No, Compass does not franchise its own brand. It owns four real estate franchisors as of January 9, 2026, and none of them discloses office earnings.
Quick answer No. Compass does not grant franchises under the Compass brand, and its more than 33,000 affiliated agents are contractors at a company brokerage. Since January 9, 2026 Compass has owned four franchisors through the Anywhere acquisition: Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby's International Realty, and Corcoran. Those four you can buy.
Two things are true at once. Compass sells no franchises, and Compass now owns four of the largest real estate franchise systems in the country. The first fact has not changed since the company went public. The second has been true only since January 9, 2026.
The clearest statement of the first fact is not on the Compass website. It sits in Item 1 of the 2026 Century 21 franchise disclosure document, where a Compass subsidiary describes its own parent for the benefit of prospective franchisees: “Compass, directly and through certain subsidiaries and affiliates (some of which previously offered franchises), is a residential real estate brokerage firm, operating in over 95 markets in the United States with over 400 offices and over 33,000 affiliated agents.” The next sentence closes the door: “Compass does not grant franchises under the Compass brand.”
Those 33,000-plus agents sign independent contractor agreements with a brokerage Compass owns. That is a different instrument from a franchise agreement in every way a buyer should care about. No disclosure document arrives 14 days before signing, because the FTC Franchise Rule does not apply. There is no territory, no initial fee, no royalty, and no asset at the end. An agent who leaves takes a book of clients and nothing else. A brokerage franchisee who leaves sells a business.
So the search that brought you here has a short answer and a longer one. The short answer is no. The longer one is that the company you cannot franchise now controls four franchisors that will happily sell you an office.
The 2026 FDDs describe the transaction in plain terms. On January 9, 2026, Anywhere Real Estate Inc., Compass, and Velocity Merger Sub, Inc. completed the merger contemplated by an agreement dated September 22, 2025. Merger Sub merged into Anywhere, and Anywhere survived as a wholly owned subsidiary of Compass. Anywhere common stock, listed on the New York Stock Exchange since an October 2012 initial public offering and trading most recently under the symbol HOUS, stopped being listed. Compass shares continue to trade as COMP.
Trace the ownership chain a franchisee now sits inside and it runs five entities deep. Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC is a subsidiary of Anywhere Real Estate Services Group LLC, itself owned by Anywhere Real Estate Group LLC, then Anywhere Intermediate Holdings LLC, then Anywhere Real Estate Inc., a direct wholly owned subsidiary of Compass, Inc., doing business as Compass International Holdings. Anywhere Group and Anywhere still guarantee the franchisor’s obligations, and they continue to issue joint audited financial statements even though Anywhere no longer reports as a public company.
The merged company carries roughly 340,000 agents. Anywhere also carried relocation services, title and escrow operations, and the franchising revenue itself into the deal, against $225 million in cost synergies Compass stated it expects to capture.
Every figure below comes from the brand’s 2026 FDD, current as of December 31, 2025.
| Century 21 | Coldwell Banker Commercial | Sotheby’s International Realty | Corcoran | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial fee, main office | $25,000 | $20,000 | $25,000 | $25,000 |
| Fees actually paid in 2025 | $0 to $25,000 | $0 to $20,000 | $0 to $25,000 | $0 to $25,000 |
| Royalty on gross revenue | 6% | 5.5% to $1M, then 3% | 6% | 6% declining to 4% |
| Marketing fund | 0.50% | 2%, $621 to $1,728 per office monthly | 2%, $723 to $3,121 per office monthly | 1% declining to 0.50% |
| Start-up office investment | $117,270 to $473,400 | $118,550 to $741,000 | $128,750 to $519,250 | $143,650 to $552,500 |
| Conversion office investment | $35,770 to $286,100 | $37,050 to $553,700 | $47,250 to $331,950 | $62,150 to $365,200 |
| Franchised offices | 1,685 | 134 | 672 | 108 |
| Item 19 earnings data | none | none | none | none |
One label deserves care. The Coldwell Banker document in our library is the Coldwell Banker Commercial offering, which is why its franchised count reads 134. The same filing discloses the residential Coldwell Banker system separately: 1,297 franchised offices and 484 company-owned offices at the end of 2025, down from 1,388 franchised three years earlier. Century 21 has shed offices on the same trajectory, from 1,870 at the start of 2023 to 1,685 at the end of 2025, with net losses of 63, 73, and 49 in the three disclosed years. Sotheby’s added six franchised offices in 2025. Corcoran is the smallest and the fastest-moving, going from 76 franchised offices in 2023 to 108, while its company-owned side shrank from 29 to 25.
Read the Item 19 in each of the four documents and you get the same paragraph with a different lawyer’s name at the bottom. Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby’s International Realty, and Corcoran all state that they make no representations about a franchisee’s future financial performance or the past performance of company-owned or franchised outlets.
That is legal, common, and expensive for a buyer. Every one of these systems is decades old with hundreds or thousands of franchised offices reporting gross revenue to the franchisor every time a transaction closes. The data exists. It has been collected continuously for royalty billing. The decision not to publish it is a choice, not a limitation.
The category is consistent about this, which is the only mild defense available. Keller Williams runs the same play across 735 franchised market centers, and RE/MAX files no Item 19 either. If you want a franchised brokerage, you are underwriting a business whose revenue you will have to reconstruct yourself from agent counts, average commission, and local transaction volume.
Compare what each brokerage franchisor actually discloses. We read the filed FDD rather than the recruiting deck, which is how the missing pieces become visible.
Item 5 in each of the four documents says the same thing in different words: a franchise sales incentive program is running, and as of the issuance date the initial franchise fee for a main office is waived. The 2025 numbers confirm it happened in practice. Century 21 franchisees paid between $0 and $25,000 last year. Coldwell Banker Commercial franchisees paid between $0 and $20,000. Sotheby’s and Corcoran both range from $0.
Treat a waived fee as pricing information rather than a discount. The initial fee is a rounding error against a royalty that runs for the life of the agreement. Century 21 charges 6% of gross revenue, defined in the franchise agreement as all compensation received or receivable in connection with the business, with a $500 minimum monthly royalty once the office opens. Sotheby’s charges 6% plus a brand marketing fund contribution of up to $3,121 per office per month. Coldwell Banker Commercial charges 5.5% until aggregate gross revenue passes $1,000,000 in a calendar year, then 3%, with a $7,500 quarterly minimum that puts you on probation if you miss it. Corcoran starts at 6% and declines to 4% as revenue grows.
Century 21 offers a partial rebate through its incentive bonus program, capped at 2% of gross revenue, which can pull the effective royalty toward 4% for a franchisee in good standing. Read the conditions before counting on it. A default notice in any quarter can strip that quarter’s revenue from the calculation even if you cure it, and a default on December 31 forfeits the payment entirely.
The most useful disclosure in these documents is not a fee. It is the paragraph describing who else operates under the same signs.
At December 31, 2025, Anywhere Advisors LLC owned and operated 484 Coldwell Banker residential offices, one Coldwell Banker Commercial office, and 37 Sotheby’s International Realty offices. Its subsidiary NRT New York LLC owned 25 Corcoran offices and one Corcoran Sunshine office. A separate affiliate operates 36 company-owned @properties offices. Behind all of that sits Compass Brokerage itself, over 400 offices under the Compass, Urban Compass, Washington Fine Properties, and Latter and Blum marks.
The Century 21 FDD does not soften what that means: “Anywhere Advisors and NRT NY operate mainly in metropolitan areas and compete directly with franchisees in the areas in which they operate.” They may compete for customers, for independent sales associates, for managers, and for title and mortgage relationships. The document then removes the last bit of comfort: “There are no restrictions on Anywhere Advisors and NRT NY regarding competition with franchisees.”
Buy a Sotheby’s International Realty franchise and your franchisor’s sister company runs 37 offices under your own brand name. The Compass merger added a much larger competitor to that picture, one whose executive team now oversees the franchisor. The FDDs also reserve the right to develop tools and systems for the exclusive use of the company-owned brokerages, which is a quiet way of saying franchisees are not guaranteed access to whatever the parent builds next.
Start with the trend line in Item 20, because it is the only performance signal these documents give you. Two of the four systems are shrinking. Ask the franchisor to explain the closures state by state, then call the offices listed in the exhibit of franchisees who left.
Ask what the waived initial fee costs elsewhere in the agreement. Conversion funding, term extensions, and minimum annual royalty commitments are all negotiated into location addenda that never appear in the published fee table. A ten-year extension attached to a waived $25,000 fee is not free.
Then accept that no Item 19 means the validation calls carry the entire underwriting burden. Both Coldwell Banker and Century 21 publish franchisee lists in their exhibits. Work them, ask for gross revenue per agent rather than office totals, and ask every franchisee within 20 miles of a company-owned office how that competition has gone.
Pull the Century 21 data sheet from the 2026 filing. We analyze the document itself, Items 5, 7, and 20, including the parts a recruiting conversation skips.
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About this analysis The franchise data in this article is drawn from VetMyFranchise's structured analysis of 2,300+ Franchise Disclosure Documents filed with U.S. state regulators. See our data & methodology.
No. The 2026 franchise disclosure documents filed by Compass subsidiaries state that Compass does not grant franchises under the Compass brand. Compass operates its own brokerage offices, over 400 of them in more than 95 US markets, staffed by more than 33,000 affiliated agents who sign independent contractor agreements rather than franchise agreements. There is no Compass FDD, no initial franchise fee, and no territory to buy.
Compass, Inc. is a public company trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol COMP, following an initial public offering on April 1, 2021. Its principal business address is 110 Fifth Avenue in New York. On January 9, 2026 it completed its acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate Inc., which now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary under the name Compass International Holdings.
Four real estate brokerage franchise systems arrived with the Anywhere acquisition: Century 21 Real Estate LLC, Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC, Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC, and Corcoran Group LLC. Each files its own FDD and each sells franchises to independent brokerage owners. Anywhere also brought relocation services through Cartus and title and escrow operations, and Compass stated $225 million in expected cost synergies from the combination.
No, and the difference is the whole question. A Compass agent affiliates with a brokerage Compass owns and operates. A franchisee of Century 21 or Corcoran owns the brokerage, signs a franchise agreement governed by the FTC Franchise Rule, receives a disclosure document 14 days before signing, pays an initial fee and an ongoing royalty, and holds a business that can be sold. An agent has a contract that ends.
None of the four does. The Item 19 in each 2026 FDD carries the same sentence: we do not make any representations about a franchisee's future financial performance or the past financial performance of company-owned or franchised outlets. Keller Williams and RE/MAX also publish no Item 19, so the entire franchised brokerage category leaves buyers to validate revenue through franchisee calls and their own market math.
This page is part of VetMyFranchise. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt