Why Aaron Kirman is betting on AI, crypto and new development

According to Aaron Kirman, much of his success in the real estate industry first as a solo agent, then as a team leader and now as a brokerage CEO, has come from keeping his finger on the pulse of the industry and taking a critical approach to his business. 

“Life is always an evolution and you don’t often know where you’re going to land,” Kirman said. “But I always like to analyze where I am and what I can be doing better. In real estate, business changes every single day, so I am constantly doing this.” 

This approach, Kirman said, is what led him to go from a solo agent to eventually building the Aaron Kirman Group, a seven-agent team in 2017.

“At the time, teams were not that common in real estate, but I saw the changing dynamics with the technology that was out there. I realized that there is only so much any one agent can do, so I looked at how I could get past the $500 million sales volume mark. Then, I realized what that would take, and I knew that the days of being a solo agent were gone,” he said. 

At first, Kirman said other agents were reluctant to join and questioned how being on a team would benefit them, but once they realized how much more ground they could cover by working together, they were sold. 

“We went from seven agents to about 100 and it was great and working well, but eventually we asked ourselves what the next evolution would be,” Kirman said.

Betting on a brokerage

The next evolution would turn out to be Christie’s International Real Estate | Southern California, the firm Kirman launched in the fall of 2022. 

“We loved Compass and where we were, but we wanted to be in charge of our own destiny and build a luxury brand and there were certain things that we felt we could do differently if we were on our own,” he said. Now, Christie’s International Real Estate is under the Compass International Holdings umbrella.

Kirman said the process of opening and running his own brokerage has been quite the learning curve. 

“It is one thing to be an agent selling houses, it is another to manage brokers and build something,” he said. “It is a tough business and margins are tight. We have a lot of top agents who take big percentages of their commissions, so we have had to learn how to run a business. Every day we’re tweaking our systems, processes and procedures to figure out what we could do bigger or better.” 

Embracing change

A big part of this, Kirman said, is trying to always be first to embrace change.

“We were early adopters of AI. I built an AI program six years ago before AI was a buzzword, so we were ahead of the curve on that,” he said. “We were also the first to launch a cryptocurrency division and that has been an amazing force for us because people all over the world want to use us to buy and sell homes. It is all about evaluating what is at the forefront of real estate and how we can work to obtain that.” 

The key to this, Kirman said, is not looking at the current year, but asking “what’s coming next year or the year after that.” 

“By doing that, we were able to grow with a lot of the top agents in the nation,” Kirman said.

An example of this philosophy in action is the firm’s recent launch of a new development division.

“We realized that all of a sudden there were some really interesting luxury high-rise development projects in Los Angeles. We were getting calls from all over the world to represent projects, so we built our new homes division to fill that purpose,” he said. 

Since opening the division just a few months ago, Kirman said the brokerage is already representing billions of dollars in developments for projects both in Beverly Hills, but also as far away as Dubai. 

Cancelling the noise

While he and his team are constantly trying to keep an eye on the future, Kirman said they also work to block out the noise.

“There is so much noise in general right now. You have the noise of the brokerage business, the noise of geopolitical situations and economic situations, so as a leader I do my best to help the team block out the noise, stay in our lane and focus on what we do,” Kirman said. “I do like to be highly educated on news and the moving parts of our economy because that helps me to better serve our clients, but I also recognize that our job is to sell houses and be at the forefront of that.”

As for the noise in the real estate industry, Kirman said he is closely watching the consolidation trends and how AI is impacting consumer behavior. 

“I recently had a $60 million deal in escrow and the buyer called me and said ‘ChatGPT said it is only worth $52 million, why am I overpaying?’ That almost [caused] me lose the deal,” Kirman said. “I had to explain to him the nuance of the situation and the local market. He eventually understood it, but that’s why a nuanced approach is so important.” 

Staying at the top

When looking to the future, Kirman anticipates that in the next decade it will be just 5% of all real estate professionals doing 90% of the business. To ensure he and his agents remain in that top 5%, Kirman said they are focused on AI and how they can use it to automate more tasks to help agents be more productive, but also to help them to better understand the marketplace and current trends. 

In addition, he said they are focusing on opening other specialty divisions like their existing cryptocurrency and new development divisions. 

“We think this is really important because as technology advances and consumers [can] more easily gain information about the market or a property, it’s important to create experts that are specialized in their approach to property types,” Kirman said. “Clients today oftentimes have as much information as agents do, so I believe where the agent can add a lot of value is in information that is not necessarily public. I think that’s an important part of agent trajectory moving forward. We’re betting on a more nuanced business where information is key and our agents and our brokerage is going to dominate that information based on specialized brokerage intelligence.”