Nothing is Sacred
Three weeks ago, Compass completed its acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate.
The transaction created the largest residential brokerage in U.S. history: 340,000+ agents, six legacy brands including Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and Sotheby’s International Realty, plus integrated title, escrow, and relocation services under one roof.
This follows Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin last year, new ways of doing business and working with customers taking shape, and existing home sales sitting at their lowest level since 1995.
The industry is expanding, contracting, and determining its destiny in real time. Nothing is sacred. Everything is changing and that’s why I got the compulsion to show up here and start writing.
Who Is This Guy?
I grew up around real estate. An aunt who still practices today and is affiliated with our firm. A family of contractors. But I didn’t grow up wanting to run a residential real estate brokerage. I had other aspirations. Things change, like they do for many, and real estate had a way of finding me. Right place, right time, and the rest is history.
I don’t code. I’m not a traditional tech person. But I’ve been tinkering since an early age, seeing how technology could be deployed to improve systems and processes, always looking for what’s next. How to improve an agent’s day to day by simplifying workflow so they can focus on what matters most: building relationships.
I don’t fit neatly into one box. I understand tech, cross disciplines, run operations, and have gone from an admin in a real estate office to Co-President and COO of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty and Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty, the third-largest Sotheby’s International Realty firm in the world and consistently ranked as one of the top 30 brokerages in the US by industry publications.
Thirty offices across Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. 1,100+ agents. $6+ billion in annual volume. We’ve been independently owned and operated for 76 years and remain that way today, no matter what is changing around us.
More than two decades in the industry later, it’s been an incredible journey. I’ve spent that time learning what it actually takes to run a brokerage: navigating complex transactions, supporting agents who wake up unemployed every day until they’re not, helping entrepreneurs realize their potential by unlocking technology that works for them rather than against them.
Brokerage OS is where I’ll share what I’ve learned in my career, what I’m learning right now, and what I think is worthy of putting to paper (proverbially speaking of course). These aren’t conference talking points. It’s the practical work of being a brokerage operator when the ground is moving.
What the Consolidation Signals
The Compass - Anywhere deal matters less for its size than for what it reveals about where leverage is shifting in our industry.
Scale used to be about market coverage and recruiting capacity. Now it’s increasingly about technology platforms, vertical integration, and control over listing distribution. Compass isn’t just building a bigger brokerage. They’re building infrastructure that could challenge the institutions themselves: the MLS, the portals, the traditional rules of how inventory flows.
But consolidation isn’t the only force reshaping this industry. AI is at the doorstep ready to shake up everything and you can already feel its presence.
The way systems run in this business are changing and going to keep changing. Compliance. Deal flow. Lead nurturing. A level of automation and true value creation that everyone from a small one-office brokerage to the biggest heavyweights will have access to. For the first time, capability won’t be gated by scale or capital. It will be gated by who understands how to implement it.
The operating questions this raises apply across the industry. Which variables are changing? How fast? Agent economics. Listing visibility. Technology investment. Referral network dynamics. None of these have settled into a new equilibrium yet. The operators paying attention to their own data will see the shifts before industry reports tell them what happened.
What I Believe
Scale alone doesn’t win. Operating discipline and adaptability do.
AI is accelerating this reality. Not the hype cycle version that dominates conferences, but the practical application: workflow automation, knowledge retrieval, agent enablement tools that reduce friction instead of adding it. I’m currently enrolled in the Chief Digital and AI Officer program at the University of Michigan because I believe the next generation of brokerage leadership needs to understand these systems at a foundational level, not delegate them to a vendor or an IT department.
The brokerages that thrive over the next five years won’t necessarily be the largest or the best-funded. They’ll be the ones that understand their own economics with precision. The ones that build systems agents actually adopt. The ones willing to redesign workflows, rethink vendor relationships, and question assumptions that made sense five years ago but don’t anymore.
This work requires flexibility. Knowing when to adapt. Seeing opportunities when they present themselves rather than waiting for certainty that never comes.
What’s Coming
This newsletter will cover operations, technology, strategy, and leadership from an operator’s perspective. Commentary grounded in what I’m seeing, not speculation from the sidelines. What’s actually working, what’s broken, and what decisions I’m facing in real time.
Let’s go.