Thoughts from the merger agreement between Compass, Inc. and Anywhere Real Estate Inc. 

Real estate is chasing the wrong gods. Everyone is arguing about tech stacks. Agents are fighting over commission splits.

Brokerages are hanging AI tools on their business like ornaments on a dead Christmas tree, hoping no one notices the needles on the floor.

It looks modern.
It feels innovative.
It is neither.

The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable.

The brokerage of the future will not win by selling more homes. It will win by controlling demand.

That is the shift almost no one in the industry wants to talk about. It sits upstream, where buyers tip from curiosity into intent. Whoever influences that moment wins. Whoever does not becomes a reseller in someone else’s marketplace.

This is not a sales problem. This is an intent problem.

And the few players who understand that difference are already changing the rules while everyone else debates the menu.

The Compass and Anywhere Merger Was Not About Scale. It Was About Sight.

When Compass announced its plan to acquire Anywhere Real Estate, most of the industry reached for the obvious story. Bigger footprint. More agents. Consolidation.

I think the real story lives in the quiet parts. This was not an arms race. It was a visibility play.

By absorbing the operational spine of Anywhere’s 340,000 agents across 120 countries, Compass acquires the one resource every modern brokerage should fear losing:

Visibility.

Every search. Every question. Every showing request. Every offer drafted inside a franchisor system.

Compass is not building a brokerage platform. It is building a market awareness machine.

The power does not sit in the software. The power sits in the intent signals the software collects.

Yard signs do not compete with that. Neither do personal networks.

The physics have changed. Gravity moved upstream, and most of the industry never got the memo.

Demand Orchestration Is the New Battleground

The industry still talks about leads like it is 2012. Resellers and Developers.

Lead gen. Lead nurture. Lead conversion. This is not strategy. It is workflow dressed up as ambition.

Strategy sits above all of that. Strategy is knowing what triggers intent, how intent moves, and how your platform shapes that movement.

Demand orchestration has four moving parts:

Predict who is most likely to buy.
Influence when they enter the market.
Position your platform as the default choice.
Route that intent with precision to the right advisors.

Tech companies understand this. Fintech companies understand this. Compass definitely understands this.

Most brokerages still think they are in the business of selling houses. They are not. They are in the business of understanding people and predicting their next move. At least they should be.

And in luxury, that understanding becomes a competitive weapon.

Why Luxury Is the Only Segment Where Demand Can Be Engineered

The mass market will be devoured by low-margin fintech funnels Pine, Sutton, etc. Fast approvals. Instant valuations. A race to zero friction and zero emotion.

Luxury is different. Luxury has texture. A high-net-worth purchase is not a transaction. It is a story. A signal.

A personal mythology that intertwines wealth, identity, family, status, migration, and aspiration. This makes luxury uniquely orchestratable.

Luxury buyers move toward:

Trust.
Brand gravity.
Scarcity.
Discretion.
Social proof.
Insight over information.

They are not impressed by how many agents you have. They are impressed when you demonstrate judgment & advisory. They care about meaning, not volume. This opens the door for any brokerage that chooses to think less like a reseller and more like a strategic advisor.

The Winners Will Build a Demand Engine, Not a Tech Stack

If you strip away the noise, the next generation of luxury brokerage is built from four pillars.

1. Cultural Intelligence: Not data for data’s sake. A living map of global wealth behavior. Who is moving. Why they are moving. What is shaping their taste. Luxury buyers do not move like consumers. They move like capital.

A brokerage must know what accelerates that capital and what slows it down.

2. A Creative Engine That Shapes Desire: CDMG proved something important. Creative is not decoration. Creative is economic infrastructure. But global luxury demands a more nuanced palate.

A modern brokerage needs the ability to craft narrative and identity with the rigor of a studio and the sensitivity of a cultural anthropologist.

Story creates demand. Design directs it.

3. Predictive Analytics Built Around Intent Velocity: Forget clicks. Forget views. Forget vanity metrics. The only metric that matters is intent velocity: Who is most likely to write a cheque, and why are they reaching that point now.

Firms that see the future will always beat firms reacting to the present.

4. A Developer Advisory Arm That Starts Before the First Shovel: Product market fit. Unit mix strategy. Amenity design. Pricing velocity. Regulatory constraints.

Sales is the final act. The real work happens long before.

The next great brokerage will resemble a strategy consultancy with a luxury brand, not a sales shop with a brochure.

Luxury Rewards Alignment, Not Volume

This is the pivot from analysis to leadership. Luxury does not reward scale. Luxury rewards alignment.

Alignment with how wealth thinks.
Alignment with culture and context.
Alignment with trust and narrative.
Alignment with the emotional logic behind large decisions.

This is not a Canadian insight. This is not an American insight. This is a universal rule of luxury markets.

Whether the buyer is in Dubai, Singapore, London, Toronto, or Vancouver, the psychological architecture is the same. They want:

Confidence.
Clarity.
Credibility.
To feel understood by the person guiding them.

Regulation gives certain markets natural guardrails, but even without those, the winning brokerage will be the one that is: Safer. Smarter. More precise. More culturally fluent. More aligned with the psychology of wealth.

Luxury does not scale the way software scales. Luxury scales the way trust scales.

And trust is the rarest currency in real estate... dare I say the world we live in today.

The Future Is Clear

The brokerage of the future will not win on agent count, territory, or noise. Those are artifacts of a slower era. The brokerage of the future will win by orchestrating demand. By operating upstream. By shaping intent before anyone else knows it has formed.

Firms clinging to the old playbook will drift. Firms building red line demand engines will dominate.

This is not a complicated strategy. It is simply a different kind of thinking. The industry believes it is in the business of selling homes. But the leaders of the next era will understand a different truth.

We are not in the supply business. We are in the influence business. Whoever shapes demand shapes the market.

In confidence,

-RL
Whispers from the gardens of capital, taste, and future terrain.