Above: Chris Trapani, co-founder and CEO, Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno
This past January marked the one-year anniversary of a monumental decision for Chris Trapani—the day he said no to Compass.
As the mega brand forges forward on building a monolithic presence on the residential real estate landscape, Trapani, co-founder and CEO of Northern California’s Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno, chose to opt out of the deal when Compass acquired @properties in January of 2025. While the decision to become part of @properties was a highly intentional choice, when faced with joining the Compass empire, Trapani and his partner, Ryan Iwanaga, returned to their foundational roots as a local, independent boutique firm.
While some may have viewed the decision to return to independence as a leap of faith, for Trapani and Iwanaga, it was just common sense—sticking to the formula that has facilitated Sereno’s success for 20 years now.
Like most successful entrepreneurs, years of professional and life experience informed Trapani’s decision, starting with the day he met Iwanaga at 10 years old, and the pair embarked on a lifelong friendship and business partnership. At the age of 24, Trapani became a real estate agent and quickly rose through the ranks to become the youngest Coldwell Banker NRT president, overseeing the prestigious Silicon Valley metro area.
Above: Trapani with lifelong friend and business partner, Ryan Iwanaga
But Trapani’s true calling was elsewhere, and he left behind the corporate environment to form Sereno with Iwanaga. Launched with just 27 agents in 2006, today Sereno is home to 650 agents in 19 offices. The firm recorded nearly $6.5 billion in volume last year, its second-best year on record, placing it at an impressive No. 29 among RISMedia’s 2026 Top 1,000 Power Broker firms.
Coming together, moving apart
Becoming one of the nation’s top brokerage firms wasn’t part of some master plan, says Trapani, but the result of fortuitous events—and the willingness to get “messy.”
“A lot of people want to go into leadership,” he explains. “They think it’s going to be some clean, easy path. Well, most of the time it results from messy situations. The messier the situation, the bigger opportunities there are.”
Like any good path to success, Trapani’s journey from start-up to saying no to Compass involved many twists and turns.
In 2018 and 2019, the Northern California residential real estate landscape—which had been what Trapani describes as “a cool kind of ecosystem”—began to change.
“Our two biggest competitors were Alain Pinel and Pacific Union,” he explains. “We were in a sweet spot. We were big enough to compete with them, but small enough to really have that family culture. And then all of a sudden, they were gone. We navigated pretty well through that, but Ryan and I said, if there is a strong partner that we could align with, we would.”
This line of thinking opened the door to @properties Founders Thad Wong and Mike Golden, who Trapani and Iwanaga found simpatico on many levels.
“You tend to think when you’re younger, you know everything and no one knows better,” says Trapani. “And then you figure out there are other people that are smarter and look at things differently. And so we opened up to that and @properties, and Thad and Mike specifically—we found kindred souls.”
In 2019, Sereno was acquired by @properties, which in 2021, acquired Christie’s International Real Estate, bringing to Trapani and Iwanaga a proprietary tech platform and an opportunity to scale, and subsequently, top luxury branding.
“Sereno is a very well-known name regionally, but we didn’t want to have any limitations on opportunity for our agents or growth for the company,” says Trapani. “We always recognized that a true luxury brand, like a Christie’s, could put us over the top.”
And according to Trapani, that theory continues to prove itself, as the Christie’s branding gives the firm a recruiting and retention advantage, as well as the opportunity to expand into new markets and represent record-priced transactions.
“@properties had a business acumen because of their scale that was really insightful to us,” says Trapani. “The intention was that we would’ve remained a partner.”
But @properties seized on a different opportunity—to affiliate with Compass—and Trapani understood.
“They did a great deal, and I’m actually really happy for them,” he says. “But there was a very small window of opportunity to peel off from that. So the moment that window opened slightly, Ryan and I didn’t even think through the details. We didn’t really get into how we were going to unpack this and become a standalone. But we knew at the heart-and-soul level that it was the right thing for us and our people.”
The return trip
While it took about six months to roll out the partnership with @properties, the agreement to buy the company back took just four or five days, says Trapani. And because the merger between Compass and @properties involved publicly traded companies, Trapani and Iwanaga needed to keep their plan top secret.
“It was interesting the day the news broke that Compass was merging with At World (@properties parent company),” says Trapani. “My phone was blowing up because our people were panicking. They were not excited about potentially getting swallowed up into that big thing because we’ve fought for this independence. It just affirmed 100% that our instinct to take the company back was spot-on.”
This outpouring of concern gave the co-founders the burst of inspiration they needed. While the timeframe to opt out of the Compass deal was small, Trapani said he and Iwanaga made the decision to return to independence in about 10 minutes.
“Emotionally, we knew,” he says. “I don’t care what kind of business you’re in, when the ownership runs the business directly, there is a different vibe. Ryan and I still have a lot of energy and now, taking the 30-plus years of experience we both have in the business and still leveraging Christie’s, it’s like we got the best of all those things. We have the Christie’s brand so we can crush it in the high end. We’ve got Sereno, which for our agents, their heart’s connected with Sereno. We have this independent ownership that we’ve had from the beginning. We also have proprietary tech, which we got from @properties during that transaction, which we’ve retained as part of our Christie’s deal. So that’s a combination, in my view, that’s highly competitive.”
While the decision was easy to make, the transition back to independence took about six months, Trapani reports, as unwinding “boring back-end stuff,” such as HR and accounting systems, took some effort to sort out. But the motivation that comes from running your own company has made the road traveled well worth it because, as Trapani explains, it’s about “making meaning,” not just money.
“I think that for people who have been in the business for a long time—if you’ve been doing this for 20, 30 years like we have—then finding that inspiration to keep making meaning is a challenge,” he says. “Inspiration comes more naturally when it’s your business. I think the inspiration from this reengagement as owners is evolving in ways that will move the needle more meaningfully for our people.”
Does brand even matter?
For every broker/owner of every size, recruiting and retaining agents is priority one, and a factor that is weighed heavily when contemplating a merger or acquisition. For Trapani, returning to independent status is one of the best recruiting and retention decisions he has made.
“Great technology is good and important, but we’re human beings,” he says. “If a culture’s really, really strong, you have to back it up. You can’t just be a fluffy culture without the backup. If you have a great brand and good tech, and you have culture, to me, that is very, very compelling. And if you have people that are really happy and feel connected, agents are phenomenal recruiters because they’re so happy—people won’t leave.”
But what about a big brand name? Does choosing not to become part of Compass impact an agent’s or consumer’s decision to work with Sereno?
“I think, generally speaking, clients pick the agent regardless of the company,” says Trapani. “That’s the No. 1 driver. They’re not going to pick an agent they don’t trust or feel confident in no matter what company they work for. A lot of them might not even know what company their agent works for.
“There’s going to be some exceptions, but I think the brand and the culture draws the good people, and the good people secure the clients.”
That said, Trapani reports that being part of Christie’s had helped the company gain access to certain markets.
“This is a tier-one luxury brand that transports anywhere,” he explains. “Whereas the other (brands), honestly, are made up. We’ve all made up the names of our companies, and maybe they’ve had 10 years or 25 years, or even maybe some of these family-name companies have a hundred years—but they don’t have 300 years, and they have not been in the upper echelons globally through auction houses and that kind of clientele.”
The combination is a powerful differentiator, Trapani says.
“It’s like we have this kind of cool juxtaposition of this down to earth, artistic, philanthropic, super-high professionalism Sereno that started with our little house logo. And then we have Christie’s, this tier-one, global luxury brand,” he says. “So we have this really cool kind of expansion in there.”
Navigating future consolidation
As a former Anywhere leader—back when the firm was Cendant—Trapani understands the big brand environment, and tips his hat to the parties involved in making the Compass/Anywhere deal happen. But now, he explains, is when the real work happens as the integration of leadership, culture and offices gets underway. And as the transition plays out, the effect on sales associates remains to be seen.
The recent news of the Real/REMAX deal, now followed by eXp Realty’s acquisition of NextHome, is of no surprise to Trapani either, as “larger players are racing to scale, hoping it somehow leads to something bigger and better.”
“For us, it makes us even more defined,” he explains. “It makes a company like ours stand out because there’s going to be a little less distinction over the long run. So I think that’s really to our advantage.”
According to Trapani, as the largest independent firm in Northern California, Sereno is not just unique because of its positioning in the marketplace, but also in its profitability.
“Many of the publicly traded real estate companies haven’t really, truly been profitable, or if they have, barely,” he says. “I would say probably most of the indies probably have not been making any money for the last several years. And we have been profitable. We don’t have any debt. We’re in a great spot.”
With that in mind, it’s not surprising that Trapani is approached several times a year by firms looking to partner. While he keeps an open mind and will talk to anyone, most prospects aren’t a good fit financially or culturally.
“Now, we would be excited about potentially bringing on good agents if they want to join us at the company, and there’s synergy there,” he adds. “So I think the focus will be more on highly productive agents and teams.”
In turbulent times, ‘know what you stand for’
Looking at the future, Trapani is optimistic, but is keeping a watchful eye on trends and issues that could change the tide of the real estate brokerage business.
In terms of the market, Trapani says Sereno has been “crawling out of” a constrained sales-unit environment since 2022, fueled by a lack of quality inventory in the pricey Bay Area.
“We had double-digit growth last year,” he reports. “We were up 10% on units from the prior year, and I think we can do that again. I think we’re ahead of the market, but there has not been that breakout year.”
But such a year could be looming as Trapani anticipates big IPOs from tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and the recently announced public offering from SpaceX.
“We’ve had massive market-cap growth in a lot of the big tech companies in the last three years,” he explains. “So all that market capitalization eventually works its way into residential real estate values. There’s a lot of buyer capacity there, probably more than people recognize. So I think we’ve got some really good years ahead.”
However, while market conditions will hopefully improve, significant industry-wide trends may potentially tip the balance. For example, Trapani is keeping his eye on the debates—in and out of court—around private listings.
“The greatest asset that agents and a brokerage have is a listing,” he says. “There’s a great deal of acquisition cost to secure and support that listing before it’s on the market, when it’s on the market and after. I think there’s going to be some pretty significant changes on how listings are shared amongst brokerages and agents and also how they’re displayed.”
Trapani also sees potential disruption from AI.
“In ’99, people were telling me that Realtors® would be out of business in a year because of the internet,” he says. “Well, that hasn’t happened. And why that hasn’t happened is because no one’s been able to scale the personalization that’s required for each and every real estate transaction. So the question is, is AI going to be able to start to fill in that personalization to some degree?”
While Trapani believes that clients will always be drawn to quality agents they can trust, AI is moving at such a rapid pace, the future is hard to predict. That’s why the time is now to make sure agents are prepared.
“It’s all evolving, so prepare agents right now for the fact that you’re going to have people asking for advice from ChatGPT while they’re sitting with you on a listing appointment,” he says. “You need to first get your mind around the fact that that’s going to happen. It’s probably already happening. So just getting agents over that hump and then realizing, ‘hey, I need to know what kind of information this program would be giving people.’ You have to dive in on what those general questions and answers are.”
Ultimately, whether it’s the widespread acceleration of AI or a decision about merging with another company, Trapani’s advice for brokers is the same: “Know what you stand for beyond just transactions.”
As an example, Trapani points to Sereno’s 1% for Good program, which started with one check for $5,000 and has now raised nearly $8 million serving some 600 local charities.
“If you’re just a transactional shop, then I think that’s vulnerable,” he says. “Some of the people we’re talking to are in places where they just feel like they’re a number. There isn’t any intention or culture.
“If I’m running a firm, and I’m not really clear on what our principles are and what we stand for or are striving for, then I better figure that out. Any way we can give our people that extra purpose and meaning, that’s an area we’re going to keep leaning in on.”
