SF Agencies Merge: City Real Estate Acquires Generation Real Estate

Side’s biggest San Francisco agency City Real Estate, has acquired another top Side firm: Generation Real Estate.

Generation, founded by Lamisse Droubi and headquartered in Noe Valley, will come under the City Real Estate brand, which is headed by David Cohen. Both Cohen and Droubi were on The Real Deal’s list of top agent teams in the city in 2024 and the combined agencies will now have 67 agents who recorded over $814 million in sales volume across 460 transactions in 2024.

Of that, about $100 million in volume came from Generation and the rest from City, which is the second-largest independent real estate company in the city by agent count, after Vanguard Properties. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The merger allows City to expand its presence in Noe Valley, with Generation’s 900-square-foot Noe Valley office rebranded as City, according to a Side representative. The merger also gives the Generation team an opportunity to expand its reach in the rest of the city, the spokesperson added.

“Our decision to join City wasn’t about being acquired — it was about aligning with a company that shares our principles and will allow our agents to thrive,” Droubi said in a statement, adding that, “City’s culture, tools and leadership are second to none.”

Cohen called the merger with Generation “a natural fit.”

“We share the same values, the same ambitions, and the same belief that independent, locally owned brokerages can offer agents and clients more,” he said in a statement.

While both agencies were already Side-affiliated, the Side rep said they “run their businesses completely independently, with infrastructure, technology and marketing support from Side.”

Guy Gal and Ed Wu launched Side in 2017 as a white-label brokerage platform that provides the back end and broker of record for each agency, but unlike Compass or Sotheby’s, the Side name and branding are not a prominent part of each agency’s business and do not provide office space.

City has been growing over the last few years, merging with another big Side brokerage, Polaris Realty, in 2022, according to the Side rep, and bringing over the Alexander Lurie team from Compass earlier this year. That move came shortly after Lurie’s brother, Daniel Lurie, won the race to become San Francisco’s mayor.

In a statement at the time, Lurie credited his brother’s recent political win as a “significant factor” for the “renewed sense of hope, optimism and possibility” in the city and said that making the move to City would best serve his clients during the recovery.

City is the biggest Side-affiliated agency in San Francisco by far, followed by BarbCo, with nearly $290 million in sales volume in 2024, according to the Side rep. City was the seventh-biggest agency in San Francisco last year, according to TRD data, and BarbCo was the eighth.