A proud day at Compass

If you talk to 100 small-business owners, 99 out of 100 will tell you that the biggest headache in their lives is health insurance. It’s complicated, confusing, expensive, filled with red tape — and vitally important to every single one of us.

Yet in our industry, nearly every agent has to navigate the mess of healthcare entirely on their own. Agents are paying too much and getting too little. And because the prices are so high on the open market, there are tens of thousands of agents who are going without any health insurance at all. 

It’s not right. And it ends… today.

About a year ago, I was visiting the Compass office in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn where I met an agent named Lori (@lorimendelis) and I asked her, “What could we be doing to make your life better?” She told me that more than anything else, health insurance kept her up at night. Her premiums kept rising and rising — up to $28,000 a year. 

So I made her a promise. And for the last 8 months, Compass has been working on a plan to provide health insurance to our agents. It’s not an easy problem. We hit multiple obstacles and failed multiple times -- three times to be exact. But we’re solutions driven and we bounce back with passion at Compass, so we didn’t give up.

I’m very, very proud to say that we’re now able to provide access to a great healthcare plan for our agents. With our HR partner, we’ve created a number of options in every one of our markets through Cigna — and when you compare against comparable plans on the health insurance exchanges, they have a savings of up to 62.8%.

We’re just getting started here, and we’ll continue to expand and improve the healthcare plan every year, like we do with everything at Compass.

This is a proud day for Compass. And thank you, Lori, for inspiring us to take this on and make it happen.