https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7z7zm/real-estate-giant-compass-is-facing-an-existential-cash-burn-problem

Not too long ago, the real estate company Compass looked poised to dominate the industry for years to come. With a promise to combine the best of the technology and real estate sectors, it had raised an eye-popping $1.5 billion in funding from investors that included SoftBank, poached or acquired many of the top agents in the business, developed a deep bench of engineers, and made its logo an almost omnipresent feature of high-end neighborhoods.

By CEO Robert Reffkin’s own admission, earning a profit was not top of mind. “Short term profitability is something that many of the more modern companies are not as focused on,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. Instead, Compass kept aggressively spending to grow. By last year, Compass, which focuses on selling luxury homes in high-end markets with the help of a sleek app, was working with thousands of agents and selling more residential real estate than any of its competitors.