To all the agents in the house,
Geographic expertise matters for individual agents, but does it make a difference for residential brokerages? Or are brokerages being nationalized and standardized like hotels or fast food restaurants?
This question has been on my mind after interviewing Thad Wong, the co-CEO of @properties earlier this week. Wong's brokerage is no. 1 in Chicago based on sales volume, and is now the 8th largest brokerage in the country based on that measurement, according to RealTrends.
A bit of that $16.3 billion in 2020 sales volume came from outside of Chicago. Following an investment from Charlottesville, Virginia, private equity firm Quad-C in 2018, @properties bought Ansley Real Estate in Atlanta and Nest Realty in Charlottesville.
But now @properties is really making a play at going national. The brokerage announced a new Dallas franchise on Tuesday, and Wong vowed to announce more franchise deals in the coming months.
For years @properties was part of a growing minority of brokerages that carved a national name through local dominance in contrast to the purely national strategies of the Realogy brands, HomeServices of America, and Compass.
But at the very least @properties is now joining Pittsburgh's Howard Hanna in developing a semi-national presence. It seems preferable to, say, what Reece Nichols in Kansas City is presently going through: A longtime market leader in the Show Me State, Compass recruited away last month several of Reece Nichols' top performers.
Agents, do you feel the local brokerage powerhouse is dead? And if not, is there still some cachet in a regional model? Do local agents or real estate professionals still say, "ooh, you should stick with Howard Hanna, they really know Pittsburgh" or, "Go to an @properties agent, they have their pulse on Chicago"?
Please email me anonymously at mblake@housingwire.com. And thank you for all the Opendoor-related emails earlier this week. We'll get into that in the next OpenHouse.
Sincerely,
Matthew Blake
Senior Real Estate Reporter
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