Prior to 2018, few people in the San Francisco Bay Area had heard of Compass, the combo tech startup / real estate brokerage based in New York City. That all changed quickly when Compass acquired several leading brokerages in the area, including Pacific Union and Alain Pinel Realtors. It’s fair to say that Compass is a juggernaut, with the Compass bay area market share towering over the competition.
With those acquisitions, Compass immediately rocketed to the top of the leaderboards. However, since that time, the company has continued to grow, based on the strength of its brand, the savvy of its agents, and the leading-edge software tools and programs it has developed to empower agents and consumers to simply and ease the sale and purchase of residential real estate.
This article features six charts which show how Compass has come to dominate the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market. These charts were first published in June 2020.
The first chart shows how Compass towers over the competition when it comes to total dollars of sales, with Compass claiming nearly $25 billion in sales over 12 months.
The next chart shows how Compass stacks up to the competition in terms of market share of sales dollars. Compass sells about 23% of all homes at all price ranges throughout the Bay Area – more than double the nearest competitor, Coldwell Banker, which has about 9% market share.
How do you define luxury? That means different things in different markets, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, Compass considers that entry-level luxury homes begin at $2 million. Here you can see that Compass commands about 34% of the $2+ million market in the Bay Area.
Let’s look at how Compass fares in the $3+ million price range. You can see that Compass controls nearly 40% of the $3+ million price range in the area.
Once we hit the $5+ million range, we can see that Compass owns over 45% of the market – more than 3x our nearest competitor, Sotheby’s.
And at the very highest end of the market, over $10 million, Compass has just under 50% of the market, well ahead of our nearest competitors.
It’s clear that Compass enjoys the dominant position in Bay Area home sales and is the top choice especially for Silicon Valley home sellers. There are many reasons for this, and I’d love to have the opportunity to explain this to you in further detail. Please reach out to me and we can talk more about how to leverage Compass’s strength in the sale of your home.
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