Proptech, brokerage execs selloff eight- and nine-figures in company stocks

Executives from the top real estate brokerages have learned in recent years that performance doesn’t need to correlate with compensation. Far from it, in fact.

Opendoor founder Eric Wu raked in $145 million through stock sales between 2021 and 2023, according to an analysis by real estate expert Mike DelPrete. Wu was the chief executive officer of the company the first two of those years and the president of marketplace in the third before departing the company at the end of last year.

Wu realized those stock sales while running or being an executive of a company that performed worse than many of its comparable peers. For those three years, Opendoor recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of $737 million and a net loss of $2.3 billion. The company stock declined 83 percent between Wu’s stock sales.

Zillow’s Rich Barton sold $86 million of company stock when its shares were near an all-time high in March 2021. From 2021 to 2023, Zillow’s adjusted EBITDA was a positive $1.1 billion, but the company lost a net of $787 million.

Since Barton’s stock sale, shares have fallen 58 percent for the company. Barton hasn’t sold any stock in the interim, though.

Other big earners in stock sales include former eXp Realty CEO Glenn Sanford, who sold $71 million of stock in the profitable company, and longtime Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, who sold $19 million in stock but recently purchased $300,000 worth of shares in the unprofitable company.

Notably, between 2021 and 2023, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and Anywhere Real Estate CEO Ryan Schneider didn’t sell any of their company shares; the former’s company hasn’t found the path to profitability yet, but Anywhere has.

There are other ways executives make money beyond moves with company stock. At the end of last year, Reffkin sacrificed $25 million worth of performance-based restricted stock awards for a $7 million cash bonus. He’s also set to make a $900,000 salary this year.

Conditions aren’t always clear when an executive receives company stock. The fact that stock sale compensation and company performance aren’t well correlated, however, is an opportunity to look further into factors such as incentives, DelPrete wrote.

— Holden Walter-Warner

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