pursuit was Compass.
I thought what was in the best interest of Christie’s International Real Estate, and I thought what was in the best interest of @properties, and at the time, Ansley and Sereno, was for us to partner with Compass and to merge with Compass. I thought we were the best opportunity Compass would ever have, not only because of our EBITDA, which we helped them with profitability quickly, but also we got them into a new vertical.
With Christie’s?
If you imagine the strength of Christie’s [International Real Estate] when it’s owned by @, and then you close your eyes for a second and you think, ‘OK, what is the strength of Christie’s when it’s owned by Compass?’ It’s huge because you can now support a franchise network faster.
When you have a lot of market share in the luxury space, you can easily get the middle of the market. And at the bottom end of the market, we don’t really wanna play there. You want the highest average sales price and the fewest number, and that is how companies are the most profitable, not by number of units closed.
You said exit of your PE firm because it was nearing six years, but did you say you as well?
Yeah, I mean, we sold. I am a shareholder now. When we sold all of the companies, we sold 100 percent of them.
I can own my exact same percentage share as I want for as long as I want. So it allowed a number of us to be able to control our destiny on how we would exit an incredibly illiquid asset.
So $444 million. $150 million in cash, and then the rest in stock. Back in 2000, when you guys were first trying to take over the @ symbol, did you expect to get there?
Mike and I have been partners for almost 30 years. And it’s very rare in business where you’ve made money and you’ve lost money and you have the same partner, especially two guys, not to be stereotypical, but usually ego.
I think the reason is that we were never focused on the money. The money was an end result at the end of the day, and it’s awesome, but it never drove our decisions.
We were a company that made the right decisions based on growth, healthy growth. So the end result, I’m super grateful for. I’m happy that it was able to affect a lot of people.
Could an @ happen again if it started in 2025 with the mega acquisitions and mergers that are happening?
No. If you look at it now on retention and recruiting, and why I would say it’s easier for the largest companies, it’s very, very difficult to compete if you don’t have a strong value proposition. And in order to have a strong value proposition outside of what the agent can do on their own, the company has to provide an astronomical amount. So for our agents, it’s not just the physical, but the physical collateral is superior to any other company.
The digital collateral is superior to any other company. The marketing resources and the distribution are superior. So, every single category, I can tell you what every competitor does and doesn’t do, and there’s no competitor to us that is doing more.
You have to be innovative or creative in order to do it. So could it be done? Yes, but it would have to involve a lot of foresight, and there would have to be a cultural component to it that people really wanted to be a part of.
