Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Opinion
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Jul 2021
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reffkin: Over a third of Compass staff quit after pivot to traditional brokerage
“Over a third of the team left.”
Assertion Partly supported
Reffkin: Leonard Steinberg was New York's top agent with $500M in listings
“Leonard was the number one agent in New York the prior year, having sold or put in contract, five hundred million dollars in listings.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reffkin: I was a C student in school
“I was never a good student. I was a C student.”
