At 13 years old, Robert Reffkin went to his mother with a plan to become a DJ. She said no, but Reffkin kept pushing. She eventually agreed to help him buy equipment and drive him to gigs.

“You don’t say no to Robert,” said his mother, Ruth Reffkin.

After little more than a decade in the real-estate business, Robert Reffkin is the chief executive of what is now the country’s biggest brokerage, Compass, and his mother is one of its agents.

His latest plan is to transform the way homes are bought and sold in America, and he isn’t taking no for an answer.

His plan would let sellers gauge interest without having to list on online platforms like Zillow that have made information about listings more accessible than ever. Reffkin says sellers are harmed by initially putting listings on public portals with reams of data like days on the market and price cuts, which can give buyers leverage to negotiate. After testing the price privately with Compass, if the home hasn’t sold, then the seller can list it publicly.

This approach isn’t just radical for home buying. It goes against how markets are expected to work: More demand raises prices. In real estate, the conventional wisdom has long been that getting more buyers to look at a property will result in the highest price. Compass argues that houses are different from stocks and bonds and that exclusivity could lure higher offers.

Whether more private listings would be good or bad for homeownership—long one of the key paths to building wealth—is hotly debated. Many in the industry argue that such a move to upend how homes are traded would shift power away from buyers and make the market less transparent and more vulnerable to discrimination. Americans are already struggling to afford homeownership. Prices are rising, mortgage rates remain elevated and sales of existing homes are on track for a third-straight sluggish year.

But Reffkin and Compass hold more sway than ever.

Last year, Reffkin set an internal goal of reaching 30% market share in 30 markets. A recent deal is putting him well on the way. Compass agreed in September to acquire Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion, joining the two largest brokerages by sales volume. The combined company, including franchises, would have more than 200,000 U.S. real-estate agents and control roughly 18% of U.S. home-sales volume, according to some analyst estimates.

The deal cemented Reffkin as the most powerful executive in the real-estate brokerage industry.

The Anywhere acquisition is “a bold, audacious move for Compass,” said Howard “Hoby” Hanna, CEO of rival brokerage Howard Hanna Real Estate Services. “They’re sitting on a lot of inventory. They can set some rules in big markets.”

Reffkin, 46, has been shaking up the real-estate business since he left Goldman Sachs and started Compass 13 years ago. He raised huge amounts of money and poached rivals’ top agents. He touted Compass’s sleek online tools to help agents produce marketing materials and communicate with clients about listings.

With the private-listings strategy, Reffkin is challenging the status quo and the National Association of Realtors, the largest trade group for real-estate agents. NAR sets rules for most local databases known as multiple-listing services, or MLSs.

“Agents should not be controlled by Zillow or MLSs, who ban and fine agents that market outside their platforms,” Reffkin said in a statement. “Home sellers should be able to choose when, where and how they market their homes.”

He declined to be interviewed.

If the Anywhere acquisition closes next year as expected, Compass will add storied brands including Century 21, Sotheby’s International Realty, Corcoran and Coldwell Banker, giving it tremendous leverage.

Reffkin says his customers are the agents who work with home buyers and sellers, and he’s creating a way to help them grow their business.

In June, he strolled onto a Denver stage in front of more than 1,000 Compass agents and staff. Dressed in a well-cut suit and sneakers, he launched into his plan to change home sales and criticized NAR and Zillow.

“Organized real estate dictating how you work with your clients is wrong,” he said. The audience broke out in applause.

‘Always in a rush’

Reffkin grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His mother was disowned by her Jewish family for having a son with a Black man. Reffkin has said he had little interaction with his father, who died when he was young.

“I felt that I just didn’t have a real community,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “Synagogue, I was the only Black person. Around my Black friends, I was also Jewish and half white. The private school where I got a scholarship, hey, I was a scholarship kid.”

Reffkin graduated in 2½ years from Columbia University, then worked as a consultant at McKinsey before returning to Columbia for business school. He worked at Lazard and, in his mid-20s, was a White House Fellow with the Treasury Department.

“He was always in a rush,” said Chris Lee, a longtime close friend of Reffkin’s, who is now president of KKR’s global real-estate business. “He always had that little bit of pressure, because he didn’t have a financial backstop.”

A voracious networker, Reffkin would devote eight weekends a year to writing more than 1,000 holiday cards by hand, he recalled in a 2018 email to Compass agents.

Reffkin spent six years at Goldman Sachs in the private-equity group and as chief of staff to the president of the firm. He also founded a nonprofit for first-generation college students, and between 2007 and 2013, ran 50 marathons, one in each state, to raise money for charities.

“I would see him limping around on Monday at the office,” said Jamie Sholem, a friend from Goldman and chair of the nonprofit Reffkin founded. “I’d ask, ‘Are you OK?’ He would respond with something like, ‘Yeah, I ran a marathon in North Dakota yesterday and then I took the redeye back.’”

Reffkin left Goldman in 2012 to co-found a low-fee rental platform called Urban Compass. The business employed salaried “neighborhood specialists” to help renters tour apartments.

In December 2013, Reffkin met with about a dozen of New York’s top agents, who criticized the model and explained the importance of the agent-client relationship.

“I could tell he was thinking really hard and really fast, because I think he heard a unanimous theme there,” said Leonard Steinberg, an agent who attended.

By 2014, the company pivoted to a commission-based model and expanded into home sales. Steinberg joined as a marquee hire.

In 2016, Reffkin’s mother, who has been a real-estate agent for a quarter-century, joined Compass in Manhattan.

Poaching rivals

Compass grew quickly. Reffkin poached high-performing agents with signing bonuses, bigger commissions and stock options.

“Rob was calling top agents again and again and again,” said venture capitalist Clelia Warburg Peters. At the time, she was president of her family’s brokerage, now owned by Anywhere.

Reffkin raised $1.5 billion from investment firms and acquired more than 10 brokerages in 2018 alone.

He brought an outsider’s approach to a fragmented brokerage industry with his focus on recruitment and dealmaking.

“He was able to bring a kind of Wall Street discipline and Silicon Valley innovation into this mom-and-pop industry,” said Stefan Swanepoel, founder of real-estate consulting firm T3 Sixty.

Compass went public in 2021, with shares closing on the day of their debut at $20.15. They haven’t closed that high since.

Mortgage rates rose rapidly in 2022, freezing the housing market. Compass’s stock sank, and the company aggressively cut costs.

Then a jury found that the real-estate industry had kept commission rates artificially high. NAR settled and agreed to new rules for how real-estate agents get paid. Compass settled the claims against it last year for $57.5 million, and didn’t admit wrongdoing.

NAR implemented a rule in 2020 limiting brokerages from advertising a private listing, even with a yard sign, without making the listing information available to all agents. Reffkin railed against the trade organization. NAR added a rule this year that gives sellers more options.

NAR said it “fosters a competitive, fair and pro-consumer market.”

‘That isn’t a free market’

Now Reffkin is in an all-out war with Zillow.

Compass calls its private-listing program a three-phased marketing strategy. First, a listing is shared with Compass agents, their clients and anyone who inquires. Then the listing is posted on Compass’s website but not other listing websites. Then the listing is shared everywhere.

This approach helps sellers get feedback on their price before the home is fully prepped for sale, Compass says. The early stages keep data about price cuts or time on the market off portals such as Zillow, Redfin or Realtor.com. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, operates Realtor.com under license from NAR.)

It also gives Compass control of the data on leads.

Almost half of Compass sellers in the first quarter used the three-phased strategy, Reffkin said on a May earnings call. But about 94% of Compass listings, including the ones that started private, ultimately went onto the portals.

“The worst thing that happens is a homeowner gets an offer, and they have an opportunity to turn it down and go to the public sites,” Reffkin said on the call.

Many of Compass’s competitors and consumer advocates say that sellers can make more money by sharing their listing with as many buyers as possible, and that withholding information from buyers creates a poor shopping experience.

“If you’re firmly aligning with one party and systematically hiding information from the other party, then that isn’t fair,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “That isn’t a free market.”

After NAR changed its rules, Zillow created its own policy designed to discourage private listings. Essentially, Zillow may block a listing from its site if it isn’t available on public portals, including Zillow, within a day.

Compass sued Zillow in June. Compass accused Zillow of being a monopoly and said its rules discouraged agents and sellers from using the three-phased strategy.

“While Americans are struggling to access and afford housing, Compass wants to hide available listings from the public,” a Zillow spokesperson said. “Sellers deserve the widest possible audience, and buyers shouldn’t have to wonder what homes they’re not seeing.”

Compass says listing privately could be easier for some sellers without the pressure of staging and timing, bringing more inventory to the market for buyers.

If private listings take off across the industry, then house hunters may have to bounce across many brokerage websites.

Reffkin has said it’s like the competition in the TV industry: You have to use various streaming services to watch different shows.

Write to Nicole Friedman at [email protected]