Guy Gal, Side co-founder and CEO, took the Main Stage at Inman Connect, making the case that top-producing agents are trading brand recognition for brand ownership as boutique, agent-owned brokerages gain ground.
The session was moderated by Inman CEO Tom Bohn, and the conversation doubled as the venue for Side’s announcement that its operating platform is now open to independent and franchise-affiliated brokerages nationwide for the first time.
Gal argued that Side’s approach runs counter to what he called the prevailing narrative that brokerages must consolidate to compete as the market contracts and AI adoption accelerates.
“The owners who know their markets and carry the risk themselves are what holds this business together,” Gal said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “SideOS exists so all of them can compete at the highest level without giving anything up.”
SideOS gives large brokerages access to the back-office infrastructure that already runs more than 600 real estate companies, while letting them keep their own brand, brokerage license and leadership. Side ranks as the No. 9 residential real estate brokerage by sales volume, according to RealTrends.
Until now, brokerage owners choosing a back-office solution faced three options: build an increasingly complex system in-house, buy into a franchise whose systems were not built around their operation or give up their brand entirely by folding into a national brand, according to the release. SideOS is positioned as a fourth option, one that runs behind an owner’s brand rather than in front of it.
The platform is not a new build. Side has spent nearly a decade developing it to run its own network’s back office, covering compliance, payments, agent support, reporting and AI-driven workflows, according to the release. That network processes more than 30,000 transactions a year, and the companies on it rank among the 10 largest residential real estate brokerages in the country by sales volume, with the top production per agent nationwide, according to RealTrends data cited in the release.
Agents on Side’s platform get back more than six hours per transaction, and 85 percent of commissions are paid the day a deal closes, according to the release.
A second announcement, tied to Inman
Gal and Bohn also used the session to detail a second piece of news: Inman has named Side a founding partner of Inman 2.0, an initiative the company describes as becoming the intelligence layer of residential real estate, with Side serving as the operating layer, according to the release.
At the center of the partnership is the Broker Owner Council, an invitation-only group of brokerage owners and operators from across the country. Side will help launch and co-lead the council, and membership is open regardless of whether a company operates on Side’s platform, according to the release.
Speaking to a packed room, Gal said Side has spent much of the past decade taking a quiet, discreet approach in the industry, favoring being different and community-oriented over pursuing a national brand narrative. He said that stance became harder to sustain as consolidation-related headlines intensified in recent years, prompting Side to step back and become more measured about how it communicated.
Gal pointed to the Inman partnership as an opportunity to spend more time identifying and showcasing brokerages growing independently of consolidation, both those partnered with Side and those that are not, saying that kind of growth is happening in major markets around the country without drawing the same attention as consolidation news.
He said one goal of the partnership is to help independent brokerage owners benchmark their performance against peers, something he said is currently difficult since that data is not visible outside Side’s own network. Side has facilitated more than $150 billion in closings across more than 600 partner offices, Gal said, citing that scale as the basis for the benchmarking data it plans to make available.
