Nick Segal’s sitting in the conference room of Carolwood Estates’ Beverly Hills headquarters, moving from his laptop screen to cell phone.
He’s showing off the Carolwood Private Portal, which its agents have been quietly using for a little over a month.
The private platform has nearly 90 listings totaling over $1.3 billion worth of signed pocket listings, and plays like a dating app. It connects sellers with prospective buyers within Carolwood’s ecosystem.
Agents can sign up for text message alerts on matches. There’s a valuation tool that makes it easy to factor in “market heat,” what’s previously sold or pending, and the ability to type in key elements, such as how much a seller spent on their kitchen upgrade or pool addition. A slick, Carolwood-branded report with all that information can then be emailed or printed for a client.
“There’s a whole gamification dynamic,” said Segal, who is Carolwood’s managing broker, as he provided a demo for the site.
The web-based platform was in development for about 18 months, although Segal partially kidded it was really cooking for about 35 years based on the collective experiences of founders Segal, CEO Drew Fenton and CMO Ed Leyson.
“We wanted to compile our off-market listings in a user-friendly Carolwood app so the agents could access from their phones,” said Fenton, adding from an agent’s perspective, it’s an “easy” tool to use.
At its simplest, the technology automates what would normally be handled during a staff meeting, where agents share information on listings and prospective buyers. Segal said they no longer include those conversations in meetings anymore. Instead, he reminds agents if they have a buyer looking for something specific, to check the portal.
Segal said the valuation component can be accessed by agents outside of the brokerage with the help of someone from Carolwood, but the off-market inventory remains internal.
It’s a competitive play and an agent retention tool from one of Los Angeles’ fastest-growing independent brokerages, which reported $3.2 billion in on- and off-market sales volume last year. That’s about double what it had in 2023, which would have been its first full year in business after launching in November 2022.
The brokerage said of Los Angeles County’ listings in excess of $10 million, Carolwood holds 27 percent of them. The percentage moves up to about 37 percent for listings north of $20 million, according to Carolwood.
“We have market share. Why wouldn’t we capitalize on that market share and create a more efficient system?” Segal said.
Fenton added that because of Carolwood’s track record in the off market, he sees the app as further helping “these increasing sales.”
The idea is to bolster Carolwood’s position within the Los Angeles market, rather than toy with ambitions of creating a national platform, the founders said.
“We don’t need to be a national brand. We don’t want to be a national brand,” Segal said. “We want to be your resource to Beverly Hills and Los Angeles.”
Segal said he sees Carolwood’s portal as a challenge to Compass Private Exclusives. Both, at their simplest, are platforms to house private listings, although Carolwood’s inventory is hyperlocal.
A Compass spokesperson declined to comment on Segal’s assertion.
Back and forth
Some might say Carolwood’s timing to reveal its platform publicly is impeccable.
The brokerage steps into a heated debate over the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy, which requires public listings be submitted to the Multiple Listing Service within one business day.
NAR’s latest update to CCP in March wasn’t an erasure of the rule and instead introduced the Multiple Listing Options for Sellers policy. The addition carves a path for sellers to opt out of placing their listing on the Internet Data Exchange — the tech that makes it possible for brokerages to place MLS listings on their respective websites.
Michael Nourmand, president of Nourmand & Associates, said the update didn’t change much locally in Los Angeles, but there’s risk “a few bad apples will put their financial interests ahead at the expense of the seller.”
In recent months, Corcoran launched Reserve and Douglas Elliman is preparing to roll out its Black Label Private Listings platform.
Compass, which has been particularly vocal on this front, has already been operating its Compass Private Exclusives and Compass Coming Soon platforms as part of a suite of slick technology for its agents. Private Exclusives and Coming Soon are part of a three-step property marketing strategy Compass rolled out late last year that it said helps sellers by shielding listings from showing accruing days on market, price drops and valuations. It also touts a level of privacy the company said gives sellers control over the access of their addresses and photos of their residences.
The turn to privatize the information by some, has roiled listing aggregators such as Zillow, which also owns Trulia. The company earlier this month doubled down on the merits of making listings public by essentially blacklisting anything private from its sites for “the life of the listing.”
Nourmand said he initially wasn’t in favor of CCP and originally saw it as a potential roadblock to agents sharing pocket listings information. He’s since changed his mind.
“I’m in favor of the Clear Cooperation Policy because you can see isolated examples of brokerages trying to use their size to put their interests ahead of their clients’ interests,” Nourmand said. “In my opinion, this is a breach of their fiduciary duty. More exposure tends to lead to higher sale prices.”
Nourmand added that while no rules are perfect, CCP places the consumer first. He pointed to brokerages that incentivize agents to use their in-house private portals as running counter to what’s in the best interest of clients. He pointed to Compass as an example. The Real Deal reported in March that Compass was offering a $100 social media campaign for agents and their clients who start off with the Compass Private Exclusives platform.
“The beauty of the MLS is that you get pretty much everything, or the vast majority of properties in one, central location,” Nourmand said. “I think the consumer wants this. I don’t think any buyer wants to go to 10 different places to see what’s for sale.”
Beverly Hills-based Westside Estate Agency co-founder Stephen Shapiro holds a similar view in casting a wide net with listings.
“At Westside Estate Agency our approach for over 25 years has been to advise our clientele that reaching the broadest audience of qualified buyers provides the best results,” Shapiro said.
Industry yawns
Some brokerages scoffed at the idea of Carolwood’s platform being anything other than the latest iteration of what the industry’s always had. That is, internal systems for communicating about pocket listings.
At one time it was something as simplistic as a mass email, said Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California COO Nina Zokhrabyan.
“A [version of this] system has been around for a very, very long time. Being archaic or not, it’s just how you develop it,” Zokhrabyan said. “So for Carolwood to bring something onto the market, it is new for them, but now new for the industry.”
Beverly Hills Estates founders Rayni Williams and Branden Williams offered a similar take.
The founders said they likely utilized the same third-party technology company as Carolwood to develop their in-house pocket listings system they’ve had from the start of the brokerage, although Rayni declined to specify what provider they tapped for the job.
“The key is that all of these platforms — and we have all of them — they’re all great, but there is no substitute for great agenting and great agenting is relationships and being in the know,” said Rayni, who serves as the brokerage’s CEO. “At the end of it all, it’s really about your relationships — who you’re talking to inside of the firm and outside of the firm.”
She stressed that Beverly Hills Estates underscores to its agents the need to talk and work the phones to share information internally and externally.
“Being a top broker, you’re working with all the other top brokers,” Branden added to Rayni’s point. “Jade’s [Mills] at Coldwell Banker. Chris Cortazzo’s at Compass. Ginger Glass is at Compass. Mauricio Umansky and Billy Rose are at The Agency. Linda May is at Carolwood. We’re always communicating.”
Zokhrabyan went further to say Carolwood is the latest in a long history of brokerages that have attempted to figure out a way to navigate off-market listings.
In fact, Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California is looking to leverage an existing tool for off-market properties that it’s had since the team was at Compass operating as the Aaron Kirman Group. It plans to bring that system to a web-based platform other agents within what Zokhrabyan described as the “Christie’s family” could access with a login.
The COO guessed the platform could be rolled out in the third or fourth quarter, but said it depends on the conversation around CCP. Which way that goes ultimately determines what features can and can’t make it into the final version, she said.
“That topic [of pocket listings] never dies, but there’s brokerages and those in the community that have always been trying to overcome that,” Zokhrabyan said. “I just think that it is more relevant right now due to all the hype around it and the [policy].”
