Behind The Scenes Demo of the Compass Technology Platform with CEO Robert Reffkin and Rory Golod

Good morning and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to an Inman Insider webinar. This is going to be a very exciting webinar for you today. We have two very influential leaders here to talk about something really exciting in the industry. So we are really excited to have Robert Reffkin, CEO of Compass, as well as Rory Goet, who is also the President of Growth and Communications for Compass. We know that many of you are here today, so we want to make sure you can hear us and that you can see us. Just feel free to go into your chat and say hello to these wonderful gentlemen. Today we are going to be taking a super rare look into the Compass technology platform and discuss the past 10 years of innovation from this amazing company. I've been lucky enough to watch this journey since day one and it has been nothing short of exciting and dynamic. Welcome to the both of you. How are you today?

Yeah, we have a big crowd, so we're letting everybody kind of come in over the next couple of minutes to help you get familiar. Everyone on the call, we have your chat that you can go into. Let us know if you have any questions. We are recording today's session, so never fear if you've got to do business or take off, you will get a recording. So Robert, why don't I go ahead and just kick this off with you. Why are we here today and what are we going to see?

Great, thank you so much Robert. Thank you Laura. And so I'm really excited to be here today to be able to actually take everyone behind the scenes at a look at the Compass platform. And I know we have a number of people joining us, some folks who are not at Compass, some who are at Compass who are going to see many of the things that they use every single day. But we've been getting a lot of questions over the last number of years quite frankly on the Compass tech platform: what is it, is it real, does it make an impact?

And can I just say, it's one of the best kept secrets. When people are talking about Compass, it's like, what can you tell me? And it's like, it's just amazing. I can't even explain it. So I'm going to let you explain it, but just so you know, it's the best kept secret.

I appreciate that. We hear the same positive feedback, but I think we want people to actually see, particularly around the platform. You know, there are other things about companies you just have to experience — the culture, the brand, the human support — but the technology, people can see it and they can touch it. And so we wanted to take this as an opportunity to say, let's show everyone, let's show the world what this platform is and why it is the most impactful thing that an agent can leverage to grow their business. Why is it that there are thousands and thousands of Compass agents who wake up every morning and use this platform to run their business? Why is it that there are close to 400 agents who had left Compass in prior years and came back in the last year? And among all of them, the number one thing they said was the platform — they missed the technology platform and they needed to come back for it. So we wanted to use this as an opportunity to take everyone through it.

Now I'm going to pull it up and I'm going to run through it. I'm going to try to do this in 20 minutes. I wish we had two hours, it might get a little boring for some, but it would take two hours to go through everything. But I wanted to use this time to just try to take 20 minutes and go through some highlights of different things and workflows that we've created that agents use to grow their businesses. Now, the things I will share — first off, 90% of what we built are tools for agents to run their business. And so when you go to compass.com and you use it and you interact with it, whether it's as a consumer or an agent, and whether it's compass.com or it's our mobile app, either one of these are very clean and simple and easy to use and great. But the real technology, the real impact is behind the scenes, and that's the inside of the Compass platform, that is the backend system that our agents use to run their businesses every single day. And so that's what I'm going to take everyone through. And so we'll start here. When you first log in, everything you're seeing today by the way is live, is something that is proprietary that we have built. None of this is third-party tools. All of these tools are tools that Compass built themselves internally, because ultimately you can't outsource great technology. You have to build it internally. It's why the world's best technology companies build their own technology, because you can't outsource it.

And so through a couple different workflows, as we're using the platform almost how our agents would use it, right? The first thing I'm going to start off with is think about searching for properties. Think about working with a buyer. One of the great things about Compass is that Compass agents can search within Compass. They don't need to use any third-party aggregators or the MLS or other systems. They can search within Compass. All the data that exists within the MLS flows into Compass, and so everything that exists out there comes into Compass. Compass agents can go in and they can search and they can find properties. One of the benefits we also have is that because we have a platform where agents can search in one place, all of the private exclusives, which are the off-market listings that Compass has, are inside the system for our agents to access. And so rather than having to email colleagues in your office or always try to figure out, hey, what was that off-market listing that someone mentioned, you can go in and see all the off-markets in your region in one simple place. And in a low-inventory environment, that's obviously particularly beneficial to any clients that an agent's working with. I can go in, I can see the photos and the information about a property and the listing and everything that is available to me, and I can decide if any of these properties are properties I want to send to my clients.

And so maybe I traditionally would select a few of these and I'd go in and just email them right to my client, which is great and easy to do, but doesn't really make the client experience better. What we did is we built a product called Collections. And what Collections is, is a visual portfolio of the buying process. Think of a Collection like the Pinterest board for the buyer. Rather than me having to email my buyer a bunch of links and then they email me back and then they text me and then we get on the phone and then we meet and all this conversation is happening in 10 different places and it's not simplified in one area, a Compass agent just shares their client on a Collection. This is the agent view, so the client view would be a little different, but it's pretty similar. And the client can go in, they can see every property that the agent has populated in the Collection. The agent can set this up so that they can set search criteria so that automatically listings can just flow into the Collection based on the criteria they select. They can even determine when their client gets alerted when a new listing comes in. And the agent and the client work together on the Collection. So the client can go in, they can see the property, they can see the photos, the information, everything about the property. And then the client can communicate with the agent, right? So this client can say, hey, I really like the layout, could we see it at the end of the day to see the sunset based on the photo? And the agent can say, absolutely, let me confirm a time and I will come back to you. Now the agent and the client are communicating in one place. That is fantastic, right? Think about how many times you've had an interaction with a buyer and you've forgotten what they've said, you're not sure, did you share that property, what they think of it. You also can invite anyone to collaborate on a Collection. So I can add anyone to this. If I'm working with one person, they wanted their spouse. I'm working with parents who are helping a child buy a property. Maybe I'm referring a client — I'm a Compass agent in New York, I'm referring a client to a Compass agent in LA — I want to be on the Collection, I want to see what they're showing my client. So the ability to share this is incredible. And the Collection lives forever, so I can see over time if my clients continuously engage with any of the listings in there. I can see how many times they've looked at it. One thing that's very interesting is when you see that there's a property that you think would be perfect for your client but they've only looked at it once, but maybe there's another one they looked at 10 times. And so you can really better manage the day-to-day experience with the clients. And the clients will indicate to the agent which ones they like, which ones maybe they don't like and they're not interested in, and ultimately which ones they want to go see.

Right, so right then, the logical next step would be we're going to go see these properties. And so let's say that I want to take my clients to go see these three properties, right? Because these are the ones they've indicated as we've gone back and forth that they like. And so we're going to create the tour, and I think this is just a great example of how technology can enhance the agent's experience. And so let's say this is Tuesday's New Client New York Tour. I can select which client of mine this is for, based on whichever client is in my CRM. So I can tag it to that client, and now I can create the tour. You see how easy this is, right? So the system knows what the most efficient route is, so it automatically says we should start, in this case, all the way uptown, head down a little bit, and then head all the way down to Tribeca. We're using New York in this example, but this would be true in any market. We have all the three properties we're going to go see. It integrates with ShowingTime if it's a market that uses ShowingTime, or I can just manually say, you know what, ideally I'd like to go see this property at 9:30, this one I'd ideally like to go see at 10:30, and I'd like to go to this one, hopefully we get there by 12:30. Now I have to contact the listing agent. I can't just show up, right? I'm working with the buyer, it's not my listing. I don't want to have to go find their email address, call them, text them, email them. This just cuts down on so much chasing information, right?

As well, this is data-driven too. So you have this analytic piece behind it that's informing you as an agent. I mean, this is superpowered. This is amazing.

Well, so all I do is click email listing agent. Amazing. I've got the email address of the agent in there, the subject is written for the email, it addresses the agent. Now notice we said 9:30, so it knows to write the email and say I want to see the unit at 9:30, and I can just click send. So think about — we're saving minutes here, but minutes add up and they turn hours. And then to take it a step further, what's the next step for my client? I don't want to just send my client an email and say, hey, meet me at this address and we'll go from there. I want to create some content for them. And so we can do this in a matter of moments. And this is the kind of thing where many agents struggle because they spend hours creating content or they just don't do it at all, right? So I can add some introductory notes. I want to add my name and information. So let's go in and let's pretend I am Stacy. So I just type in my name and I can go in and select it, and then my headshot, my phone number, my email address — automatically in there. I don't have to go find my headshot. I've got the overview of the properties, information about each property. In this case we're including floor plans and the route we're going to take to get there. And all I have to do is decide, email this to my client or print it and bring it with me. Now the great thing about this — notice we went from searching for properties, then we shared them in a Collection with our client, and then we created a tour, but we never left Compass. We only had one tab open. We didn't have 15 tabs or 20 tabs. Just typical, right?

It is unfortunately typical.

And there's a saying I have, which is: integration is the innovation. The average real estate agent uses 20 systems, right? 20 systems.

I was just going to say that! I just saw that in a headline that the average agent does use 20 different products to achieve pretty much what this just did. 20 different products, according to T360, you know, the well-known real estate consulting firm.

And the problem is if you have 20 tabs open, you're never going to have an experience that is going to make you efficient, going to help you make more money, and is going to be something your clients are impressed with. The best technology platforms in the world are integrated, right? When you're on your mobile phone, you can't use 20 apps at the same time, right? And so what we have done is we've taken all these different workflows — we didn't invent the concept of searching for properties or setting up tours — we just took all these different things, we put it into one place. One login, one system, one app to do everything, so that you don't need 12 or 20 or 30, and you don't need to pay for all of them, right? That's part of what makes it so challenging for agents. Now if we sort of pivot for a moment, think about marketing, right? Marketing is probably the most time-consuming and important activity an agent has, right? But unfortunately, marketing is incredibly difficult. Because my options as an agent are: pay a third party to do it, find third-party software that doesn't really work for real estate, or try to do it myself, right?

Yeah, from a branded marketing perspective, not really. Well, yeah, I would struggle in that area myself.

And so Marketing Center within the platform is the one-stop marketing place for our agents. I like to say, think of Marketing Center, this product, like having a graphic designer on your team but for free, or having Photoshop in your hands but anyone can use it. And so I can go in and create any content I need. Now, the interesting thing that we do is we recognize that agents, their time is very limited, so creating content can be challenging. And so in Marketing Center, every week we automatically give our agents content. With everything going on in the industry, maybe an agent wants to send something to clients about buyer representation — that content's all in here. They can select it. They might want to share why Compass is a great brand and a great company for those clients. They might want to create videos for listings, they can do that. Maybe they want to talk about posts on social media about market share and all the markets Compass is number one in. Maybe they want to share market stats and data. Every week we provide this content to agents. Maybe you're a Kansas City Chiefs fan and you're in Kansas City — all that's in there. So they can go right in there and create. They don't have to get in the mind space of being a content creator.

Let's actually create some content though, right? Let's say a brochure for a listing, which is obviously a pretty standard, common thing for an agent to need. We'll see how easy it is to create this, right? I've got all different starting points here that I can use — we don't like calling them templates, we call them starting points. And I go in, let me pick one. Now the system knows these are all my listings, right? So I don't have to even worry about entering my listing. I'm just going to pick one of my listings. I click on the listing, all the information on the listing automatically flows into the brochure. And maybe I decide, you know what, I don't love this photo. Well, that's fine, because I don't have to go into my files and find the other photos and upload them. It's all integrated, all that data lives in Compass. So I decide, you know, I like this photo better, that's a better view. You know, in this case I'm going to remove the unit number, and I'd like to just move this over. So we're just going to move it over to the middle. I think that looks good. You know, this looks good. And right here, I'm co-listing this with let's say one of our agents. I don't need to bother that agent and email him, say, hey, can you send me your headshot? I just type in his name and I'm done.

Wow. Right. Now, I am not a graphic designer. I'm not skilled in graphic design at all. And I used to do these brochures and they take — by hand, they can take a long time, especially to have a really nice, sleek brand. But to be able to drop in all of this with correct resolutions of photos and headshots and have it be branded to Compass is phenomenal. It's half the battle.

Well, and here's, to make it even easier, you know, I might decide I want to print this in my office and bring it, or what I'd most likely want to do is have beautiful, gloss, thick-stock copies created. And so again, in this spirit of integration, I just click one button. This will automatically get sent to a third-party printing provider, in this case, ExpressDocs. I never have to interface and use it. I just click the button and in three days I can have 200 gloss copies sent right to my office, so I can bring them to my open house, right? So we've tried to take something that either would take a lot of time or would cost an agent money and make it simple and easy to use. Now what we just did for a brochure, we can do for any type of collateral. Social media post — if I want to post on Instagram about my new listing, again, I just put in, I've got all my listings in here, select my listing, I can make the same edits and changes, post right to Facebook or Instagram.

So you're integrated with the social media platforms as well?

Completely integrated, so I can do that right from there. Email — Compass agents don't need to use third-party email service providers. They can send all their email newsletters right from Compass. Videos — if I want to create a video for my listing, I do it right within Compass. Digital ads — this is one of my favorite ones. I think agents should be doing digital ads for every listing, because the cost relative to the exposure is so high. For a few hundred dollars, you can get in front of thousands of people, and it's measurable. But most agents don't do digital ads because it's a pain. You got to figure out, how do I set up a business account on Facebook, and how much do I spend? And then a number of them hire third-party agencies to do this, which is frankly massively overpriced. So I can go in, I've got all my listings in there, I select a listing, and I can just create a digital ad really easily. And I can see if I want to do it on Facebook, if I want to do it on Instagram, I want to do it on Google. I can go and I can edit the ad, make any changes, adjust the photo I want to use. And then from there I can go in, I can edit how much money I want to spend, where I want to run the ad. Do I want to use certain zip codes? Do I want to target my own contacts in my CRM and retarget them on social media? And then I can set how much I want to spend, and my credit card's in the system, so I just purchase the ad and that's it. I never even have to worry about going to one of those third-party companies to do it. And one thing that I really love about this too is that if you are an agent that is working cross-nationally — in other words, you have secondary markets, you have secondary referral partners — you can target those ads to a completely different farm or location. And one thing that I feel like is really big this year in a shortage of inventory is adding on additional inventory markets for you to feed into and to do this.

So this looks like that could already be set up. You don't even have to think about it. It's like, turn it on and go. Yeah, that's phenomenal.

Yeah. And part of what makes it so impactful is, as you said, I can be meeting with a client and say, look, if you believe that there are going to be extra buyers coming from Florida, let's say, and your listing is in New York, I can go right in there, drop in my zip codes and do it. We go a step further, right? We're just talking about marketing collateral, print and digital, but what about physical collateral? What about if I want to gift my clients, right? If I want to send a client a closing gift, I can do it right through Compass. Maybe I want to send my client this water purifier. I go in, add it to the cart, check out, and it automatically tags that in the CRM to remind me that I bought this client this product and I had it sent to them. And I can do a personalized note. And so I can gift through the platform, so I can keep track of it. I can order my business cards, my signs. When I order a sign for a listing, I don't go to some third-party vendor, my team doesn't have to do that. It's all through Compass, right? Everything gets done within the system.

So that I, as an agent, don't have to worry about using all these different third-party tools. Now, when you think about kind of the next logical step of I'm searching for properties, I'm marketing properties — like, how do I actually track my business? One of the things I always say, when you go to an agent's office, you're always going to see a whiteboard, and it's going to have like my current listings, my current buyers, anything that's in contract or in escrow or pending. But a whiteboard is not going to make an agent or their client's life easier because it's static. And so we built a product called Business Tracker, which I like to say I think of it as like the digital whiteboard, right? For every buyer, renter, or lease I'm doing, seller, all that lives in my Business Tracker. And this is a place where I can go in and if someone were to ask me, hey, what's going on with every seller you're working with? Those that you first reached out to, those that you're nurturing, those that are preparing to list, those that have already listed, those that are in contract, and those that have closed. So I have one place where I can keep track of all of this. And as the status has changed, I can update this. You know, I can say, this one closed, great, I move that over, and all the numbers update for me. As I'm looking in here, everything I need for my listings is in this place. I always say this to agents: if I were to ask you, show me where everything lives for a transaction, what would you say? Twenty different places, and I don't know. And a big I don't know. And then the inevitable, a client asks a question months later and you're trying to say, wait, where does this thing live? But it should all be in one place, right? And so let's say this listing — I go in, I've got all the tasks that I need to complete for this listing. As I check off tasks, they get completed. I can even assign tasks to my team, so maybe there's people on my team who are going to do certain tasks. Got all the information about the property, notes, the checklist of the transaction, all the steps I need to take, so that myself or my team is kept up to speed on where things are. When I want photography for my listing, I don't have to get the photographer to send me all the photos and then I download them from Dropbox and I upload them. We just put in the photographer's email address, the photographer gets a link, photographer uploads the photos, they automatically get uploaded into Compass. We cut out every step that is not needed. And by the way, pretty soon we're going to be able to, once those photos come in, automatically build the listing page drafts for an agent and use AI to predict which photos should go in which order. So that's something we're excited about.