The company now has 17,752 principal agents. Founder and CEO Robert Reffkin said in a new earnings report that he believes his company will pull ahead in 2025.
Turn up the volume on your real estate success at Inman On Tour: Nashville! Connect with industry trailblazers and top-tier speakers to gain insights, cutting-edge strategies, and invaluable connections. Elevate your business and achieve your boldest goals — all with Music City magic. Register now.
Compass has once again managed to buck housing market sluggishness, revealing Tuesday that it grew all of its key metrics in the final three months of 2024.
The numbers, from a newly published fourth-quarter earnings report, show that the brokerage’s revenue between October and December hit $1.4 billion, a 25.9 percent year-over-year increase. The company also cut its net loss to $40.5 million in the quarter, an improvement over the $83.7 million it lost during the same period in 2023.
Additionally, the company reported that it achieved $26.7 million in Q4 free cash flow — a key metric thanks to CEO Robert Reffkin’s promise to make Compass free cash flow positive. Indeed, the report adds that for the first time ever Compass was free cash flow positive for an entire year in 2024.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL INDEX SURVEY FOR FEBRUARY
Perhaps of even greater interest to real estate industry professionals, however, were the company’s agent count and market share numbers. Regarding the former, the report states that Compass had 17,752 principal agents at the end of 2024, which is a year-over-year jump of 20.9 percent. Regarding the latter, the earnings report states that Compass now has a market share of 5.06 percent, up 0.65 percent from the final three months of 2023.
The brokerage also grew transactions in the quarter by 24.1 percent year over year to 50,411.
Robert Reffkin
In the report, Reffkin noted that his company outpaced the broader market, which saw resale transactions hit a 29-year low.
“As the market recovers, we believe the combination of our cost discipline and structural advantages, which include our end-to-end proprietary technology platform, national scale, network of top agents, and depth of inventory, positions Compass to capture significant upside,” Reffkin said in the report, adding later that he believes “2025 will be the year that the gap between Compass and the industry widens.”
During a call with investors Tuesday afternoon, Reffkin said that Compass’ recent performance is “clear evidence that our playbook is working.”
Heading into Tuesday’s earnings, shares in Compass were trading for just under $8. That was up for the day and the week, and a considerable improvement over one year ago when shares were hovering in the mid-$3 range.
Shares jumped Tuesday in after hours trading following the publication of the Q4 earnings report.
Credit: Google
Compass had a market cap of about $4.6 billion as of Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday’s report is the latest in a growing string of positive earnings for the brokerage. Compass last reported earnings in October, for example, at which time it revealed that during the third quarter of last year, its revenue jumped 11.7 percent year over year. Transactions also rose 16.1 percent compared to the same period in 2023. Other reports from last year similarly showed ongoing growth even in the face of a struggling market.
Compass’ strong earnings also come as the company has staked out a unique, and uniquely vocal, position in the real estate industry. Beginning last summer, Reffkin has been among the most vocal opponents of Clear Cooperation, a rule from the National Association of Realtors requiring agents to put their listings into their NAR-affiliated MLS within a day after marketing begins. Reffkin has argued that the rule violates ethics codes and limits consumer choice, among other things.
At the same time, Compass has been open about its efforts to build a private network of listings that are only available — at least initially — to the company’s agents and their clients.
Tuesday’s report sheds light on how that effort is going, noting that, as of Feb. 16, “homeowners are marketing more than 7,500 listings as a Compass Private Exclusive or a Compass Coming Soon, which are only available by working with a Compass agent or by searching Compass.com.”
About 55 percent of the listings Compass currently holds start as either a company “exclusive” or “coming soon,” the report also states. The report, citing internal company research, additionally argues that such listings “were associated with a 2.9 percent higher average close price compared to Compass-sold properties that were not pre-marketed in 2024.”
Those findings are significant because they come just days after Zillow published a report arguing that “sellers who transacted off the MLS collectively left more than $1 billion on the table.”
The Zillow report did not look specifically at Compass listings, and Compass’ own findings apply merely to properties that began off-market, not that necessarily ended up transacting off-market. In other words, despite the disparate findings, the two reports don’t necessarily contradict each other. Still, they are both likely to fuel an intense and ongoing debate in real estate right now over the value of off-market listings.
Update: This story was updated after publication with additional information from Compass’ report, a call with analysts, and background from previous reports.
Email Jim Dalrymple II
