Aaron Kirman’s brokerage has ballooned in short order. Having his name on the door seemed a bit small-time, so he’s removing his personal brand from the brokerage to have Christie’s International Real Estate take the spotlight.
Los Angeles’ top-ranking agent confirmed to The Real Deal the rebrand of his brokerage to Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California as he plots the business’ scale, while a legacy industry name gains firmer footing in the region.
“The public really knows the Christie’s name, not that they didn’t know AKG. They did. But it just felt at a certain point the way we were going was a more corporate brokerage level rather than having anybody’s name on the door,” Kirman said.
Kirman made waves in November 2022 when he left Compass to launch his brokerage in partnership with Christie’s International Real Estate. At the time, the new entity was called AKG. Since then, it has gone by names with various combinations of AKG and Christie’s.
The deal struck was technically a licensing agreement, although both parties refer to it as an affiliation.
Since then, Kirman’s business has gone from 60 agents in one office to more than four doors with a headcount of more than 200 agents. There are also satellite offices in London, New York and Hong Kong to capture the overseas market.
By the numbers, the brokerage generated sales volume of $1.2 billion across 287 deals between May 1, 2023 and May 1, 2024, according to a TRD analysis of on-market deals over $1 million.
“We got to a point where we had scaled in a great, organic way so much that it felt we no longer had the resemblance of a team,” Kirman said. “We had changed to a relatively large luxury brokerage, and it was my idea to change the name.”
The strategy is to catapult the business to the next level and attract more top talent.
Kirman had already recognized the challenges in naming a brokerage after himself from early on when he said it was misconstrued by some that he was simply moving his team to Christie’s back in 2022. As a result, he said it was difficult in the beginning to woo top producers. Once the market understood he had struck out on his own, it made it easy to bring on powerhouses such as Cindy Ambuehl, Shelton Wilder and many others, according to Kirman.
“It was a little bit of a messaging error, to be honest,” he reflected. “A lot of the top-producing agents don’t necessarily want to be partners under what’s considered another top-producing agent.”
From a leadership perspective, nothing changes. Kirman confirmed he remains CEO.
The AKG brand will still exist as Kirman’s team, which is modest at this point and totals 10 people.
Meanwhile, the management position left open by Jamie Duran, who abruptly exited in June after three months at the brokerage in what Kirman called at the time a mismatch of “visions,” will remain unfilled. Duran was hired to assist with the brokerage’s office expansion after leading Coldwell Banker’s Southern California business.
“We’ve decided at this point in time to do our local growth based on our management team on a localized level, and it seems to be working,” Kirman said.
The CEO confirmed one new Southern California office is in the works. There’s also plans for a larger office in the San Fernando Valley to support the expanded team there that’s set to open at the beginning of 2025. The company also looks to explore artificial intelligence as a tool for agents.
“Real estate’s no longer just selling real estate,” Kirman said. “You have to be media-driven. You have to have social media. You have to have exposure. It’s all about the people who are doing things that the consumer wants to see, whereas 20 years ago the companies had a much more important role and it wasn’t based on the independence of agents. That was a shift in the industry. We view Christie’s as a mechanism to help [agents] go further nationally and internationally.”
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