Compass closed its acquisition of Anywhere in January, paying $1.6 billion in stock, with the total running closer to $4.2 billion once you count the assumed debt. Nine brands all sit under one owner now.
If consolidation on that scale were going to bury firms my size, last year was the year to prove it. It didn’t.
RealTrends’ latest rankings put local independents at 28.79 percent of market share, up from 26.98 percent. We gained ground in the same year the biggest deal in the industry’s history closed.
Steve Murray of RealTrends has spent decades reading brokerage financials, and he put the point plainly: “Anybody who says that a privately owned independent, local, regional brand can’t compete, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
I agree, and I would rather spend this space on why we are competing this well, and what it tells an owner-operator about where the next few years will be won.
For years, a franchise affiliation sold a small firm two things it couldn’t build alone: a name people knew at the kitchen table and a technology stack. Portals took the first one a decade ago.
In the last year, agentic AI has taken the second. That collapses the whole franchise pitch down to the one thing a national brand could never solve for: retention. Which leaves independents competing on two things they fully control: the agents they keep and the technology they now build themselves.
Retention is the growth model
Keeping your agents is where an independent’s whole growth model sits. Add up what you bring in over a year, subtract what walks out, and the difference is your entire result.
Ours runs 91.7 percent by headcount over the past 12 months, against a market average near 70.4 percent for mid-to-large firms. Each January opens with the prior year’s production largely intact, so recruiting builds on that base instead of refilling it.
Retention carries that much weight because of where this business lives.
The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that 37 percent of sellers hired an agent referred by a friend, neighbor or relative, and another 29 percent went back to someone they had worked with before. An agent’s real asset is the sphere they spent years building, and when that agent leaves, the sphere and every referral inside it leave, too.
What holds our retention up would not impress anyone in a recruiting deck.
- We set goals with each agent once a year and sit down again to check the progress.
- We track closed production, but we spend more time on the leading indicators underneath it: the buyer rep agreements and listing agreements and signed contracts that tell you where a pipeline is heading before it shows up in revenue.
When a number slips, the conversation stays on the activity, not on a deal that fell through for reasons nobody controlled. The rhythm is dull by design, and running it during the weeks when everyone is tired is most of the job.
The technology you build
The technology stack was always the more defensible half of what a franchise sold, and it is the half that just fell. For most of my career, matching a national’s tools meant either paying into a franchise system or writing checks to vendors on their terms and their timeline.
Agentic coding changed the math inside a single year. A broker who can describe what he needs can now direct AI to build it, and the output lands at a level that used to require a funded engineering team. The gap that justified the franchise fee is closing, and the firms moving fastest through it are not the largest ones.
I am not the only operator who noticed. Sam Sawyer at Pinnacle made a public bet on building his firm’s technology this way, ahead of competitors many times his size. Ryan Fitzgerald at Raleigh Realty keeps shipping features on a lead-generation platform he owns outright rather than renting.
At Bramlett Partners, we have released product in a few months that would have taken a traditional team years and a budget we do not have, all of it built through agentic coding rather than bought. None of us are working with venture money. We are working with tools that did not exist 18 months ago, and that is precisely the point.
The advantage no longer belongs to whoever can spend the most on software. It belongs to whoever can build the fastest, and size is not what decides that anymore.
What the bet costs
A business model I would defend this hard is one I should be honest about, and you should hear the costs from someone inside it rather than from someone selling against it. We do not have the luxury of running at a loss while we wait for scale to arrive, because there is no investor to cover the gap.
Our expansion waits on conviction only as far as cash flow allows. When a downturn hits, it lands on us with no parent company to spread it across.
That last constraint shaped how we operate. A firm absorbing its own bad quarters learns exactly where its money goes. It also reacts fast when the market turns, because it has no cushion for a slow decision. That is what makes both levers work.
You keep agents by paying attention on a schedule, which costs time rather than capital. You build the tools you need because you understand the problem better than any vendor, and now you have the means to build them.
Neither advantage is available to a firm that solves every shortage by writing a check. When you strip out investor money, retention and the technology you build are not consolation prizes. They are the whole position, and the constraints are what force you to get good at them.
The moat you build when you can’t buy one
I have never considered selling. Ever. The economics just don’t hold up, and in my experience, firms sell when there is no succession plan, and the owner wants out, not because the model stopped working. Plenty of those sales were the right call for reasons only the owner could see. Ours was never that situation.
Whether the independent path suits your firm comes down to two things you control: whether your agents stay and whether you are building the tools the work now requires. Neither was fully in reach a few years ago. Both are now.
Money Matters Month is here. All September, Inman is focused on the financial side of real estate — the part nobody teaches you when you get your license. How to budget through lean times, protect your profits when business is good and find new ways to grow your bottom line no matter what the market is doing.
Eric Bramlett is the founder of Bramlett Partners in Austin, Texas. Get connected on Instagram and Facebook.
