Compass taps ex-Coldwell exec to oversee Chicago growth

What a week for resi brokerage shakeups in Chicago.

Days after it was revealed that Diane Glass would take the top job at Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices Chicago, Compass announced it had snapped up a former top real estate executive to lead growth at its Chicago operations.

Fran Broude, the former president of Coldwell Banker’s Chicago operations, has joined Compass as a senior managing director, Crain’s reported. She started on Monday.

Broude spent 11 years at Coldwell Banker, where she helped establish the brokerage as the biggest in the city at one point. In 2017, her final full calendar year at Coldwell Banker, the firm sported $9.7 billion in sales volume, according to Real Trends data cited by Crain’s. However, sales volume fell to $9.1 billion in 2018 and the firm was handily overtaken by current market leader @properties in 2019.

She’ll have a similar challenge at Compass, which made a splash when it entered the Chicago market in 2017 and picked off top agents and established managers, sparking a rivalry with @properties in the process.

Today, Compass has nearly 1,200 agents in the Chicago area, and has established itself as a top player in a crowded field.

In the Chicagoland area, Compass, last valued at $6.5 billion, handled $2.9 billion in sales in 2019, according to MLS data analyzed by The Real Deal earlier this year. That represented 4.4 percent of the market, below that of @properties, Coldwell Banker and Baird & Warner, which all snagged at least 8 percent market share.

Compass fared better inside the city of Chicago, where the venture-backed brokerage claimed nearly 10 percent market share but was still outpaced by @properties and others. [Crain’s] — James Kleimann