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Clockwise from top left: Scott Durkin, president and COO of Douglas Elliman; Bess Freedman, CEO of Brown Harris Stevens; Adam Mahfouda, founder and CEO of Oxford Property Group; Rory Golod, Tri-State president of Compass; Pam Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group; David Walker, CEO of Triplemint
It’s a long-held tenet of the business that agents switch firms when times are bad and few years in recent memory have been worse than 2020.
“When the market is super strong… agents don’t really move,” said Scott Durkin, president and chief operating officer of Douglas Elliman. “That’s a natural evolution of the business.”
“We don’t need to go public in order to raise capital.”
It was September, and Robert Reffkin was making an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, touting his firm’s ability to attract funds without needing an IPO. With the housing market booming and tech stocks having a banner year despite economic turmoil in other sectors, Compass’ chief executive was deflecting what’s become a perennial question about the firm’s long-term strategy. “August revenue was 70 percent ahead of last year,” he said. “Our business is really surging.”
But behind the scenes, Compass has indeed been laying the groundwork for an IPO, long seen as the most viable path forward for the residential brokerage, which has raised $1.5 billion from investors since its founding in 2012, and has boosted its M&A activity since first receiving funding from SoftBank in 2017.