Mike Golden was working in human resources at Encyclopedia Britannica. Thad Wong was working at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during the day and finishing college at night. Both were a far cry from selling real estate.
But about 30 years ago, Golden connected with long-defunct firm Property Consultants after buying a home through the company, and Wong found out about the company and then went to work there after buying a home on the same block as the firm’s office.
Fast forward a few years and Wong and Golden were working full-time as real estate agents at the firm. The two were issued an ultimatum from a large developer: Leave Property Consultants or lose my business.
So, with only a handful of years of real estate experience under their belts, the pair launched @properties in 2000.
Once a Chicago-based firm with only a local presence, the company has grown into the largest residential real estate brokerage in the Chicago region and the eighth-largest residential brokerage in the U.S. by sales volume. The two sold their company in December.
@properties, known as @properties Christie’s International Real Estate since the 2021 acquisition of the global real estate firm, has joined forces with the nation’s largest brokerage, New York-based Compass, in a $444 million acquisition that closed in January.
The acquisition comes at a time of change in how homes are bought and sold. The Chicago-based National Association of Realtors and real estate brokerages nationwide agreed roughly a year ago to settle massive class-action antitrust lawsuits filed by home sellers who argued they were forced to pay inflated commissions to real estate brokers. The National Association of Realtors will pay $418 million to home sellers and has changed its rules for members as of August 2024 to require potential homebuyers to sign written agreements stating how their agents will be paid.
Wong and Golden, who are still the co-CEOs of @properties, talked with the Tribune recently in their first interview since the sale of their company about the transaction, the evolution of their company as it celebrates its 25th anniversary and the future of real estate.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Q. What was the premise behind @properties? Was there a niche you were looking to fill when you founded the company?
Thad Wong: We thought: What if we open up our own brokerage, and we center it around providing the agent exceptional marketing and consistency — kind of doing for the agents what they’re not good at when it comes to business building practices. … We can grow the company on the shoulders of the agents, as long as we’re providing the agents a better plan to sell more real estate. … With the name, the impression we were trying to give off was technology-forward thinking. When we launched it at the beginning of 2000, it was right at that tech bubble, when everyone was talking about technology, so the name itself expressed to the consumer that we’re a tech company. …We knew, inevitably, every brokerage needed to become fluent in technology.
Mike Golden: We were also uniquely disadvantaged when we had to come up with a name because a lot of people were naming it like Sussex and Reilley with the names of the two founders’ mothers’ maiden names or Coldwell Banker. Well, Golden Wong, it’s either a bad Chinese restaurant or porn.
Q. How did you become as successful as you are now in a relatively short time?
TW: We think it was a long time. But I think if you compare it to other companies organically, it was a short time, because all of our growth prior to 2019 was organic. We never acquired a company in our local market — (only) one small firm. We did create a motto early on in the company for our agents that we lived by which was: If you’re not growing, you’re dying. We were in perpetual growth mode in every facet, not just in volume and number of agents, but we were in growth mode in technology. We were in growth mode in marketing. We were in growth mode with our culture.
MG: People have asked us: What was your secret sauce? What did you do differently? We did everything. We worked on everything all the time. It was sort of a focus on always trying to evolve, always trying to get better, never sitting back and saying we figured it out. We’ve never figured it out. We still, to this day, haven’t figured it out. … We’re always trying to strive to be better. … We work for everybody else that works here, so we’ve always got to be improving for them. We always have to be focused on the fact that we have to retain, and we have to be providing more value to our agents. That’s the way we always geared ourselves and how we thought we’d create success. … And it certainly wasn’t just the two of us. It was a group effort.
Q. How did the acquisition of Christie’s change your company?
MG: We knew we had the best technology solution. We had the best business platform. But what we didn’t have was a brand that resonated. … We recognize the fact that by taking our platform, our technology, our training and coaching platform, our marketing and the experience that we have in growing a successful brand and then coupling that with the Christie’s International Real Estate brand, we knew that could be a game changer for us. … And in the end, it was a major milestone for @properties, and it’s one of the reasons why we have a partnership with Compass.
Q. In an interview with Crain’s Chicago Business from 2018, Thad is quoted saying you were not interested in selling the company. You even created billboards that same year that featured a man with a compass that said “Don’t ask directions from a tourist,” a clear jab at Compass. Why did you decide to sell to Compass in December after years of rivalry?
MG: Robert (Reffkin, CEO of Compass) reminds us of that billboard every time he sees us.
(Laughing)
MG: Back then, (Compass) was just coming into town. We weren’t looking to sell. …If you talk to (Compass), this was pretty much the only market that they couldn’t beat the No. 1 competitor (@properties) in of all the major markets they went into. …Over time, we evolved and they evolved. …This deal took over a year to put together. We got to know them, and I think what we saw is that we are very well aligned on culture, on how we thought about the business, on technology, on how we felt that the agents were the key part of our company. …We have experience that they don’t have. …Thad and I were boots on the ground for years. Most of their top-tier leadership has never sold real estate. They come from a different perspective. They have incredible pedigree. …We just saw it as the right partnership at the right time.
TW: And I think what (Compass) was interested in at first was (our) profitability. …and the intrinsic value of the Christie’s International Real Estate brand.
Q. In December, you told the Tribune that @properties Christie’s International Real Estate will operate as a separate business unit for the foreseeable future under its own distinct brand with you both still controlling day-to-day operations. Is this still the case? Will your company eventually become Compass?
TW: No, it wouldn’t make sense to roll it in because it’s too much under one brand. …Consumers want choice.
MG: We’re the bigger player here — not by a small margin — so to all of a sudden take away our brand that has resonated in this marketplace, they would be damaging the investment that they made.
Q. How will consumers be affected by your sale to Compass?
MG: Consumers really shouldn’t be impacted, except in a positive way. We will bring better products to the market; we will bring more value to the consumer. They can still work with @properties, which is still a locally grown and locally based brand, or if they want to work with Compass, that’s a big, more of a national brand, they can do that.
TW: I think it’s actually cool too (because Compass is) our best competition, and I think we are their best competition. And so if we continue to compete with separate brands, we’re going to come up with the best product offering.
MG: While Compass was tough to compete with back in 2018…in the end, they made us think outside of the box. They made us do things differently, and I would argue that we were a great competitor for them. …We made them think about things differently. … And without a doubt, our people — our agents and consumers — all benefited from the competition that we have here.
Q. With your own sale to Compass announced in December, the announcement earlier this month that Rocket Cos. is acquiring Redfin and the potential sale of Berkshire Hathaway to Compass, it’s been a busy time for acquisitions in the real estate industry. What do these acquisitions and talks of sales mean at this moment for the future of real estate?
TW: People are positioning for search, and they’re positioning for search because they’re realizing when they have search and they have those consumers, they can monetize them in a number of different ways. They could take a percentage of the brokerage fee. They can sell them a mortgage. Oftentimes, they can direct title, advertising and insurance. …Compass is also playing in search. The big differences between the @properties platform and the Compass tech was search. They effectively built a search component that competes with Zillow because Compass’ vision was to compete with Zillow, not to compete with @properties. Our vision was to provide to the consumer and to the agent only, so we didn’t compete in search because we knew consumers liked to go to syndicated sites.
MG: Being small is almost impossible today because of technology and because of the needs of the agent — whether it be technology or marketing or training and coaching. … You’re going to continue to see more consolidation, especially with the stuff that’s happened with the litigation in our industry. The litigation took a lot out of a lot of people in our industry. …These are massive judgments, but companies like ours retain a tiny percentage of the income. …The agent takes the lion’s share of the commission on all deals now. So we have to operate differently, and I think the consolidation allows the bigger players to be able to hopefully create some margin for themselves and be able to be competitive. … And is that good or bad for the consumer longer term? I think that there’s plenty of competition out there, even if it becomes larger players.
Q. What else does the future hold for your company?
TW: I think that the way independent owners are looking at it is that they can provide the Compass technology, eventually, in a market where that’s in high demand under an internationally known luxury brand. And that comes with enormous advantages. … I do think that you’ll continue to see @properties franchises pop up nationally where that makes sense. And then I think both companies will grow locally.
Q. How does it feel to reach 25 years at @properties?
MG: It’s hard to believe.
TW: It is, isn’t it?
MG: We both have older kids now and gray hair. I do anyway. You don’t really have a lot of gray hair. … We’ve never been ones to sit back and say, ‘Oh, let’s celebrate our success.’ It’s ‘How do we continue to get better?’ … We want to celebrate with everyone here to thank them for everything they’ve done to help us get here. But now we’re thinking about: What does the next five years look like? What does the next 10 years look like? How are we going to continue to evolve? We’re not old yet — feeling older — but we have to start thinking about succession planning.
TW: The good news is that I think that because we created such a culture that we enjoy working in, we do have a natural succession plan. The people around us know how to lead this company, and the people around us, in some ways, are better than us. Neither one of us are looking to leave. … I can’t imagine doing something else right now. … The work is still fun.
MG: We’re looking forward to the next evolution. Every evolution has been great.
TW: I think we owe a lot to the city of Chicago. … We owe it a ton.
MG: And the local communities because they’re the reason why we are here.
