Top Dallas Agent Joins Compass Despite Firm's Financial Woes

UPDATED, Aug. 24, 12:56 p.m.: At a time when other brokers are jumping ship from Compass, one Dallas-Fort Worth agent is climbing aboard.

The Jansen Klefeker Group, which did over $30 million in residential deals in the DFW metro in 2021, is joining the once high-flying brokerage, focusing on the city’s luxury market.

Klefeker has spent the past five years at Rogers Healy and Associates, where he was recognized by D Magazine as among DFW’s “Best Real Estate Agents” in 2020, 2021, and 2022, as well as “Top Producer” for 2021 and 2022.

He now thinks could become bigger players in the region and beyond with the broker-support services Compass built its early reputation on.

“If I want to scale my business over the next five years, I have to have the Compass technology to do so,” he said in a statement from Compass.

In the run-up to going public last year, Compass positioned itself as a Softbank-backed startup that leveraged technology to enhance broker productivity, while plowing venture capital dollars into an aggressive recruitment machine that rapidly built its market share — and also made enemies in the brokerage industry.

More recently, however, as the now-publicly traded company’s path to profitability remains unclear and its entire business model seems in peril, skeptics have suggested that Compass’ technology claims were overblown and didn’t offer the transformational advantages the firm promised.

But Klefeker said that the company’s platform was his entire reason for making the jump from Rogers Healy. It was Klefeker who approached Compass about the move, not the other way around, and unlike many of the brokers who the one-time startup poached from other firms, he received no signing bonus or equity package. The draw, he said, was the firm’s suite of technology.

“It’s not even compared to Rogers Healy, it’s compared to the industry,” Klefeker told The Real Deal. “There’s so many different software you bounce between to service clients, and Compass just has it all in one place. I can go from any aspect of my business. Managing everything is all in one place. I have not seen that anywhere.”

Despite its vaunted technology, however, the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage reported a loss of over $101 million in the second quarter of this year alone, and over the last year and a half, it has lost a total of $800 million.

Compass CEO Robert Reffkin has reassured investors that the company still has about $430 million in cash and about $300 million in untapped credit, which could sustain nearly two years of its second quarter burn rate. But the firm is cutting costs by scaling back various funds and programs for brokers and sellers.

The firm’s projected full-year revenues for 2022 are currently between $6.15 billion and $6.45 billion — well below earlier projections of $7.6 billion to $8 billion — and the company is expected to enact more layoffs by October.

Reached for comment on Klefeker’s departure, his former boss suggested it was a transition he needed to make quickly.

“Jansen is not the person I thought he was. It’s disappointing to think he would go public with his decision,” said Rogers Healy.

This story was updated with a statement from Rogers Healy