Robert Reffkin
Founder & CEO, Compass. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthor@RobReffkin ↗LinkedIn ↗robertreffkin.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Robert Reffkin co-founded Compass in 2012, scaling it into one of the largest residential real estate brokerages in the United States. He is also the author of the book No One Succeeds Alone and the founder of the nonprofit organization America Needs You.
2shows
2appearances
26statements
7resolved
3supported
1contradicted
43%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Robert Reffkin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Reffkin: Compass senior team secretly asked co-founder Ori Allon to fire me
“One morning, Ori Was invited to a breakfast by one of the senior members of the team. He goes to breakfast, and everyone is there on the senior team except me. And they basically tell him that they want to fire me.”
Reffkin: A real estate brokerage's customer is the agent, not the homebuyer
“You can't work for everyone. And who's your customer? Your customer is the person that pays you. And buyers and sellers don't pay brokerage firms. They pay agents. And agents are the ones that pay brokerage firms. They split a percentage of what they make with…”
Reffkin: Average agent grows business 19% in first year at Compass
“The average agent that comes to Compass has grown their business 19% in their first year.”
Reffkin: In 2018, rival brokerage heads claimed Compass would fail within five years
“At a big real estate conference, one of the top, you know, brokerage firms says, oh, you know, this was like in 2018 I think compass is going to go out of business in five years. And then the head of the fourth largest broker from the country says, oh, I think…”
Reffkin: Underrepresented workers receive less candid feedback in the workplace
“And if you're part of an underrepresented community, I think people give feedback to you even less.”
Reffkin: Searching listings is less than 5% of an agent's business
“Everyone thought that real estate was like searching listings, what aggregators do. That's probably less than five percent of what an agent's business is.”
Reffkin: Traditional brokerages pocketed profits instead of investing in R&D
“This has been a model for over a hundred years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and then they went on vacation. But wh…”
Reffkin: Real estate demand for larger homes has permanently shifted
“On the real estate side, I think that we have a permanent shift in the demand curve, where people will continue to want more space and more multiple home ownership.”
Reffkin: Apartment seekers want experienced experts, not friendly tour guides
“We were not giving good customer service because people are not looking for a friend. They're looking for someone who has expertise and that has done this many, many, many times before.”
Reffkin: Compass lost over a third of its employees during a pivot
“We pivoted. We lost over a third of our people because they thought we weren't going the right direction.”
Reffkin: Real estate agents' core competency is complex project management
“Their core competency is taking this multi-party transaction with all these different entities that it takes to close and think of like a very extensive Gantt chart of all these different entities. They're the ones who just keep on pushing it forward. You know…”
Reffkin: Real estate agents are fundamentally entrepreneurs, not just industry professionals
“Real estate agents aren't real estate professionals that happen to be entrepreneurs. They're entrepreneurs that just happen to be in real estate. If real estate didn't exist, they would be entrepreneurs somewhere else.”
Reffkin: Veteran agents outperform hospitality recruits in real estate
“The people that are best at doing that, I could see were agents who had been doing it for 10 years, not people that we hired, you know, from restaurants or hotels that were really, really nice, and trying to train them to, like, meet someone on a corner and sh…”
Reffkin: The average real estate agent uses 13 third-party software tools
“A mobile app can connect to 13 different third party tools, which is how many tools the average agent uses.”
Reffkin: Compass placed ads directly outside competitors' offices to recruit agents
“We would market the Compass brand outside of the offices of our competing firms, and so there's like a phone booth or a billboard or a bus stop, outside of our competing firms, that's where we would put the brands so that agents at other companies would say, o…”
Reffkin: Consumers use real estate agents more today than 10 years ago
“Just to be very clear, people use agents more now today than they did 10 years ago.”
Reffkin: Bayo Ogunlesi offered a $500k seed investment and safety-net job
“He said, how about this? I'll give you 500,000 dollars. I'll be your first investor, and if you fail in a year, then I'll hire you.”
Reffkin: Grandfather left $26M to my aunt and $100 to my mother
“He ended up being very successful. I think he and his family owned real estate in Israel, and, you know, when he died, you know, he gave twenty-six million dollars to her sister, who is, I guess, more obedient to the way that And he wanted her to be. And gave …”
Reffkin: Childhood loneliness from mixed-race identity drove my ambition to succeed
“One of the hard things about being A mixed kid is that you don't really feel like you belong, like you have no place, you have no community, and that feels lonely. So I do remember being lonely when I was younger, but those feelings are what instilled in me at…”
Reffkin: I earned over $100,000 as a high school DJ
“Yeah, I earned over a 100,000 dollars as a DJ, and better than that, I was able to employ a number of my friends and help them, you know, make money as well, and so it was a very empowering feeling, and it was fun.”
Reffkin: McKinsey did not invite me to stay after two years
“Yeah, I stayed there for two years, and I was not they did not let me continue on. They don't call it fired, but they say you are not invited to stay on.”
Reffkin: Compass Co-Founder Ori Allon Sold Startups to Google and Twitter
“I had a friend named Ori Alone who had sold a company to Google and another company to Twitter”
Reffkin: Urban Compass raised that year's largest seed round at $8M
“Yeah, we raised eight million dollars, which was the largest seed financing round that year, and we raised it from three groups of people. Venture capital firms, real estate investors, and CEOs.”
The other half of the tape: Robert Reffkin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 1 episode across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 5
Statements about Robert Reffkin, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 5
2021 5 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Robert's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Compass | 1 | 20 | 43% 3/7 | full record on How I Built This → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder & CEO, Compass | 1 | 6 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |