Compass: What Goes Up, Must Come Down

By York Baur, CEO of Moxi Works

If you’re reading this, you have no doubt seen the news about Softbank (the world’s largest tech investment fund) investing $450 Million into the tech brokerage Compass – emphasis on the brokerage. This morning I sent out a note to all of our employees here at Moxi Works, and have decided to share them here. As a true “techie,” I’m sure it surprises no one to learn that I have some opinions about this.

For starters, Compass is a brokerage, not a tech company. However, like Redfin (who has continually overpromised and undelivered), they’re being valued as a technology company, not a brokerage, which means it’s valued at several times the valuation of brokerages.

This fundamental disconnect will work for a while, but gravity is pervasive, and the valuation will fall back to earth soon enough, particularly when there is a real estate market correction.

In short – this is the Greater Fool Theory at work.

What does this all mean?

To quote Inman, “Compass touts itself as “the first modern real estate platform, which reduces the friction and frustration associated with selling, buying, or renting a property by providing real estate agents with a set of powerful tools to increase efficiency and sales volume.”

They have to pay off agents with large sums of money to consider leaving their current brokerage for Compass and their platform. Hence, they are a brokerage, not a technology company.

Here’s a fact: You don’t have to with a true open platform and the technology that embodies it.

There’s nothing Compass has that we don’t already have or that isn’t available today from our more than 35 partners. Our success, the success of the Moxi Cloud open platform isn’t a theory – we can prove that our stuff makes agents more productive and brokerages more profitable. To that end, their CEO Robert Reffkin said today that agents that come to Compass do 24.9% better the year after. We know that agents that adopt Moxi Engage do 39% better, and are happy to walk you through that data.

News like today’s strikes fear in the heart of brokerages, as it probably should. Like every problem, there is a solution. That solution is the Moxi Cloud, which takes Compass head on and gives agents exactly what they need to be more successful than their competition.

I encourage you to contact us – we’d be happy to answer any questions you have, whether it’s about Moxi Works are not. We’re here to help the brokerage.