Compass CEO Robert Reffkin’s Zillow War Could Reshape Homebuying | Invesloan.com

It’s almost 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in November, and Robert Reffkin is working the phones.

The 46-year-old CEO of Compass, the country’s largest real estate brokerage, spent the previous morning in a Manhattan courtroom, serving as a key witness in his firm’s fierce legal battle with the home-search giant Zillow. It’s been a busy fall: In late September, Compass revealed its plans to acquire Anywhere Real Estate, the second-largest brokerage, for $1.6 billion; the combined company would represent nearly a quarter of America’s home sales. But on this night, Reffkin is carving out a moment for one of his time-honored traditions: making a personal call to one of Compass’ more than 38,000 real estate agents.

He leaves a brief voicemail for Evan Duby, congratulating him on reaching a decade at the brokerage. Never mind that Duby, by his own admission, is “hardly even selling anymore.” Reffkin is well-known for ringing his agents out of the blue — his staff estimates that he makes thousands of these calls every year. He plants himself by the door at company parties to shake the hand of every attendee, and welcomes agents to Shabbat dinners at his home in New York. When he’s not on the road visiting Compass offices or trying to woo agents from other brokerages, he spends Sundays with his wife, Benís, and their three children, showing up at open houses hosted by Compass agents.

“There hasn’t been a time in 10 years when I’ve interacted with him that he hasn’t been immediately responsive,” says Duby.

Unlike most brokerage execs, Reffkin did not rise through the real estate ranks. A half-Black, self-described C-student raised by a single mother in the Bay Area, he charged through a series of prestigious postgrad stints — McKinsey, Lazard, a White House fellowship during the Bush administration, Goldman Sachs — before cofounding Compass in 2012 at 33. His original plan was to cut out the pricey brokers that acted as middlemen in New York City’s rental market, but he quickly pivoted to a more traditional agent model focused on home sales. The move nearly cost him control of the company. It worked, though, and these days Reffkin is unequivocal in his belief that agents occupy the center of the real estate ecosystem. “I work for you, not the other way around,” he told more than 1,000 agents at a company retreat in Denver this year. “And it is my job to give you an advantage.”

That conviction has led to the defining battle of his career. In 2024, Reffkin began crusading against the National Association of Realtors, real estate’s most powerful industry group, which he said had crafted rules that unfairly limit how sellers and their agents market homes for sale. Reffkin wanted to transform the Compass website into a VIP room filled with home listings that couldn’t be found anywhere else. The NAR rules, however, pushed agents to share homes widely via industry databases. When Zillow sided with the status quo, Reffkin went to war with the search portal as well.

“He has a keen eye for enemies that allow him to advance his narrative and his vision,” says Brian Boero, a longtime real estate consultant.

Then things got ugly: This past summer, Zillow started banning a small number of home listings — mostly those of Compass agents — from its highly trafficked portal. Compass responded by suing Zillow in federal court, which is how Reffkin ended up on the witness stand last month.

In just over a decade, Reffkin has transformed Compass from a well-funded upstart to a bona fide giant, capable of taking on real estate’s most established players while altering the rules of the housing market to match his ambitions. Now, Reffkin’s fight with Zillow could reshape how — and where — average Americans find homes for sale. Critics say his attempt to rewrite the rules could throw the real estate market into chaos, with more home listings hidden behind virtual velvet ropes and buyers left to face a murkier home search. Reffkin’s supporters, many of them Compass agents, laud him on LinkedIn and Instagram, where they rail against the rulemakers that Reffkin refers to as “organized real estate.”

“The only reason this has been able to go on so long is no one’s done anything,” Reffkin tells me at Compass headquarters in Manhattan. “No one even knows.”

‘Vilified by the industry’

Reffkin has long been one of real estate’s most polarizing figures. When the first iteration of his company, then known as Urban Compass, failed to gain traction, he and cofounder Ori Allon reimagined the firm in 2014 as a combination of new and old school: a tech-savvy brokerage with an eye on the sales market. Reffkin began relentlessly pursuing agents, crisscrossing the country to establish footholds in new markets by recruiting star talent or acquiring entire brokerages.

“There really hadn’t been anyone so aggressively trying to induce people to move until Compass came to town,” says Clelia Warburg Peters, a venture capitalist who at the time led a New York-based real estate brokerage. Her agents reported getting recruiting calls from Reffkin well into the night, five to seven days a week. They weren’t alone. Reffkin pitched agents across the country on his firm’s superior tech, which would help them manage clients and close more deals, and offered personalized branding that would position them as star dealmakers. As the likes of SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Qatar Investment Authority pumped more than $1 billion into Compass through a series of investment rounds, Reffkin cut deals with agents that included cash incentives, stock options, and favorable “splits” that allowed them to keep larger chunks of their commissions.

Brokerage executives are a chummy bunch: Though they’re competitors, they recognize that their businesses depend on agents sharing listings and closing sales with each other. But with all that VC money and a mandate to grow at all costs, Reffkin was “vilified by the industry,” says Mike DelPrete, a tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“There have been a lot of people in the industry that just don’t like him,” says DelPrete, who has written about Compass for nearly a decade. “They don’t like his methods. They don’t like his company. They don’t like anything about it.”

Some brokerage execs did more than grumble; they sued. Starting in 2014, the company faced a raft of legal actions from rival firms that accused Compass of stealing trade secrets and illegally poaching top agents. Among them was the real estate behemoth now known as Anywhere, the owner of household names like Coldwell Banker and Century21. Compass also faced a yearslong legal battle with Avi Dorfman, a onetime collaborator of Reffkin’s who claimed he had been robbed of cofounder credit and a stake in the company after Reffkin cast him aside. In both instances, Compass denied the allegations, reaching settlements after years of legal barbs. Dorfman is now recognized as a cofounder, while Compass and Anywhere — once bitter rivals — seek regulatory approval to merge. The combined entity, including franchisees, would account for nearly a quarter of US home-sales volume, based on estimates from T3 Sixty, a real estate management consulting firm.

To real estate observers, Reffkin’s vision appeared more opportunistic than technologically advanced: He saw a low-margin industry that was stuck in the old way of doing things and ripe for acquisitions. “I think Robert’s path to building this really valuable company has actually looked a lot more like a private-equity-style roll-up,” Warburg Peters tells me. She doesn’t see that as a knock on his achievements: “Robert is an extremely ambitious, analytical person.”

While the company’s tech was sleek and easy to use, providing agents with an all-in-one platform to manage their client relationships and market homes, “it wasn’t anything revolutionary,” says DelPrete. He adds that the firm’s “agent productivity numbers or technology usage numbers” roughly mirror the rest of the industry. A Compass spokesperson says in an email that the firm is the “only brokerage company that has invested $1.7 billion in building a single-login technology platform where agents can run their entire business from start to finish.”

His outside reputation aside, Reffkin inspires a fierce loyalty among the Compass rank and file. During a visit to New York last December, Zori Levine, an agent in Boulder, emailed Reffkin to ask for help getting into the office after she received no reply from a few other agents. He responded by offering her a personal tour. Agents say he readily hands out his cellphone number and peppers them with questions about how the company could better serve them. Not even his mother, Ruth — a Compass agent who has worked in real estate since Robert was a young adult — is spared.

“Sometimes he would aggravate me, because he could not, would not, leave me alone,” Ruth tells me. She remembers thinking, “I came here to see my grandchildren, and you’re just probing my brain here.”

Reffkin’s crusade against real estate rules

Just a day before Compass’s stock debut in the spring of 2021, the company slashed the amount it planned to raise; one analyst called the company “a traditional brokerage with flashy marketing, whose only advantage is an unlimited ability to burn cash.” Compass debuted at a valuation of $8.2 billion, rather than the initially planned $10 billion, and the share price drifted down from the IPO peak in the following months. Then mortgage rates spiked and home sales cratered, forcing Reffkin into cost-cutting mode. The company, which had never turned a profit, laid off roughly a quarter of its workforce in 2022.

“If you see evidence that someone doesn’t want to stay at Compass and help us weather this storm, say something,” Reffkin wrote in a December 2022 memo titled “Managing out poor performers.” The company notched its first quarterly profit in the second quarter of last year, and ended the year with a $154 million net loss.

No longer focused solely on steadying the ship, Reffkin has turned his efforts to unseating real estate’s entrenched powers: the rulemakers that determine how most sellers market their homes.

“Because he came from the outside, I think from the beginning he had no inborn reverence for the structure or the power centers in the industry,” Boero tells me.

Last fall, Reffkin unveiled what he called the “three-phased marketing strategy,” the centerpiece of an effort to transform Compass.com into an exclusive destination for coveted home listings. When a typical agent begins working with a seller, they’ll usually put the home into a local database known as the multiple listing service, or MLS, which distributes the info to other agents and home-search portals like Zillow or Realtor.com. This may sound like good business practice, but agents also don’t really have a choice: In 2019, the National Association of Realtors passed a new rule to clamp down on agents swapping home listings outside the MLSs. Known as the Clear Cooperation Policy, it dictated that within one business day of marking a home publicly — posting about it on Facebook, planting a sign in the front yard, advertising it on a brokerage’s website — an agent had to either share the listing in their local MLS for everyone to see, or face potentially thousands of dollars in fines.

After the NAR was forced to settle landmark class-action lawsuits last year over a different set of MLS rules regarding agent commissions — costing the trade group $418 million, and Compass $57.5 million — Reffkin says he experienced an awakening. Why, he wondered, did a non-government trade group get to decide the rules of the road for the entire housing market?

“There’s no trade association telling investment bankers how to run their business, how to serve their clients,” Reffkin tells me. “That’s just not right. And so I think I’m looking at this like, ‘What is going on?'”

A NAR spokesperson says in an email that the group’s work “fosters a competitive, fair, and pro-consumer market,” adding that its members have a say on policy issues and that local MLSs can decide how to enforce NAR policies.

The only reason this has been able to go on so long is no one’s done anything. No one even knows.Compass CEO Robert Reffkin

Compass’ new marketing strategy clashed with NAR’s clear cooperation rule while exposing its contradictions. Instead of immediately advertising homes everywhere online, Reffkin encouraged his agents to first share their home listings in an internal database accessible only to Compass agents and their clients, capitalizing on a loophole that allowed for so-called “office exclusives.” In the second phase, they would share the home publicly on the Compass website, but not elsewhere, as a “Coming Soon” listing. The third phase was the traditional, maximalist launch.

This might sound like a weird, convoluted journey: Why not just quickly share a home everywhere and wait for the offers to roll in? In Compass’ view, the strategy offered wins all around. Buyers who visited the company’s website or contacted one of its agents got an early look at available homes. Sellers could test the waters before listing on the MLS or Zillow, both of which track how long a house has been on the market and how many times the seller has cut the price. In Reffkin’s telling, these “negative insights” give buyers more negotiating power and hurt sellers: If a homeowner cuts their price or their place lingers on the market, “you look like damaged goods,” Reffkin said in sworn testimony in November.

To promote the strategy, the company mocked up billboards that made a tantalizing pitch to buyers: “See 25% of homes for sale, one week before any other site.” In the first quarter of this year, the company said, roughly half of homes listed by Compass agents followed this new path.

Other real estate executives cried foul. If everyone followed suit, they argued, the housing market would devolve into a series of private gardens, with buyers only able to see a fraction of homes available for sale at any moment. Last year, the 10 biggest real estate companies accounted for more than half of US sales volume, according to a T3 Sixty analysis. Large brokerages like Compass could use their hefty market share to edge out smaller players, lure more agents, and “double-end” more deals, with agents from the same brokerage representing both the buyer and seller. A golden age of home search, in which sellers got broad exposure and buyers could cruise to any of the search portals to get a good sense of the available homes, was at risk of crumbling.

The war with Zillow

Compass’ move also represented an existential threat to portals like Zillow: The biggest name in home search would lose its luster if buyers knew it had only a fraction of the available listings. “If Compass is able to say that we have listings that Zillow doesn’t have, then people would search Compass,” Reffkin said in court. “It’s a very simple thing.”

In April, Zillow threatened to ban from its site any listings that weren’t shared with everyone within one day of being marketed publicly. “While Americans are struggling to access and afford housing, Compass wants to hide available listings from the public,” a Zillow spokesperson says in an email. “Hidden listings harm consumers, agents, and smaller brokerages; Zillow’s standards protect against that harm.” The company began sending warnings to agents who breached the policy, allowing two strikes per agent before blocking listings from its site. Shortly before enforcement took effect in June, Compass sued Zillow in federal court, claiming the company was using its monopoly power to quash Compass’ innovative business model.

“I can’t think of anything else in our entire history that could compare to this fight,” says Steve Halpern, an agent who joined Compass in 2013. “When Robert wants something, and Robert is committed to getting something, he usually finds a way to achieve it.”

When Robert wants something, and Robert is committed to getting something, he usually finds a way to achieve it.Steve Halpern, longtime Compass agent

The NAR and Zillow make for convenient enemies. The NAR, which has roughly 1.5 million members and effectively governs the vast majority of MLSs, is still reeling from leadership upheaval and the settlement over agent commissions. Zillow is plainly disliked in many corners of the real estate industry. The search giant makes a good chunk of its money by selling “leads” to agents: When you click the buttons to contact an agent or schedule a tour, Zillow will typically pass along your contact information to an agent who pays a fee to the site — not the agent who actually listed the house for sale. In court, Reffkin called this practice “free riding.” In his estimation, Zillow is merely profiting off agents’ legwork.

“Zillow knows who they can bully and who they can’t,” Reffkin said in court. Large homebuilders, he argued, regularly advertise homes off the MLS without repercussion. “It’s easy to bully an industry of individual agents like my mom or independent contractors,” Reffkin continued. “They do not make a salary.”

A Zillow spokesperson says the company invests heavily in a broad range of tools that help agents grow their businesses.

Compass agents may be Reffkin’s loudest supporters, but not all are on board. Some have balked at his crusade, which goes against what many in the industry consider to be both standard practice and common sense.

“Listings belong in the public eye for all homebuyers to see,” Alyssia Essig, a Compass agent in the Baltimore area, said in a YouTube video in early August. After the video gained traction on LinkedIn, she received a call from Reffkin, and they debated the issue over the phone. Neither changed their mind.

Essig says she has no plans to leave Compass — she loves the tech and the people. But the push toward exclusive inventory, she tells me, means she has to sift through emails, text messages, and social media to find homes advertised in more discreet channels. It’s “making everything more difficult, in an industry where it’s already difficult,” she says.

Several people in the industry told me they’d been blocked on LinkedIn by Reffkin after they pushed back in the comments of his social media posts. One of them is Shaun Michael Lewis, the CEO of Clearwater Properties, a midsize real estate brokerage with 35 offices across the Mountain West. Lewis says he understands the pressures to grow market share, but worries that Reffkin will drag the industry back to a time when homes were more difficult to find.

“If you see him on TV or listen to him on a podcast, he’s a very intelligent, very charming person,” Lewis says. “But if you have experience in the industry, you understand that what he’s actually saying — while it probably sounds good for laymen, the consumer — a lot of it’s just bunk.”

Reffkin is undeterred. “I’ve never seen him back down from a fight,” DelPrete tells me. “In fact, the opposite. He will double down, triple down.” The pending acquisition of Anywhere, expected to close late next year, would add more than 170,000 agents to Compass ranks, combine the two largest brokerages by sales volume, and give Reffkin more power to mold the housing market in his image. In key markets such as New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, the brands under the joint entity would boast a market share ranging from 30% to 50%, according to data from T3 Sixty.

For regular buyers, Reffkin’s vision could usher in a more complicated home search: You might have to visit a range of sites to unearth home inventory, or sweat over whether your agent is actually showing you everything out there. Reffkin argues that this fight isn’t actually about “hidden” home listings at all: It’s about marketing homes publicly without quickly sharing them in the MLS and Zillow. Sellers and their agents, he says, should have the choice to promote their homes however they please, without fear of getting dinged for price cuts or days on market. In his dream scenario, the home search might not be all that complicated: In places where his company has a strong presence, you could just go to Compass.com and find houses there instead of Zillow.

There’s no guarantee he will come close to that goal. Because agents are independent contractors, Reffkin can’t force them to adopt his three-phased marketing strategy. The Anywhere deal could face regulatory scrutiny or fall apart for other reasons, and if it goes through, Compass will end up with more than $2 billion in additional debt. The court battle with Zillow is another question mark. “It’s hard to take out the king,” Jack Miller, the president and CEO of T3 Sixty, told me in September. “Whatever the challenge of the week is for Zillow, I still think they’re such a powerful player.”

Despite Zillow’s posturing, Compass’ website is home to thousands of listings that can’t be found anywhere else. Its agent count is at an all-time high. Other big brokerages are readying their own private databases of listings, prepping for Reffkin’s vision to become reality.

It’s not entirely clear what a loss would mean for the company and Reffkin. When I meet him at Compass’ midtown Manhattan headquarters, I ask a version of this question: What if the fight doesn’t go your way?

Before I can finish my next sentence, he interjects.

“We’ll never give up.”

James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider’s Discourse team.