At a sunny San Diego office in March, Compass’ new president, Neda Navab, stood before a room full of female agents.
She told them about her background, saying that she earned the grit necessary to work in real estate through years of watching her Iranian immigrant mom build her business as a broker.
“I got to grow up sitting shotgun to this incredible profession and career,” said Navab, echoing a talking point from the brokerage’s longtime CEO, Robert Reffkin, who cites his mother as inspiration for his own entrepreneurial hustle. “I developed such respect for this profession,” she added.
The appearance at the brokerage’s Southern California outpost was just one stop along Navab’s campaign to attend 100 meetings or events in her first 100 days at the top of the firm. Her journey began in Larchmont, New York, just two days after she was announced as president, and she continued to travel across the country to such markets as Boston, Palm Beach and Dallas.
The inaugural initiative is also right out of Reffkin’s playbook, a natural roadmap for the executive who’s worked closely with him since she joined the company in 2018. Reffkin hired Navab as his chief of staff to fill the spot after he promoted his other longtime right-hand executive, Rory Golod.
Now Navab and Golod are among the leaders Reffkin is leaning on to usher the Compass empire into a new era. The company’s new form came in January, after it closed a $1.6 billion deal to acquire Anywhere Real Estate — the parent firm of some of the industry’s most well-known brands, including Sotheby’s International Realty, Corcoran and Coldwell Banker.
As part of the deal, Reffkin — the central force behind Compass’ ascent from a startup brokerage in New York City to residential real estate’s largest conglomerate — traded in his role at the top of the brokerage he built to helm the newly minted holding company as chairman and CEO. Along with expanding the number of agents Compass oversees by nearly nine times, the deal added thousands of franchise businesses, international reach and mortgage and title companies — plus a whopping $3 billion in debt carried over from Anywhere’s balance sheets.
To handle the load, Reffkin is tapping a cast of familiar names, some assembled from Anywhere’s ranks and others from his longtime circle of confidantes. He’s tasked the cohort with steering the company through the tumults of a major shakeup, one made only more complicated by his own determination to topple industry norms and the powers that be.
The charge is a tall order for these industry veterans, longtime Compass loyalists and first-time C-suites, who will have to balance building a cohesive corporate culture with preserving individual brand identities, as well as upholding the company’s promises to its employees and agents while delivering on its financial goals for shareholders.
Growing pains
Before the merger, Reffkin was on a crusade to change industry practices around private listings. Compass had already started encouraging agents to use a three-step plan that included first marketing properties within Compass’ own ecosystem before offering them publicly. When listing portals such as Zillow pushed back against private listings with new rules, Reffkin’s company sued the platform over alleged anti-competitive tactics.
When news of the Anywhere acquisition broke in September, it added fuel to Reffkin’s fire, and he continued the public grandstanding he’d become known for over the years.
Behind the scenes, Compass tapped a crucial partner in the halls of power. The scale of the combined firms triggered warnings from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, who urged the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to conduct an antitrust review. But any further probe was quashed by Mike Davis, a lawyer known as an ally of President Donald Trump and a specialist in advancing mergers.
By January, the firm announced the deal had crossed the finish line months ahead of schedule. And Reffkin showed no signs of slowing down.
At Compass the brokerage, he rolled out a controversial lead generation program and implemented fixed transaction fees across its markets. The company announced an exclusive partnership with Redfin to display the company’s “Coming Soon” listings, and Zillow followed with its own agreements with other brokerages. (Compass dropped its lawsuit against Zillow in March after a judge rejected its bid for an injunction.)
Reffkin has also overseen some tough calls in merging the residential giants. He implemented a company-wide policy requiring employees across all of its brands to work from their offices five days a week.
“This merger came together quite quickly, and more quickly than we had anticipated. We all were sort of forced to hit the ground running.”
In March, the firm told the New Jersey Department of Labor that it would lay off 110 employees based in Madison, where Anywhere was headquartered. Around the same time, Compass leaders assured many of the brokerage’s own employees that they would keep their jobs, but some told The Real Deal they were laid off just days later. Others reported that the company had eliminated entire teams, including those responsible for operating and refining the firm’s tech stack.
As Compass reduced the number of engineers, its leaders began to strategize how to scale its platform to accommodate the tens of thousands of additional agents now under its purview — one of the biggest tasks for the company’s first years.
In an open letter published after the merger, Reffkin promised the brokerages formerly with Anywhere that it wouldn’t force them to adopt the platform, although access to Compass’ technology — one of the firm’s main talking points and a piece of the business in which it’s invested more than a billion dollars — could be a bright spot for many agents evaluating their future in their new supersized ecosystem.
Leading the operation on the tech side is the company’s chief technology officer, Shay Artzi. Artzi joined Compass as a senior director of engineering in 2021, and Compass announced his post in March amid a series of leadership updates.
But the face of the platform rollout is Rory Golod, who has served closely under Reffkin since the early days of Compass. Now president of growth at Compass International Holdings, Golod has been touring across the country, shaking hands with Coldwell Banker agents in South Florida and appearing alongside Reffkin on stage at a Century 21 conference in Las Vegas.
The promotion followed more than a decade of juggling multiple duties at the company alongside Reffkin’s other longtime deputy, Navab. Golod started at the firm in 2014 as a strategy and business development manager before taking over as Reffkin’s chief of staff. He later went on to serve as the president of the brokerage’s tri-state region, among other titles.
“Some things are similar. Some things are a little different,” said Golod in an interview, comparing his new position to the hats he previously wore at the company.
“This merger came together quite quickly, and more quickly than we had anticipated,” Golod said. “We all were sort of forced to hit the ground running.”
Golod, whose new role also includes overseeing mergers and acquisitions and recruiting, is responsible for selling former Anywhere brands on Compass’ platform, which he described as a “multi-year, highly coordinated campaign.”
Once it’s broadly adopted, the platform will allow agents across brands to share listings and will expand the company’s data pool. Golod said that his platform evangelization efforts have mostly yielded positive feedback, although some have already decided against joining the ride.
A number of agents have decamped from Compass and its new network of brokerages following the merger, many of them pointing to worries about how it would affect their individual or team brand.
“They’ve got a CEO that’s one day in a picture with Century 21, and one day in a picture with Coldwell Banker,” said Douglas Elliman CEO Michael Liebowitz. “It’s brand dilution.”
So far, Reffkin has promised to keep the brands distinct. But Compass, unlike Anywhere, is already a brand unto itself, and agents have only to look at Compass’ past acquisitions to start reading the tea leaves.
“If you’re in South Florida and there’s a Compass on a block and Coldwell Banker Realty on another block, does it make sense to keep that office, or do you move your agents into a Compass office,” said Joseph Hamdan, the owner of what was formerly the largest Coldwell Banker affiliate in New York City. Hamdan left the franchise system in April to start his own brokerage under LeadingRE, which backs independent firms.
The task of overseeing the unwieldy morass of brands and franchisees has fallen to Sue Yannaccone, who oversaw Anywhere’s owned brokerage and franchise operations. Yannaccone, who was announced as Compass International Holdings’ chief operating officer, will have a similar set of responsibilities to the ones she had at Anywhere.
While much of Compass’s previous C-suite counted former Ivy League MBAs, consultants and tech disrupters, Yannaccone is an industry lifer. “I always knew I wanted to go into real estate,” she said on a 2021 podcast. After studying real estate at Clemson University, she worked as a commercial agent before moving to the residential side with GMAC Real Estate, where she tackled such unglamorous work as franchise contract negotiation and administration.
Yannaccone has been far more operator than innovator in her career, which might be a good thing. Reffkin is tackling the Wild West of a franchising operation that counts more than 150,000 agents under its purview, according to data from real estate consulting firm T3 Sixty.
Mike Valdes, a longtime industry executive with brokerage leadership experience at Sotheby’s and Realogy before its evolution into Anywhere, said that the “interior leadership” will be key for Reffkin in overseeing the conglomerate.
“He is a wonderful disrupter,” Valdes, who now heads the international and luxury brands associated with cloud-based brokerage LPT Realty, said of Reffkin. “What he has no idea about is the franchise model, and he has no idea what he just purchased.”
Financial bets
As part of the merger, Compass assumed $2.6 billion in debt from Anywhere, adding pressure to the company’s finances and putting debt reduction at the top of Reffkin’s priorities.
To manage the undertaking, Reffkin tapped the brokerage’s newly promoted Scott Wahlers. Wahlers, who previously served as the chief accounting officer, had not held a CFO position until August, when he took over following the departure of Kalani Reelitz, who’d served as the brokerage’s CFO since he was hired from Cushman & Wakefield in 2022.
Meanwhile, Compass does not appear to have kept Anywhere’s CFO, Charlotte Simonelli, who joined the company in 2019, but Anywhere’s chief accounting officer, Timothy Gustavson, is staying on in the same role.
After years of paying next to nothing in interest, Compass will now be on the hook for almost $100 million a year in debt service, as well as around $3 billion in maturing debt from 2029 to 2031, depending on the outcome of a $1 billion convertible note it took out related to the merger.
On the investor call following the merger announcement, analysts questioned Compass executives on how they were going to retire its sizable debt. Reffkin touted ancillary services and cost synergies, something Valdes, who was on the call, sees as wishful thinking.
“Anywhere had this [debt] for over 15 years,” Valdes added. “How could they not have retired the multi-billion-dollar debt, and they had much stronger ancillary services as part of their portfolio?”
While Reffkin has rolled out the leadership team responsible for shepherding the new holding company entity toward a sustainable future, the brokerages that make up Compass International Holdings have largely kept their leadership intact.
Most of them are led by industry stalwarts, including Corcoran’s Pam Liebman, Philip White of Sotheby’s and Century 21’s Michael Miedler.
One of the exceptions is Navab, who fits the Compass mold of having blue blood bona fides from outside the industry. Navab graduated from Columbia University. After a stint at McKinsey & Company, she went to Harvard Business School and then worked at a series of tech companies before joining Compass.
Regardless of their backgrounds, Reffkin’s new coterie of leaders will likely be held to the same standard: Reffkin himself.
“For two years, until the end of June of ‘25, Robert was on an airplane three days a week, in different cities all the time,” said Mark McLaughlin, a mergers and acquisitions adviser to Compass who was a key player in closing the deal with Anywhere. “Robert probably spends more time in the field than any other real estate executive. He expects his direct managers to behave the same way.”
So far, they’re acting the part.
“What we have here is special. It’s this room, it’s these leaders, it’s each of you and what you bring,” Navab said in San Diego, leaving agents in the room with a promise. “As Compass gets bigger, our leaders are going to get closer to you and your markets and what matters most to you.”
