Compass, Redfin to cut workforces amid U.S. housing slowdown

Real estate brokerages Compass Inc. and Redfin Corp. are cutting their workforces as rising interest rates cool a U.S. housing market that reached a frenzy during the pandemic.

Compass will lay off about about 10% of its workforce while Redfin will cut about 6%, the companies said in regulatory filings Tuesday. Bloomberg News reported the Compass layoffs earlier. 

For Compass, those cuts total about 450 employees and will contribute to an estimated $21.5 million to $23 million in costs before taxes in the second quarter, the company said. Redfin said it expects to cut about 470 employees and estimates that severance and other costs will total $9.5 million to $10.5 million.

The cutbacks come as the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tamp down inflation push mortgage rates higher, cooling home purchases. Redfin Chief Executive Officer Glenn Kelman noted that demand in May was 17% below the company’s expectations.

“We raised hundreds of millions of dollars so we wouldn’t have to shed people after just a few months of uncertainty,” Kelman wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “But mortgage rates increased faster than at any point in history. We could be facing years, not months, of fewer home sales, and Redfin still plans to thrive. If falling from $97 per share to $8 doesn’t put a company through heck, I don’t know what does.”

Compass stock, which was previously halted for the announcement, was down nearly 5.5% to $4.50 at 1:03 p.m. in New York trading. The stock is now worth 75% less than its initial public offering price of $18 a share in 2021. A Compass spokesperson confirmed the layoffs in an email and declined to comment further. 

Redfin shares dropped nearly 4% to $8.21. That stock is down almost 92% since its nearly $97 per-share high reached in 2021 during the pandemic-spurred housing boom.

Minimum Reaction

“I think Compass laying off 10% of the staff is the minimum reaction to market conditions,” said Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s doing the least possible to treat current symptoms but not addressing underlying challenges with the business model and incredibly high cash burn.”

Compass’s personnel cutbacks are part of a broader retrenchment by the real estate brokerage, which includes a planned pause in geographic expansion and merger-and-acquisition activity. The company is also expecting to consolidate some offices as a way to cut costs. 

“The strategic actions are part of a broader plan by the company to take meaningful actions to improve the alignment between the company’s organizational structure and its long-term business strategy,” Compass said in the filing. 

Compass was co-founded in 2012 by Robert Reffkin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who sought to build a tech-enabled real estate brokerage. The company grew rapidly, often acquiring existing brokerages as a means of expanding, and using generous incentives to recruit top-performing agents. 

Those moves helped vault the company past Anywhere Real Estate Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s HomeServices of America to becomes the largest U.S. brokerage by sales volume in 2021, according to industry website Real Trends.