How Compass Grew So Quickly And Why Its Playbook Is Shifting Again

Compass founder and CEO Robert Reffkin started with a simple goal: build a modern, tech-forward company that helps agents do more business with less friction.

But the speed of Compass’s rise, and the way it continues to stack growth on top of growth, is an aggressive strategy that is about much more than being modern and tech forward. The firm uses M&A, private listings and ancillary services to create a flywheel familiar to today’s large brokers — more agents, more listings, more consumer attention and more services attached to every transaction.

By late 2024, Reffkin was blunt about what he sees as Compass’s core asset: listing inventory.

“Listing inventory remains the lifeblood of the residential real estate marketplace,” he said, arguing that Compass already has “a depth of inventory in many of our local markets that is unmatched.”

That statement matters because it reveals the company’s North Star — not merely recruiting or revenue, but the control point Compass believes can reshape consumer behavior and, potentially, the real estate industry.

The inventory advantage

Reffkin’s target early in the game was ambitious: an average of 30% market share in its top 30 markets. The logic? That inventory advantage will eventually pull buyers into Compass.com, not as a brokerage site but as a destination for property search.

But “inventory-first” doesn’t scale nationally on an island. Compass scales through acquisitions — and in 2024, the firm made it clear that M&A is the main route, not a side quest. It has moved from early agent incentive acquisitions — high commission splits, signing bonuses and equity — to bigger conquests that move the needle.

Business-changing acquisition strategies

One of the firm’s early acquisitions was Pacific Union in 2018, which established Compass as a major player in the California luxury market. Another turning point is when the firm entered Louisiana and Mississippi through its purchase of Gulf Coast-based brokerage Latter & Blum. The acquisition also added more than 3,000 agents, a meaningful jump after Compass reported an average of 14,689 principal agents in the final three months of 2023.

In the final weeks of 2024, Compass announced plans to acquire Christie’s International Real Estate and @properties — a deal it framed as both domestic strength and an international leap. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Compass said it would purchase the companies for $150 million in cash at closing, plus roughly 44.13 million shares of Compass Class A stock, with additional adjustments tied to share price after the one-year anniversary of closing.

These acquisitions were framed internally as an extension of what Compass had already been building.

“Compass as a brand had massive organic growth,” said Rory Golod, the company’s president of growth and communications. “Then you had the closing of the Christie’s acquisition last January. You had the Anywhere (deal) coming together this January.”

Golod said that bringing on companies with strong local standing helps Compass “get to the outcomes we are looking for faster,” adding that the real test of any acquisition is how it lands with agents and brokers. “The judge of this, ultimately, is going to be agents and affiliate owners,” he said.

Attaching services

Compass growth is not only about brokerage sides — it’s about attaching services.

Golod said Compass wants further expansion of ancillary services and deeper integration into the agent platform, pointing to @properties’ “really strong title business” in Chicago as an example of how acquisitions can create an instant service footprint. He also noted that @properties’ mortgage joint venture with Rate would strengthen Compass’s mortgage offerings.

Golod described the announcement to purchase Anywhere Real Estate as a defining moment.

“I think, certainly, the Anywhere announcement for us is definitely the biggest,” he said. “It’s incredibly exciting to be sitting here talking to you today as Compass International Holdings, and as one company with these distinct brands and these storied legacy brands.”

During the proposed-deal period, it was estimated that the Compass–Anywhere merger would form similar mortgage joint ventures and, if completed, jointly oversee a $9 billion-per-year mortgage operation — enough to make the firm the 26th-largest U.S. originator in the first half of 2025.

The same story described a definitive all-stock merger agreement valuing Anywhere at $10 billion. It brings together 340,000 real estate professionals across the U.S. and 120 countries, while expanding the company’s title and escrow reach.

Reaction to the Compass-Anywhere merger

By early 2026, Compass and Anywhere officially closed their $1.6 billion deal. That came four months after Compass announced the proposed acquisition and well ahead of Compass’s original estimate of a summer or fall 2026 closing date. Now, Reffkin’s focus has turned to integration — and the industry’s reaction.

“We’re only a couple days in, but it is so energizing and positive to see the reaction from real estate professionals out in the field, because that’s really what matters here,” Golod said. “This whole industry is one where we all will succeed together if we work together.”

What’s most interesting, though, is that Compass frames this entire growth era as happening alongside newfound discipline. Golod said Compass learned how important it is to run the business with “really strong fiscal discipline,” especially as predictions about a sharp 2025 bounce-back didn’t materialize. The company intends to keep operating conservatively, he said, even if it reaches a point where it no longer has to.

That discipline underpins Reffkin’s forward-looking financial narrative: If Compass continues adding to its net agent count each year; maintains or modestly improves agent economics; and keeps $600 million in annual cost savings with minimal 3% to 4% inflationary growth in 2025 and beyond, it believes it can generate “hundreds and hundreds of millions” in adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow as the market normalizes to 5.4 million to 5.6 million home sales in 2026.

Put it all together and Compass’s “fast growth” story looks less like a single rocket launch and more like a repeatable pattern — acquire credible operators, expand services, build listing inventory advantages and push the industry’s rules toward a marketplace where the inventory strategy can thrive.

As Golod put it, Compass views its role as bigger than its own balance sheet. “We recognize that we have a responsibility not just to our agents but to the whole industry,” he said.

Whether competitors like the approach is almost beside the point. Compass is building toward a world where scale isn’t just about how many agents you have — it’s how many listing relationships you control and how many services you can attach to every transaction.

And if Compass is right about its own flywheel, the question for the rest of the industry isn’t, “How did they grow so quickly?” It’s, “What happens to everyone else if that model becomes the new baseline?”