Side CEO argues independent brokerages can thrive amid real estate consolidation

In 2026, over 80% of Side Real Estate’s partner companies qualified for the RealTrend Verified Rankings, up from 72% a year ago and roughly 51% in 2024. According to Side co-founder and CEO Guy Gal, this growth is no mere coincidence. 

“Side inherently has the benefit of getting to work with really great agents because that is our model — we help very productive agents and teams become their own company,” Gal said.

In 2024, Gal said he and the team at Side were surprised that only about half of their teams and agents made the RealTrend Verified Rankings, and they quickly made it a goal to one day have 100% of their partners make the rankings. 

“This progress has come from making sure that our agents focus all of their energy and effort on what matters most, which is how they market, how they come to the market, how they build out their team and how they work with clients and show up in their communities,” Gal said.

He believes Side agents and partners can focus more on these things because Side provides them with all of the back-end transaction management support, enabling them to spend more time and energy working with and serving their clients. 

“They can be more productive because they are not constrained by their capacity to meet all the opportunities that have already presented themselves.” Gal said. 

Stand outs from the rankings include the San Francisco-based enterprise team City Real Estate, which closed 469 transaction sides and over $1 billion in sales volume, earning it the No. 4 rank in the nation for sale volume on the RealTrends Verified agent rankings, as well as House Real Estate, a Sacramento-based mega team that closed over $380 million in sales volume spanning 417 transaction sides, earning it the No. 2 rank in California by transaction sides. 

Training their way to the top

Kylie James, Side’s senior director of partner success, added that the firm also works to foster the growth of its agents and partners through education and training. 

“We do over 10 live trainings each week that focus on different areas of a real estate company’s business,” James said. “It might be leveraging some of the tools Side provides or best practices around nurturing your sphere and how to create more business from that. These are really great times for Side to be a thought leader and show those best practices that folks should be implementing in their businesses.”

James added that Side’s managing brokers in each market regularly put on town hall events to ensure that partners and agents stay on top of forms, compliance and understand current local market conditions. 

On top of this, the firm also provides partner companies with a business strategist, who works to help them understand the resources or mentorship they have available to them as they work toward different goals. 

Success breeds success

As Side works toward its goal of having all partners qualify for the RealTrends Verified Rankings, Gal said the company is focusing on creating partnerships with well-established top-producing teams and independent brokerages interested in affiliating with Side. 

“Partnering with these top firms, teams and agents, creates this positive selection bias where the community starts to support itself through connections and relationships. Now most of our partnerships originate from referrals from our community,” Gal said. “Our partners and their brands are showing up in markets in really distinct and visible ways because they are different and not more of the same. This inspires other people around them to want to follow in their footsteps.” 

Gal said it is “pretty cool” to have grown the company to where it is today, largely through organic growth mechanisms

Local over corporate 

Today, however, while much of the rest of the real estate industry is focused on consolidation, Gal said he is confident the boutique, local, community-oriented nature of Side will help continue to fuel its organic growth. 

“For nearly a decade, we’ve been investing against the status quo of the industry, which is much more concerned with consolidating everything under a  small number of brands where everyone sort of looks, speaks, talks, pitches, approaches their marketing and their appointments similarly, which in effect commoditizes the agents,” Gal said. “Instead, we have always thought that if you’re going to commoditize anything in real estate, it should be the brokerage.” 

For Gal, the agents are what makes a company or a brand distinct because they are the ones that understand the texture and contours of the community better than anybody.

“Our agents are specialists and experts in their markets versus generalists, who may be well served by a one-size-fits-all approach,” Gal said. “But we want to see a future of real estate that is a lot more independent, a lot less consolidated, a lot more specialized and a lot more local and community-oriented than it is corporate and consolidated.” 

In the meantime, Gal acknowledged that the industry is in the midst of a massive wave of consolidation, but looking at past consolidations, he said this is often followed by a proliferation of boutique real estate firms, looking to differentiate themselves from the corporate behemoths.

“To the degree that the industry continues to try to bundle itself up into these weird Frankenstein corporations, we want to unbundle it into distinct, unique local companies that receive the support they need to scale, so they can focus on what they do better than anyone else and actually show up in the market as opposed to disappear into it,” Gal said.