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Altos Research founder Mike Simonsen named chief economist at Compass

Expect Compass to become more relevant in the housing market analytics conversation.

Mike Simonsen’s weekly housing market updates are a staple of so-called Housing Twitter.

Back in May 2025, Mike Simonsen announced those weekly updates would stop—at least for a while. See, Simonsen—who sold his housing analytics company Altos Research to HousingWire’s parent company HW Media in 2022—was exiting Altos, where he had stayed for a few years following the 2022 sale, and had yet to announce his next move.

Today, we learned that Simonsen’s weekly housing updates will return and that he’ll step into his new role as chief economist of Compass.

“Today, I start a new professional era as the Chief Economist for Compass.

Many of you know that I recently left Altos Research, the company I founded and ran as CEO for nearly 20 years, and sold it to HW Media/HousingWire in 2022. Altos is the premier source for real-time housing market analytics, helping people understand what’s happening right now in the US housing economy and anticipate what comes next.

Altos started as a personal project to help me analyze the housing market after I’d bought a run-down, overpriced house in Silicon Valley just as the dot-com bubble burst. Had I overpaid? Was the market tanking? These were questions I couldn’t find answers to anywhere. So I built the database and analytics myself. I quickly realized it wasn’t just me who needed this kind of insight. So I turned my personal data project into a company.

We launched Altos on January 1, 2006, and have since worked with tens of thousands of real estate professionals and many of the world's largest financial firms to make sense of the US housing market. Through my market updates, webinars, economic analyses and reports, media interviews, and more, we’ve been able to reach millions of people with the Altos data and become the most trusted source of independent, data-driven insights into the housing economy. I’ve also had the privilege of providing guidance on housing economics and policy to top-tier media, legislators, business leaders, academics, and more. I’m proud that what started as my personal data project has become a globally influential source of truth about the US economy.

The day after I announced I was leaving Altos, I received a very interesting call from a very compelling person: Robert Reffkin, the founder and CEO of Compass. When Robert proposed that I join Compass, I immediately saw the opportunity to bring the deep market understanding I had cultivated at Altos to a much larger audience. For two decades, I’ve made it my professional mission to help people understand what’s happening right now in the housing economy. This, in many ways, would be the next step in fulfilling that mission.

For my colleagues in the industry, I’ll resume publishing my weekly video and written analysis on the housing economy in the coming weeks, now under the Compass brand. (You can also still catch my monthly column for HousingWire, too.) I’ll still be using the awesome Altos data… and now I’ll also have insights from being inside the biggest brokerage in the country. I deeply appreciate all of you being part of my journey over the past twenty years. I hope you’ll join me for this exciting new chapter. LFG!”

- Mike Simonsen wrote on LinkedIn on Monday

My hot take?

When it comes to earned media, Compass—the largest residential real estate brokerage by sales volume in 2024—made a smart move by hiring Mike Simonsen. Lately, most of Compass’s press coverage has centered around its off-market listing battle with Zillow. Bringing on Simonsen immediately adds research and analytics muscle to the brokerage. Expect Compass to become more relevant in the housing market analytics conversation.