Compass International Holdings is rolling out Home Platform to its company-owned brands first and won’t bring franchisees on until January 2027. Lauren Henss describes it as a smart, beta-testing-like approach.
Henss, the chief marketing and strategy officer at FirstTeam Real Estate, spent a year at Compass as a regional marketing director, years before the megabrokerage closed its blockbuster $1.6 billion acquisition of Anywhere in January.
She sees the phased Home Platform rollout approach as standard SaaS playbook: work out the kinks with the parent company before asking franchise owners, who run their own businesses and will be far less forgiving, to get on board.
Henss spoke with Inman about what Home Platform gets right and how independent brokerages like hers are pitching agents to stay put while the industry consolidates around them.
This interview is part of an ongoing series on Compass International Holdings’ Home Platform rollout, featuring interviews with brokerage executives, real estate agents and industry insiders with the most at stake.
The first part of the series (which you can read here) featured an interview with Coldwell Banker Realty CEO Kamini Lane.
Inman: Compass says there’s no mandate to adopt their platform. But there’s an inherent tension there, right? Compass has acknowledged strong business incentives to get as many agents onto the platform as quickly as possible. What’s your read on that? How does a no-mandate policy square with needing that many agents to adopt it?
Lauren Henss: As a brokerage, you can’t mandate that anybody adopts something. They either do, or they don’t. What you can do — and what Compass is very good at — is show agents the benefits, because at the end of the day, we all have the same goal: Help agents do more deals in less time and be a strategic advisor to their clients. The brokerages that can show that win.
An end-to-end platform — an ecosystem that unifies agent tools, marketing, client management and transactions across all their brokerages — is a big deal. You’ve got the artificial intelligence assistant, buyer demand, the business dashboard, the client dashboard, collections, market insights, all in one place.
But the biggest part is training and implementation, plus ambassadors across the organization to drive demand. You have agents who are extremely tech-savvy, and you have agents who need real assistance.
It has to be a conscious, ongoing training and ambassador effort across every brand in that ecosystem — Corcoran, Sotheby’s, Coldwell Banker Realty, Compass proper, all of them. That takes time and dedication. And they’ll need to monitor adoption and actually calculate ROI on the platform based on productivity, deal size and agent growth.
They’re rolling out first with company-owned brands, and then franchises in January. What’s the reasoning behind that gap?
I think the biggest thing is they’re dealing with their own companies first. Get the Anywhere-owned companies on board, have the parent company understand the value before it goes out to franchise owners.
You want the inner nucleus to understand it, champion it, adopt it and work out the kinks — beta it, essentially — in what I’d call Phase One. Then whatever needs to change for franchisees, because franchisees are going to be extremely critical since they’re their own business owners, gets adopted before that rollout.
It’s pretty smart. You don’t want to do it the other way around. You want the parent brand to understand it and anticipate franchisee needs beforehand. It wouldn’t surprise me if they already have a handful of franchise beta testers — some of the big ones — giving feedback right now, because this has to be successful.
Compass has upwards of 340,000 agents. The margin for error is very slim. A strategic, phased approach is common in SaaS and a good play here.
What do you think Home Platform does really well? What’s the real differentiator, and what would make a franchisee want to switch?
Look at everything they’ve integrated — CMA, collections, marketing center, insights, the client dashboard. What’ll help is pre-listing pricing intelligence that shows how demand shifts at different price points, plus real-time reverse prospecting — visibility into what agents are doing with a listing.
Lauren Henss
But ultimately what this does is let agents spend less time on admin work while giving their clients a seamless experience. This industry has so much shiny-object syndrome. Everyone is building point solutions.
Instead, saying “We’re building one system with CMA, collections, buyer demand, reverse prospecting, agent network, marketing center, insights, and a client dashboard that centralizes all communication, documents, timelines and listing activity” is brilliant.
It brings everything — marketing listings, managing transactions, nurturing relationships — into one ecosystem. That increases unique inventory, interactions and collaboration across brands, and builds toward a unified brand experience. Each phased launch also builds case studies for the next phase of adoption. It’s the common playbook for launching a product like this.
You worked at Compass for a couple of years as a regional marketing director, around 2021–2022. What was Compass’s tech like back then, and how does it compare to their approach now? Is it really just a matter of scale?
I think it is scale. Compass has always led with innovation. They already had the marketing center, the CMA, prospecting and sphere-nurturing tools, collections, all of it. So this is really an extension of that platform.
What they’re smart about — something a lot of people in proptech miss — is understanding the agent journey and the customer journey, and building solutions around that. A lot of proptech is people building “products” that are really just Band-Aid features bolted onto something that already exists.
The question they’re not asking is: What does the agent actually want? What are the agent’s pain points, and what are the client’s pain points?
Then build solutions around that, which let the agent close more deals in less time, the right way, while empowering them and giving the consumer a great experience. Because buying a home is stressful and emotional. It’s one of the biggest decisions of someone’s life. The last thing they need is to feel like they’re getting a used-car-salesman transaction. If you have someone who can anticipate your needs and set you up with a low failure point, why wouldn’t you want that?
I wanted to ask about independent brokerages, too. There’s a ton of consolidation happening, and Compass is enormous. At FirstTeam, what’s the pitch you make to agents now for why independents still matter?
It’s funny, I’ve said this a lot: We don’t build rosters; we build careers. Our job is to build meaningful career paths. We ask agents what they want to be doing in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Does that mean being on a team? Becoming a leader? Having ownership and a sellable asset at the end of the day?
We make decisions for agents, not a board of directors. We’re not publicly traded. I can build the best tech stack for our agents without the red tape.
We’re not putting agents in a box and telling them, “You have to do this.” I’m not the brand agents have to fit into. Their brand propels them, and we champion that and build career paths and infrastructure around it. They get access to the executive team, which they wouldn’t get at a big-box brokerage.
Combine that with 75 years of strategy and real marketing — not just flyers — and we take a genuine business approach to their careers. We’re not handing everyone the same roadmap a big-box brokerage hands out.
So as an independent, you’re a lot more agile, too?
We’re agile, but we’re also large enough nationally that we don’t need to wait on those kinds of decisions. We’re not mom-and-pop. When you need firepower, we can deliver it.
We have people who truly understand real estate and proptech, who’ve built this before … We’re the best at growing a brokerage, expanding agents’ career paths and driving digital transformation. It’s all centered on that experience.
Was there anything else about the Compass/Home Platform rollout you’re paying attention to or that interests you?
For me, it’s always about how other brokerages innovate and what the agent experience looks like. Where we can share ideas or collaborate. We all have the same mission at the end of the day.
It’s just about who’s doing it right and continuing to do it right. We all want our agents to have the best experience and be successful, because it’s really hard for agents right now. We have to set them up to succeed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
