Navab also spoke about a real estate journey that began when she was a child, and about meeting Robert Reffkin in college.
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In 2021, Neda Navab said her role at Compass was all about “the long game.”
At the time, Navab was the brokerage’s eastern region president and was riding the high of a successful initial public offering, which had given Compass the momentum — and capital — to further round out its end-to-end platform and expand into new regions.
“It all comes back to the strategy of making sure that being able to buy and sell a home is as simple and pleasant of an experience as possible for the agent, and for the buyer and seller on the other end of the transaction,” she told Inman that December. “We’re staying focused on that [goal] through whatever 2022 may bring us.”
Neda Navab | Compass
Fast forward to today, Navab is now settling into her new role as Compass’ president. The first priority on her list is to host 100 agent events in her first 100 days, all with the goal of tapping into the heartbeat of the brokerage’s mission: the agents.
“I was in Greenwich yesterday morning, Westport yesterday evening. I’ll be in Pennsylvania next week. You know, just hitting the road across the country,” she said. “As Compass grows in size and as Robert [Reffkin] steps into the role leading [parent company] Compass International Holdings, leaders like myself have to get closer to the field, closer to the ground, closer to the agents … This is a time of a lot of change for the industry, and it’s still a hard market to practice real estate. Our real estate professionals need our support.”
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: It’s been 4 years since our last conversation, and a lot has changed since then. You started as Robert’s chief of staff in 2018, and the last time we talked, you were a regional president. How are you thinking about your journey to where you are now?
Navab: I’ll tell you something, actually quite interesting. I would say my journey into Compass started decades ago for two reasons.
So one, it’s actually quite poignant this week. My parents were both born and raised in Iran. And in 1979, my mom had to flee Iran because of the Islamic Revolution. She landed in Boston without a dollar to her name, working behind the counter at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but turned that job opportunity into another and another and ended up practicing real estate when I was a young girl.
So I got the opportunity to sit shotgun to a real estate professional when I was little, which really developed my respect for the profession and the opportunity it can unlock for a family and a community.
And then, funny enough, Robert and I have known each other for over 20 years. We met as students up at Columbia. And so as you can imagine, once you meet Robert, you know, he’s unforgettable, right? He’s incredible at keeping in touch with people, and we kept in touch over the years. And then in 2018, he reached out to me about this opportunity to come join Compass. It was a really full-circle moment. I have to be honest with you. I wasn’t looking for a chief of staff opportunity, but when I sat down with him, knowing him from before and knowing how hard it is to be a real estate professional, it struck me how agent-centric he was. So I took a leap of faith.
How did that experience inform what you’re doing now?
I’ll tell you, it is the most fun and demanding role at Compass. We have a number of leaders around the company now who started or at some point in time were Robert’s chief of staff. Your sole focus is to make Compass successful. You’re not thinking about things from any other specific department lens, and you develop just such a deep understanding of the core of the company, which is the real estate professional.
That’s behind the commitment I made Day 1 when I moved into the role: to attend and host 100 agent events in my first 100 days. What I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to them about is my mission to make sure that Compass is the best brokerage for delivering on the promises of a big firm, but with a boutique feel.
Big is our engine, but boutique is our edge.
Big is the power of the platform that we have built for them. Big is the incredible referral network they have. Big is the fact that we have an opportunity to partner with Redfin.com, a top-three search portal in the U.S., to give coming-soon listings more visibility and more options for sellers and their real estate professionals.
But boutique is our edge. It’s that feeling our real estate professionals get when they walk into the local office and the person at the front desk knows to ask about how their grandfather is doing, or how their closing went on Sunday, or whether the inspection came through as they hoped. And I think our real estate professionals deliver the power of big and boutique for their clients.
Let’s focus on the Redfin partnership. Are you looking at the coming months as a testing ground for the partnership? Maybe a litmus test for how it may evolve in the coming years?
What excites our agents most about the Redfin partnership so far is the opportunity to get 60 million monthly eyeballs on coming-soon listings without the digital baggage. The digital baggage includes days on market, public price drops, and status changes. It eliminates the risk of launching your listing and testing the market during the coming-soon phase. And so, from a homeowner’s standpoint, that’s fantastic.
I can launch my listing. I can have it appear on a top portal. I can get feedback. I can adjust. And then, if I choose to launch the listing more publicly, with the benefit of having had that coming-soon period without any of that digital baggage.
And by the way, because Redfin during that coming-soon period has the listing agent on the listing, the agent who knows the most about the home is able to speak to the buyers to answer the questions they have about the home, right? I think there’s a lot of excitement among sellers and our listing agents about the opportunity this unlocks. Hopefully, it will bring more inventory online ahead of the spring market.
Our time is running short, so let’s end today’s conversation by talking about broader industry trends. At ICNY last month, artificial intelligence and consolidation were at the top of the list, and Compass’ acquisition of Anywhere certainly drove much of the conversation about the latter. How do these trends fit into your decision-making?
All roads lead back to the real estate professional for us, right? I’ll take AI as one example. We have focused on building out training so that agents can leverage the tools available to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients.
There’s an example I shared earlier today, one of our agents in Westport, Connecticut, Susan Vanech. I was on Instagram the other day, and she posted this phenomenal video that just pulled me in, so I sent her a message saying, ‘Great video.’ She responded and said, ‘I scripted the entire thing using AI, not only the words that I said, but I asked the AI to tell me how to walk, what to do with my hands, what part of the home to be in, like literally to direct me.’ And it really showed because the quality was 10 out of 10.
And so our focus is just making sure we are leveraging all the best practices that the incredible agents around the country have and sharing them across the board. As I said, the best ideas come from the agents, so patterning off of how they’re using these apps has been a critical starting point for us.
Email Marian McPherson
Topics: Anywhere | Compass | Redfin | Robert Reffkin | leadership Show Comments Hide Comments Sign up for Inman’s Morning Headlines What you need to know to start your day with all the latest industry developments Sign me up By submitting your email address, you agree to receive marketing emails from Inman. Success! Thank you for subscribing to Morning Headlines. Read Next
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