Even as interest rates rose at a record setting rate and the pace of existing home sales continued to slide, Los Angeles-based Equity Union Real Estate continued to grow. Between 2021 and 2025, Equity Union Real Estate recorded 239% transaction side percentage growth, earning the firm the top-spot in the 2026 RealTrends Verified GameChanger rankings, after the company closed 5,670 transaction sides in 2025.
Harma Hartouni, the CEO of Equity Union Real Estate, attributes the continued growth of his firm to the strong belief that his clients are their real estate agents.
“Looking at the greater market and industry, so much is changing, there is all of this consolidation happening, but I am not paying attention to that — I am focusing on our agents,” Hartouni said.
A prime example of this, Hartouni said, is how quickly his brokers and staff respond to agent questions and queries.
“We have a 15 minute rule that all of my brokers have to abide by, so they have 15 minutes to respond to agents and that way no one, the agent or their client, has to wait,” he said.
Pillars of support
In addition to this, Hartouni said his firm provides agents with three pillars of support: technology and marketing, compliance and education and coaching.
While the compliance pillar is focused on helping agents manage risk, with technology and marketing, Hartouni noted that not all agents like to market in the same way. This means the firm’s marketing department customizes its offerings to the needs of each agent. Similarly, agents also have different education and coaching needs and while the majority of agents at Equity Union are well-established in the industry, not all of them have the same goals.
“Our education is based on the needs of higher level agents, so for some that is hiring an assistant and for others it is how to build and start a team,” he said.
Hartouni believes a key to his firm’s ability to support its agents is the fact that they have physical offices agents can go to get the help they need.
“I’m a big fan of having a physical space agents can go into. If you look at our statistics, it shows that it has helped them increase productivity and it also helps them really feel supported, part of a community and that their hard work is appreciated,” Hartouni said.
These agents then go out and tell other agents about the culture and the support they receive, creating a natural recruiting pipeline for the firm, Hartouni said.
Old school organic growth
“All of our growth has been organic, one agent at a time,” Hartouni said. “We aren’t out there doing any big mergers or recruiting gigantic teams with hundreds of agents or anything like that.”
While Hartouni acknowledges his role in helping establish the supportive, agent-first culture of Equity Union, he says most of this largely comes down to the rest of the leadership team.
“We believe in earning leadership roles by contributing. My entire team, from the vice president of marketing to education leaders to our brokers, truly wants to serve and help our agents grow their businesses and that desire in the invisible string that brings everything and everyone together,” Hartouni said.
The leadership and the culture it has helped create at Equity Union, Hartouni says has helped the company with agent retention.
“We celebrate their personal and professional successes and milestones and we hold masterminds that put agents in a room with peers that they respect and they feel have the same integrity and work ethic,” Hartouni said. “It is all about being around their colleagues who are striving for their own goals and success and it creates a sense of community for them.”
Even with a strong sense of community, navigating the macroeconomic and legal challenges of the past five years has not been easy. As Hartouni and his team looked to help agents find their way through high interest rates and the commission lawsuit business practice changes, he said they focused on removing fear by preparing their agents for these challenges early.
“Go head first into fear. If there is something I am afraid of and it needs to be addressed, I don’t procrastinate, I dive in, fix it and move on,” Hartouni said. “With the settlement, there was all this noise and fear out there, so at every meeting, I brought agents back to the core idea that their relationship with their clients still matters and that they are still going to get paid for the expertise and services they provide.”
Due to this preparation, Hartouni said that when the business practice changes went into effect, his agents barely noticed because they had been working towards implementing these changes for three months.
As Hartouni looks ahead, despite the success of his company, he knows there are still areas where things can be improved, including improving the efficiency and effectiveness of support staff through the strategic implementation of AI tools and providing agents with more education and tools to help them get more listings.
“We are focusing on those things because we truly believe that it is about the agents — that people work with our agents because of them, not because of us,” Hartouni said. “I know a lot of companies think they are the brand, but for me, the agents are the brand.”
English (US) · 