“Dog-eat-dog” culture drives resi agents to boutique firms

Hannah Bomze spent six months training her assistant when she was a broker at Compass. 

Bomze needed the extra pair of hands to help her run her busy book of business, and she was relieved to finally have caught someone up to speed.

That is, until the agent two doors down poached her newly trained assistant with the promise of $10,000 more a year and copied her marketing material. 

Stories like this are common in the brokerage world, which has earned a reputation for being ruthless, uncompromising and a place where tales of misdeeds run rampant: team leads throwing objects at their subordinates, agents poaching clients at a showing or ignoring texts and emails for days to avoid co-broking a listing. 

“You’re in a company where you’re competing against your neighbor,” Bomze said. “If you leave something in the printer too long when you’re going to pitch a listing, someone is going to see you pitching that listing and go and steal it.” 

Bomze feels this sort of infighting is a structural issue at large brokerages, which she says often don’t provide enough support or oversight, particularly for newer agents. After spending a combined six years at Douglas Elliman and then Compass, she left to launch Casa Blanca, an app-centric residential brokerage operating in New York and Denver. 

Casa Blanca is one of several boutique brokerages in the city that have attracted an onslaught of new agents, which Bomze and others attribute in part to a more collaborative company culture.

Where everybody knows your name

New York City’s brokerage scene has become increasingly consolidated in recent years, with the city’s larger firms merging with boutique brokerages to expand their reach throughout the five boroughs.

With fewer options, recruiting competition, particularly in the past five to 10 years, has been fierce. Big firms often entice agents with sizable sign-on bonuses and boundless marketing budgets. Smaller brokerages lack the capital to win in those areas.

Large legacy firms offer plenty of advantages after the recruiting stage too. With an established brand, brokers can rely on the experience and expertise associated with the name. 

“Reputation is what arrives before you do,” Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman said. “We’ve been in the business for 150 years. That’s experience. … We’re not the new kid on the block.”

But during the pandemic — as the housing market came to a grinding halt in 2020 before hurtling back to full steam the following year — many agents began to rethink how much they needed those perks, with some turning away from the allure of the big brands entirely. 

Boutique and startup brokerages last year outpaced growth at some of the city’s larger, more established firms. Corofy data show Casa Blanca, Bomze’s firm, added 58 agents in 2022, more than quadrupling its headcount. Another firm in the ranks is Platinum Properties, a family-owned brokerage founded in 2005, which grew by 34 percent. 

With fewer colleagues, agents at boutique brokerages often get more direct attention, including customized business plans and personalized advice and training, which most larger brokerages typically don’t have the manpower or bandwidth to provide, said Melissa True, sales director at Platinum Properties. 

True, who formerly worked with both Town Residential and Douglas Elliman, said this level of oversight and support is especially important for new agents, and without it, many will likely decide to leave the industry just as they’re starting out. 

Boutique firms are also often structured as one big team, rather than individual agents and team factions competing for business, True said. The structure allows for more collaboration — both Casa Blanca and Platinum Properties have Slack channels for agents to ask questions and get help from other agents to service a listing.

Managers at smaller brokerages are often more inclined to share leads, unlike at big brokerages where they tend to be carefully guarded secrets.

“I’ve worked at places where people, even pre-pandemic, would tell me they prefer to work from home because they didn’t want their competition hearing their conversations,” True said.

While competing with agents at other more ubiquitous and recognized firms can be difficult, True said most buyers and sellers will choose to work with an individual they trust, not a brand name. 

“I always try and boil it down to, if you pitch yourself correctly and you have spent the time making a relationship with someone and they like you and they trust you, you have just as good a chance,” True said.

Burying the competition

Despite its nearly 3,000 agents, Freedman describes BHS as having the “heart of a mom-and-pop shop,” with efforts to make executives accessible to agents and foster community through weekly newsletters, events and company-wide webcasts. 

But even within the collective culture BHS promotes, Freedman said “everyone wants to fight to be number one.” 

“The competition, that tension, is what keeps people sharp,” Freedman said. “It keeps people on their game.”

For Corcoran agent Sephrah Towbin, competing with her peers at the firm — and seeing who gets up on the board that month —  allows her to better understand her business and its place in the market. But she said that while competition in the workplace can be healthy, too much of a focus on winning may cloud what could be helpful metrics.

“The competition, that tension, is what keeps people sharp. It keeps people on their game.”

Bess Freedman, Brown Harris Stevens

“There’s nothing wrong with competition,” Towbin said. “But there’s a difference between that and jockeying for first place.” 

Every agent’s business is different, but Towbin said she sees no reason to leave Corcoran. Between the big name — and the connections that come with it — the brokerage has the means to support her business.

“I’m not trying to reinvent anything, and real estate has been around long enough that I don’t need to. What works works,” Towbin said. “New businesses tend to advertise that what they’re doing is better and different, but really, we don’t need that.”