Over the past two-and-a-half decades, Aaron Kirman has become a juggernaut in Southern California’s luxury market.
The broker led one of the highest-earning teams in the country at Compass for several years before launching his own firm with Christie’s International Real Estate in 2022. When his team was at its height at Compass, it had about 160 agents, and today, Kirman has more than doubled that at Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California into a force of roughly 350 agents.
As an individual agent, Kirman also continues to impress. Over the course of his career, he’s sold around $19 billion in real estate, $2 billion of which was done in 2023 alone, according to his website. Among other high-profile sales, Kirman helped sell the beleaguered mega-mansion “The One,” in conjunction with Concierge Auctions, in 2022 for $141 million. He gained even more widespread visibility by starring in CNBC’s Listing Impossible in 2020.
In short, Kirman has kept busy in the past few years building his business, but he took some time to catch up with Inman this week about the latest market happenings and headlines. Here’s what he had to say, edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman News: I saw that you launched a cryptocurrency division a few months ago, and I was curious to hear more about how that’s going. How much demand is there for that in LA?
Aaron Kirman
Aaron Kirman: It’s going so well. You know, we launched this crypto division, and we’ve had not only many deals close from crypto, but we get inquiries from all over the world from people who are interested in buying houses with crypto. And so it’s been an amazing, amazing division for the company.
We’ve done a couple of $100 million dollars deals and transactions in crypto, which has been exceptional. We represented everybody from local money to San Francisco tech families to billionaires from the Middle East and China. So it’s been an amazing ride. And it’s a lot of fun to have one of the only crypto divisions in the nation.
Thinking more about technology, I’d love to hear how you’re adapting and using AI in your business now, and if you have any concerns about it.
So I think the word ‘AI’ in the real estate business is certainly overused. Everybody loves to throw out the word ‘AI,’ but there are so many variations to AI — back-end, front-end, sales structure.
I was probably one of the first to adopt AI before the word ‘AI’ was used as much as it is. About five or six years ago, I created a program to help me in patterns, try to identify buyers and sellers through tech plays, and then be able to retarget them. So I’ve always used AI as a tool to try to gain information and access to information. And I 100 percent embrace AI.
I don’t believe that AI is a threat, only because real estate is a people business, and at the end of the day, people need people. So there is a value that we as agents will always bring to the table, and it’s that personal touch, personal experience and knowledge that AI simply cannot always do … But I’m not one of those guys who thinks that AI is going to be taking over the brokerage business and then an agent’s business.
Shifting a little bit here to some of the current news headlines, I wanted to get your take on this new deal that Compass has established with Redfin, where they’re going to put their coming-soon listings up on Redfin. How do you feel about that?
I’m actually very in alignment with some of the things Compass is doing. I believe that a seller should have a choice — this is more addressing Clear Cooperation — I believe sellers should have choices when it comes to that, and I don’t think that just because something gets listed, it should immediately go to the public. I think a seller should have a right to decide what they do and do not want to do with that.
And I’m 100 percent in alignment with Robert’s decision to fight the current standard. I think no seller should be forced into publicly marketing their home. And I think no agent should have to share information just because they have it listed. Some things are private, and some people want to keep it private, and I think a seller should have the right to do that.
I think when it comes to the Compass Coming Soons, the reality is, there is an advantage to people who are part of a multinational company that’s as big as it is. I think that if they choose to share that information as to coming soons to Redfin and those types of [portals], it’s fine. It worked.
I think that it just should be a seller’s choice, though, and I think it should also be an agent’s choice as to how they choose to proceed on their marketing programs. It’s not always one-size-fits-all, and I think that’s the problem with real estate. Everybody tries to package it as one-size-fits-all, and it’s not that simple. And every house is different, and every client is different, and every situation is different.
And you obviously work with a lot of high-end clients who might prefer to be private. Would you say you mostly do private listings these days?
I sold probably $1.5 billion in real estate last year, estimated. So no, we’re public a lot of the time, but we do a lot of private listings. A lot of our clients are celebrities, billionaires, multimillionaires, and they want the discretion that a private listing would offer.
A lot of times, buyers don’t want to buy a house that’s been overly publicized for multiple reasons, whether it’s security or other factors, and they just want the ability to be able to buy something that’s not overly publicized some of the time. There are a lot of factors in the world now with security and public issues, and so, we do a lot of private sales, and a lot of the people that we represent appreciate that fact.
Thinking about Southern California and Los Angeles, how do you feel people are responding to LA’s mansion tax at this point? I saw some flashy headline the other day that said new construction permits are severely down since before it went into effect. Do you feel like the public is still feeling impacts from that tax?
I think the public will feel the impacts of the mansion tax until the mansion tax goes away. I think the mansion tax was one of the biggest mistakes the California voters ever voted into law, and I think that the mansion tax has cost California billions and billions of dollars in terms of not only investment, but reinvestment in the state. So, somehow, some way, we need to get that mansion tax off the books here in California.
We’re not seeing the same numbers of developers in the market. We’re not seeing the same number of multi-unit offices because the mansion tax is, and I hate that word ‘mansion tax’ … and that’s how it got into office, by the way, it was a very good word for the people that believed in it. But the reality is, it is a terrible tax, and in a city that needs development and housing, somehow, some way, we need to get it off the books.
Makes sense. On a more personal note, do you have any reality TV shows coming up? Are you thinking about getting back into that at all in the future?
That’s a funny question. I’ve been approached by multiple people for a show. But I put the bulk of my focus right now into growing my brokerage and our brand. We went from zero to 350 agents in the past three years. So we grew Christie’s International Real Estate SoCal immensely.
And, I’ve really been very passionate about selling houses. I would do a show, but it would have to be the right show. No offense to my dear friend Jason Oppenheim, but that’s not my thing. I like this to be a little bit more intellectual and informational, but for the right thing, I would do it, although I’ve been kind of focusing on other things right now, and I’ve really been enjoying that.
I also think, while it’s great to have a show in today’s world, you don’t need a show because social media has gotten so powerful, and I could get to millions of people on any one of my videos that we [create] — and we do.
Good to know. Is there anything else that you’ve been working on lately at your brokerage that you wanted to share?
We’re about to launch some really cool things. Can’t really say what it is yet, but we have something very — it’s not necessarily [at] my brokerage either — but I have a pretty cool new concept about to launch that is going to be independent of my brokerage, actually. But, I think it’s going to be interesting, and I think it’s going to be revolutionary, and I think it’ll be a very successful, fun business.
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