When then-Compass CFO Kalani Reelitz told investors in October 2024 that the company would achieve 30 percent market share in its top 30 markets “exiting ’26,” it wasn’t a boast. It was a deadline.
Eighteen months later, new data from the Consumer Policy Center (CPC) suggests Compass has already hit that target — and in some cities, blown well past it.
The CPC report, based on 5,000 recent home sales across five major markets, found that Compass now controls between 30 percent and 39.5 percent of unit sales in Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Diego and Austin. In four of those five cities, its share is at least four times larger than the next biggest brokerage. In dollar volume — skewed upward by Compass’s deliberate focus on luxury and high-priced properties — the dominance is even greater.
The scale of that dominance becomes even clearer in context. New data from industry consulting firm T3 Sixty shows that Compass and Anywhere’s combined 2025 sales volume exceeded that of the next three largest enterprises — Keller Williams, REMAX and HomeServices of America — combined.
What the numbers don’t fully capture is how deliberately, and how methodically, Compass got there. The following is a comprehensive look back at how Compass executed the biggest power grab residential real estate has ever seen.
The goal they stopped talking about
Compass International Holdings CEO Robert Reffkin updated investors on what he called the “30/30 vision” during the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call, laying out an explicit goal: 30 percent market share in the brokerage’s top 30 cities. “Our 30/30 vision of realizing on average 30 percent market share in our top 30 cities will strengthen this advantage by growing listings in more markets where we have the largest presence, as well as enabling double-digit growth in our gross transaction volume,” Reffkin told investors.
His CFO went further on the same call, telling analysts the company was “probably halfway” there, with “a few markets that are at or over” the threshold and “a lot of markets kind of in that high-teens area.” The target, Reelitz said, was achievable “exiting ’26.”
“At this time, we’re not talking about that topic.”
— Robert Reffkin, Q3 2025 Earnings Call, when asked about the 30/30 strategy
Reelitz, who had set that deadline so explicitly, would not be around to see it. He resigned from Compass in the summer of 2025 and was succeeded by Scott Wahlers, the company’s longtime Chief Accounting Officer. By the time of the Q3 2025 earnings call — the first since Compass announced its planned Anywhere acquisition — it was a different CFO and a different set of answers.
“At this time, we’re not talking about that topic,” Reffkin said when asked by a Wall Street analyst for an update on the 30/30 strategy.
When a second analyst asked about adoption of the private listings program, the response was equally brief. “Just given where things are, we’re not guiding into that topic.”
Compass declined multiple inquiries from Inman seeking clarification on the 30/30 vision markets.
A December 2025 analysis by The Capitol Forum, based on RealTrends Verified data, found the Compass-Anywhere merger would create market share concentrations “well above presumptively illegal thresholds” under the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission 2023 Merger Guidelines — which treat market shares above 30 percent as presumptively illegal — in at least a dozen states.
The analysis projected the combined company would exceed majority market share in several major cities, including Denver, Seattle, Boston, Washington D.C., and Brooklyn, New York, and could even top 80 percent in both Manhattan and Newport Beach, California. The analysis relies on voluntary data submissions and may undercount smaller players, researchers said, but the directional picture it paints is consistent with the CPC’s transaction-level findings.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote to the Department of Justice, flagging the antitrust implications as “significant.” When the deal was announced, Compass said it expected it to close in the second half of 2026. It ended up closing in January, sailing through DOJ review.
How they got there
The market share that Compass now commands didn’t materialize overnight. It was the product of a strategic acquisition plan, a private listings program and — when necessary — legal wrangling.
On the acquisitions front, Compass moved quickly and deliberately.
In 2024, the company announced plans to acquire @properties Christie’s International Real Estate — the number one brokerage in Chicago by sales volume — in a deal valued at roughly $444 million, along with regional firms Latter & Blum on the Gulf Coast and Parks Real Estate in Tennessee.
In 2025, it acquired Washington Fine Properties, a 150-agent luxury firm in a D.C. market where it already held 22 percent share, and made moves into two new markets: PorchLight Real Estate Group and Cottingham Chalk — a Charlotte, North Carolina firm with 70 agents and $589 million in 2024 sales — both in July, and Colorado Home Realty in Colorado in September.
Then, later that month, Compass announced a $1.6 billion deal for Anywhere Real Estate — the parent of Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s, ERA, Corcoran and Better Homes and Gardens. The combined company would become the largest residential real estate brokerage in the world, representing nearly 340,000 real estate professionals across roughly 120 countries and territories, Compass said at the time of the announcement.
Meanwhile, in November 2024, Compass formally launched its three-phase marketing strategy, which moves sellers from a Private Exclusives phase through a Coming Soon pre-marketing period before ultimately heading to the MLS. By February 2025, the Compass One client portal baked that funnel directly into every seller conversation. Two months later, the company had roughly 10,000 private exclusive listings nationwide, Rory Golod, then a Compass regional president but now president of growth, said.
The industry’s own rule-making was moving in Compass’s direction as well. In March 2025, NAR updated its policies to introduce a “delayed marketing exempt listing” category alongside Clear Cooperation, formally allowing brokerages to hold properties back from public IDX feeds before wider distribution.
Where MLS rules stood in the way, Compass kept pushing. In early 2025, the brokerage coordinated a private exclusives push in the Seattle area, encouraging agents to test its 3-phase marketing strategy against Northwest MLS rules and, according to agents, offering to cover potential fines. Compass sued NWMLS in April, alleging anticompetitive conduct. Compass has argued in court filings that aspects of its approach complied with existing MLS rules, while NWMLS moved to block those efforts by updating its rules and eventually cutting off Compass’s access to its listings data feed. The case has since expanded to include counterclaims from NWMLS, and a federal judge recently denied a motion to dismiss, allowing the dispute to move forward.
Then in June, Compass sued Zillow, which had moved to restrict certain Compass private listings from its platform. Compass dropped the Zillow suit in mid-March 2026 after Zillow made its listing rules more lenient.
The CPC report’s data suggests the private listings strategy is functioning as designed. In Washington, D.C., where Compass holds 39.5 percent of unit sales, the company’s double-ending rate — deals in which both the listing and buyer agent belong to the same brokerage — exceeded 41 percent. In his research, Stephen Brobeck, senior fellow at the Consumer Policy Center and the report’s author, said that when he studied double-ending rates across cities roughly a decade ago, the typical range was 3 to 12 percent. Compass has previously said double-ending is not something it tracks or encourages.
Building the team for what comes next
As Compass assembled its market position, it was simultaneously staffing for it.
In July 2025, Compass hired Mike Simonsen — a multi-decade industry veteran and founder of Altos Research, the company that built real-time MLS data tools tracking days on market and price reductions — as its first-ever chief economist. His weekly market update video series, once published under the HousingWire banner, now runs under the Compass brand.
Two months later, Compass brought on Ethan Glass as Chief Legal Officer. Glass spent years at the DOJ directing teams that investigated and litigated against MLS organizations for anticompetitive practices — then became NAR’s lead antitrust attorney in the Sitzer | Burnett commission case. Glass had already been working with Compass on the NWMLS lawsuit before joining full-time, and his appointment came the same month the Anywhere deal was announced.
In February 2026, as the Anywhere integration got underway, Reffkin elevated Neda Navab to president of Compass. Navab has been with Compass since 2018, starting as Reffkin’s chief of staff before rising to eastern region president. Her mandate now is to unify the combined company’s culture across all 340,000 agents and every brand. “Big is our engine, but boutique is our edge,” she told Inman in March.
Also in March, Compass tapped Sue Yannaccone — the former president and CEO of Anywhere Brands — as the combined company’s first Chief Operating Officer. While at Anywhere, she had been an outspoken critic of the private listings push, warning in a 2025 op-ed that certain brokerages were “simply trying to concentrate listings for the express purpose of benefiting their business — at the expense of a consumer base that is already struggling.” She is now COO of the company running the industry’s largest private listings program.
Earlier this month, the company also promoted Golod to President of Growth at parent Compass International Holdings. In his expanded role, Golod now oversees agent recruitment, platform adoption, M&A and corporate communications across all 340,000 agents under every brand in the Compass portfolio. In February 2025, Golod told Real Estate News that “if you’re not working with Compass, you’re missing the market.” He is now responsible for making that true at a scale that would have seemed implausible two years ago.
What it means for consumers
An April report from the Consumer Federation of America and the National Urban League — based on a survey of 223 HUD-certified housing counselors across 37 states — found that nearly half said their clients sometimes, often or always struggle to find homes because of private listings.
The report also raised fair housing concerns, noting that private listings have historically been linked to racial steering and segregation, and warning that their growth could reintroduce barriers the MLS system was built to reduce.
As the Anywhere integration deepens and the private listings program spreads across brands consumers still associate as independent — Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s — double-ending rates across the combined entity could climb, Brobeck suggests.
“Compass is becoming so dominant in some local markets that consumers will feel both pressure and attraction to list and purchase properties through Compass agents.”
— Stephen Brobeck, Consumer Policy Center, April 2026
Compass maintains that its private listing strategy benefits sellers, citing internal research showing pre-marketed homes sell for 2.9 percent more on average than those that go directly to the MLS. Critics, including Zillow and Bright MLS, have disputed that finding.
Either way, the megabrokerage is still making moves. On April 24, the company announced a partnership with MRED — the Chicagoland MLS with more than 48,000 subscribers — to develop a national private listing network. Compass committed to supplying its full inventory of private exclusives and coming-soon listings to MRED’s Private Listing Network, and said it would subsidize membership costs for up to 100,000 of its agents.
MRED pledged to protect participating agents from being penalized by third-party portals. The partnership effectively gives Compass a national MLS infrastructure for its private listings strategy.
Where that leads remains to be seen. But there’s no question about the arc of the brokerage’s expansion. Compass’ CFO said in October 2024 that they’d reach 30 percent of market share in 30 markets by the end of 2026. New data suggests they’re already there — in some cities, and then some. For the buyers and sellers navigating that market, the question is no longer whether Compass will dominate — it’s what that dominance will mean.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Neda Navab’s title to President of Compass. It has also been updated to add context on Compass’s legal position and ongoing litigation with Northwest MLS.
