Compass: The “Apple” of Real Estate

It’s hard to believe it’s only been six short weeks since we’ve affiliated with a new broker, Compass Real Estate.  We already can’t imagine our lives without our new company! When people ask “Why, Compass?” or if it lives up to its reputation as an innovative company, I’ve been searching to accurately put my feelings and experience into words.

This past weekend I read an article published on Inman News that really summed up the way I feel about Compass. The crux of the article, “The Apple of Real Estate” , delves into outsider views of Compass and the author ultimately compares the brokerage to Apple.

The article begins with a discussion of the newly unveiled Compass real estate sign which will be available during the fall market. It’s illuminated with beacon technology which will automatically pull up the listing info for the property when you approach it. It’s incredibly exciting and completely unlike anything we’ve seen before in our industry. You can read our full article on the sign here.  

I’ll leave the sign discussion to the end of the article though. It’s relevant, but not my major takeaway from the my experience at Compass. More like icing on an already delicious cake. Here are the excerpts that really resonated. Bear with me – there are many!

“Time and time again, I am asked by readers: What has Compass shown, really, that makes it so different from any other brokerage? Implicit in this line of questioning is a criticism that Compass has yet to demonstrate any tech or innovation regarded as truly, universally groundbreaking… But what other company has been constantly misjudged, misunderstood and sometimes ridiculed for releasing new products and services that seem like just more expensive and needlessly fancier versions of older tech?

What other company has excellent marketing and gets lots of press coverage, yet is often criticized for offering more style than substance, more form than function? And what company didn’t give a second thought to the naysayers, focused intently on making the best user experience, and rose from being a plucky upstart to the most powerful and wealthy tech company in the world?

…. If you read up on the history of the iPhone, the most revolutionary consumer tech gadget since the personal computer, you’ll learn that Apple basically cobbled together existing but poorly implemented tech and refined the user experience to make something incredible.

Before these inventions (iPhone and iPod), the world already had perfectly acceptable portable music players… and smartphones… But it was Apple’s hiring of the best engineers, knitting together existing hardware and software in new ways, and refining everything that allowed it to produce world-changing products and services.

Now look at Compass: it’s been aggressively scooping top-producing agents and brokerages, building new complementary technology products and services, and uniting them all in a shared vision of a company that wants to provide the best user experience to its customers, e.g. agents and their clients.

The Compass doubters want to see a single groundbreaking product or service that justifies their hype, but there’s not one: it’s the entire ecosystem that Compass is building, of the highest quality hardware, software, and service, that it’s banking on to succeed.”

As the writer notes, there is not ONE individual thing about Compass taken on its own that makes it a unique company.  Sure, we at The Goodhart Group have been blown away by the fantastic in-house advertising and design agency as well as the suite of tech tools.  Most of all though, it’s the energy within the company – its management as well as its agents – that makes us more committed to bringing the same to our clients. It’s the entire ecosystem as the writer notes; the drive and and vision to keep pushing to make every single experience a better one and refusing to accept “good enough” or the way things have been done before as a standard. That’s why Compass been able to attract the top agents in each city and dominate most major markets in the U.S. in just a few short years.

By striving to make life easier for us, Compass makes it exponentially easier for us agents to spend more time with our clients and for our clients, which has always been our goal. Further, it’s inspired us to recommit to innovate our service and experience for those clients in the same vein that Compass has done for us. Which brings me back to the discussion of the sign in the article:

“The other big headline, Compass unveiling a new $1,000 lighted and connected real estate sign, was greeted by some of the real estate community at Connect and online with a mix of polite applause, vocal befuddlement and even ridicule… Would most agents really fork over a non-trivial sum for a marketing set that can be easily damaged or stolen…? Would it be really worth the cost and potential trouble to be able to send out smartphone notifications?”

The answer is a resounding yes. The agents that Compass is recruiting and hiring are not agents who are resistant to change. They are not hesitant to spend money on marketing the homes they sell {note: price for the sign will actually be $500 not $1,000}.  Collectively, we (the #agentsofcompass) are not only willing to embrace change, we’re attracted to it. It inspires us. Especially if that change offers benefits to our clients.

Love the sign or hate it, there is no doubt that it offers a competitive advantage to homes that have it in their front yard. The internal message boards within Compass are fired up about the sign and I anticipate a sold out initial run for the fall market release. Speaking of which, if you’re interested in having this sign in your yard in the fall, please reach out now at the bottom of this email.

As the writer notes about Compass, “We are generally interested in what they’re doing now and next. Because as history has shown us, those who didn’t pay attention to Apple’s rise are now playing catch-up”.

Stay tuned, we can’t wait to continue to share our journey at Compass with you. Feel free to check out the FAQ about our move to Compass!  We’ve found our place in the world and are looking forward to helping guide our clients home as well.