Post-IPO, Compass is back to business as usual when it comes to expansions and acquisitions.
The brokerage announced Thursday that it has opened a new office in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is Compass’ third push into a new market since going public earlier this month, following its expansions in Delaware and Tampa, Florida.
Fifty-five agents have signed on and will serve the entire Research Triangle area, which includes Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The company plans to open a separate Durham office in the future.
The new team includes several principal agents, including Gretchen Coley of the Coley Group, who specializes in new and luxury developments, and Linda Trevor, who brokered more than $114 million in sales across the Triangle area last year.
Combined, the 55 agents in the new office closed $420 million in deals in 2020.
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They’ll be competing with local brokerages such as Coldwell Banker Howard Perry and Walston Realty, which dominated with more than $2.4 billion in sales in 2019 according to RealTrends.
Fonville Morisey, which is affiliated with Long & Foster and HomeServices, and the Jay Crow Group at Keller Williams Realty, are other major area players, with $1.6 and $1.1 billion in sales in 2019, respectively.
Compass’ decision to plant roots in North Carolina makes sense, given the area’s red-hot housing market. Like many other parts of the country, the Triangle saw a surge in sales in 2020, with home prices following. The median sale price across the region increased by nearly 11 percent year-over-year in March, according to Triangle MLS. Closed sales increased by 6 percent.
That’s also led to fewer homes on the market: The number of available homes in the Triangle region plummeted by 68 percent year-over-year in March, according to the MLS data. There were 2.2 months worth of homes available for sale in March 2020; this year, that number dropped to 0.6 months.
Compass has offices in more than 165 cities in the U.S. Earlier this week, the brokerage acquired Glide Labs, a San Francisco-based real estate transaction management platform. It’s the latest in the brokerage’s ongoing acquisition spree.