“Sereno Rides Again”: Brokerage Buys Back Christie’s Name

Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno has bought its independence back from the recently approved merger between @properties and Compass. The recently finalized agreement will make the brokerage with $5.5 billion in 2024 sales the largest locally owned and operated brokerage in Northern California.

As part of the separation, Christie’s Sereno will maintain exclusive rights to the Christie’s brand across all of its current markets, which include San Francisco, the Peninsula, the East Bay, Santa Cruz, Marin County, Wine Country, Lake Tahoe, the Sierra Foothills and the Central Coast.

Sereno, which was founded by Chris Trapani and Ryan Iwanaga in 2006, has been a Christie’s affiliate since it partnered with Chicago-based @properties in 2022, but always maintained its operational independence.

The founders had about a month to negotiate and close the company’s re-acquisition for an undisclosed sum after finding out about the Compass merger, they said, and it will take many months more to fully disentangle its back-end from @properties. It will remain part of the overall Christie’s affiliate network, but will be owned and operated independently.

“There’s an emotional part and an intellectual part to getting your mind around becoming a standalone again, but we knew instantly that this was the right thing to do,” Trapani said.

He added that @properites and Compass were both “very supportive” of the buyback and he has heard from other independent broker owners who are “thrilled” to see Sereno “become independent again.”

“Everyone, even at Compass, recognizes that having a strong Christie’s representative in the Bay Area is really important,” said Trapani, who said Sereno is among the top Christie’s affiliates globally. “Hyper local real-estate firms are really an important ingredient to a healthy profession and a healthy community.”

A Compass representative said in a statement that Christie’s “independently owned affiliates have always operated with autonomy, reflecting the unique needs of their local markets,” which would remain “unchanged” after the merger and added that Compass would be able to provide “enhanced benefits” for affiliates.

Thad Wong, @properties co-founder and co-CEO, said in a statement that the company was looking forward to “continuing to serve Chris and Ryan, two of the best and most respected broker-owners/operators in Northern California.”

Internal communications

Trapani said they let their 650 agents know that they were in the process of buying the company back as soon as news of the merger was made public. When the announcement went out on Monday that the re-acquisition was finalized, he was moved by the “overwhelmingly electric and positive” response.

“What that tells me is there remains a significant group of real estate professionals that really want to be part of a hyper-local organization,” he said, adding that the company’s focus on giving back locally had long been an agent draw. “There’s a purpose in making meaning beyond just sales. I’m not saying other companies don’t have that but it is really part of the DNA and has been part of the priority system of the company from day one.”

Even with the local focus, the South Bay-based company has been on a growth trajectory, moving into San Francisco in the fall of 2023 and heading further north to Wine Country last summer, expansions that seem particularly prescient now because it gives Sereno exclusive rights to the Christie’s name in those markets. Other offices could be called Christie’s San Francisco, Christie’s Marin or Christie’s Wine Country, but they are all owned by Sereno and not Compass, Trapani clarified.

“Exclusivity is important because you don’t want to have a dilution of that brand,” he said.

Trapani noted the company is not looking to add any new geographical markets, but that it would seek to recruit more agents in the territories it already serves. It’s currently talking to both agents and smaller independents about coming aboard.

“Rebel soul”

Trapani and Iwanaga have been best friends since they became neighbors in Saratoga as 10-year-olds in 1976, they said.

“I’ve been with Ryan longer than I’ve been with my wife,” Trapani said.

Fourth-generation South Bay residents who have lived in “Silicon Valley since before it was Silicon Valley,” according to Iwanaga, they both followed their fathers’ entrepreneurial models by going into real estate in the 1990s.

They worked at Coldwell Banker in Los Gatos for many years but became disenchanted with corporate brokerages when they saw independents begin to get eaten up and decided to go out on their own, Trapani said. They took four of the agency’s top regional “ultra-producers” with them to start Sereno 18 years ago. By the time the company merged with Chicago-based @properties in 2022, it had just come off of its biggest year ever with close to $7 billion in sales.

Even though Sereno was successful as an independent, the duo said they began to feel like they had to start making partnerships as they continued to watch brokerage after brokerage go corporate. They were particularly stricken by the sale of Alain Pinel, which had been the biggest independent in Northern California, to Compass in 2019.

“Alain Pinel was always a big sibling to us,” Iwanaga said. “We always learned from them and observed what they did. And then overnight they got absorbed into Compass and all of a sudden we were the biggest independent brokerage in Northern California.”

The Alain Pinel buy showed them that the time had come to think seriously about creating partnerships with other like-minded independents, Iwanga said. Enter @properties, another duo-founded firm with “culturally similar values” but also the “stronger infrastructure” and greater reach Sereno needed.

“At that time, it was just Chris and I versus the world,” Iwanaga said, adding that the time partnered with @properties taught them a lot about how to grow without sacrificing company culture. “As we recalibrate the back end, we can build in those things we learned from them and actually create an infrastructure that can scale.”

The partnership also got the company a “tier-one global luxury brand” in Christie’s, said Trapani, which allowed agents to more easily enter luxury markets such as Lake Tahoe, where a Christie’s Sereno agent made the biggest sale in the region’s history last year.

“With Sereno, you go into every town and you have to explain what the brand means, but with Christie’s, you don’t have to do that,” he said.

Not only is Christie’s Sereno the only Christie’s Trapani knows of that has gone back to independent status, but it’s the only time in his 34-year career in the industry that he has heard of a private brokerage of Sereno’s size selling and then buying itself back.

This time, the co-founders are less concerned about being one of the Bay Area’s lone independents and more concerned with making the most of the unexpected chance to get back to its roots.

“Sereno rides again,” Trapani said. “That rebel soul that the company started upon is fully in force and hopefully we’ve learned a little bit and gotten smarter about a lot of things. The opportunity is there for us. It’s just a matter of what we do with it.”