Highland Real Estate and Compass Join Forces

Highland Real Estate and Compass have joined forces to make the real estate experience intelligent and seamless with the industry’s top talent and technology in the Winthrop area.

Jim Polino, the owner of the 42-year old Highland Real Estate on Crest Avenue, said the new affiliation with Compass was suggested last November when his son Jonathan had a discussion with a Compass agent.

“We’re still our own company, we’re still our own business, we’re an affiliation of Compass,” Jim Polino said. “We were doing fine independently. We looked at their stocks and their growth has been nothing short of amazing.”

Jim and Elizabeth Polino started Highland Real Estate in 1977. “She helped get the company going in 1977,”  Jim said.

Polino showed an example from 2016 that the top firms were polled in Massachusetts and Compass wasn’t on the list of the top 29.

“Today, in 2019, they’re the number two company in the state,” Polino said. “One of the reasons we wanted to affiliate with Compass is so we can bring some of those higher income buyers to Winthrop.”

He’d like to see some of the buyers who are paying a higher price in East Boston come to Winthrop.

“Winthrop has a lot more to offer. We’ve got parking, we have a bus line to the T, a water shuttle,” he said. “It’s all about perception with the buyers. They want the Boston address. So we have affiliated with a company strong in Boston to help bring those buyers to Winthrop.”

In 2016 Compass had the seventh largest real estate office in Boston. In 2019 Compass has attained the number one position.

“When Jonathan and the other agents looked at Compass’ data, they concluded that they’re doing something right,” Polino said, adding that Highland has been engrained in the community and has the number one market share. “We thought that affiliating with that kind of growth would help our sellers in Winthrop.”

Highland Real Estate will take a listing, put it on the Compass platform.

Compass also has some innovative programs like Compass Concierge, which helps sellers prepare their homes for sale with fresh paint, repairs, and staging. Whatever the cost the seller simply pays Compass at the closing. There are also no fees attached to the loan.

Compass also has a “coming soon” platform for sellers who want to list their property on the market but who are not yet ready to have their homes photographed.

Compass also works with Highland to design billboards, the signs on the back of the MBTA buses and postcard mailings.

“This allows us to focus on sales while they help with marketing,” Jim Polino said.

“Our goal is to simplify the real estate process. We have agents from coast to coast,” said Chelsea Clark of Compass. “Compass is the largest independent real estate brokerage nationally with 12,000 agents and 300 Compass offices.”

Clark said they want to make the real estate process seamless and intelligent.

“Compass is the future of real estate,” Clark said.

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