Compass Real Estate was going to disrupt the industry. But as it lays off 450 employees and its stock price tanks, it's settling into the reality of being not the next big thing but just another brokerage. kvelsey reports
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Alamy Among showily disruptive tech companies, the narrative, as much as the product itself, is the thing. WeWork’s culture was manifested in a fever-dream vibe, with tales of tequila-fueled ragers and megalomaniacal tendencies, all of it overseen by a man who’d previously started a company selling baby clothes with built-in kneepads. Tesla was going to throw out every established idea about making automobiles and rethink it all from the ground up.
And spend it Compass did, much of it on acquiring other brokerages and wooing agents with lavish incentives , allowing it to build formidable operations in those high-end districts. But all that growth was in other ways a problem. Early on, Compass focused on recruiting elite agents, but over time, they started throwing money at any and everyone, according to a former Compass agent.
Compass has framed its cost-cutting as a prudent response to a cooling sales market. “Due to the clear signals of slowing economic growth, we’ve taken a number of measures to safeguard our business including the difficult decision to reduce the size of our employee team by approximately 10%,” a company spokesman wrote in an email.
Or had them. It hasn’t really felt that way for a while, according to a current Compass agent, who said that before the company went public it started charging agents for things like Docusign, Adobe, and Property Shark. “The nickle-and-diming of the support services is really annoying when you’re an agent who’s bringing in all this money and they have to pay for basic stuff like that,” he said. Although it was hardly the most frustrating thing since the IPO — that would be the stock price.
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