A27M Group · By invitation · $1M+ revenue floor · Eight Core Partners
Your agency sells for 2–3× earnings. Together, we build for 6–8×.
A27M is a private room of eight real estate media operators pooling the sales bench, the back office, and the vendor leverage no single shop can afford. The margin widens from the first week. The premium exit is where it leads. Keep your brand. Keep control. Share the upside.
Member studios shoot for agents at
The math
Service business at 2–3×. Platform at 6–8×.
- 2–3×
- What an agency sells for alone
- 2.83×
- What consolidators pay today
- 6–8×
- Where the group re-rates
Outside capital is already buying the mid-tier of real estate media, systematically, from owners who are tired or unsure what the business is worth. The only question is whether you're inside the platform capturing the premium, or on the outside selling into it.
What the collective is built for
Four levers no single operator pulls alone.
The back end of a $27M company, pooled, not purchased. Each lever is a cost you carry alone today, and what it becomes inside the room.
01
Cut your costs
Negotiate Matterport, iGuide, and AutoHDR as one room, plus shared editing, drone, and 3D-tour capacity. The first thing you feel is your margin widen.
02
Build recurring revenue
Pooled marketing and managed-service offers turn one-off project work into revenue that survives the winter. Recurring revenue is the single thing buyers pay the most for, and the hardest to build alone.
03
Benchmark and de-risk
Real P&Ls from operators at your scale, a shared sales bench, and an acquisition-grade CFO who makes your books diligence-ready, so a buyer can't discount you for owner-dependence or messy numbers.
04
Exit at a premium
Then the payoff. The room reaches the scale serious buyers engage with. Equity swap, keep your brand, the second bite: two exits, not one.
Who's at the table
Operators, not observers.
The collective is built around eight Core Partners and a wider group of agency members, owners doing $1M to $10M+ a year, each carrying a specialization the rest of the room actually needs.
- 8
- Core Partners
- 15+
- Agency Members
- $27M
- Combined revenue target
- 6–8×
- Reclassification multiple
Listing photography from a member studio. Every seat in the room ships work at this level, in its own market, under its own name.
Read the visionThe thesis, in long form
Read the math before you decide.
The $27M Question
A buyer offered one founder a million dollars for an agency doing $4.3 million a year. There was no number on the other side of the table to argue with. This paper is about where that offer comes from, and why private equity will not take the meeting under $3 million in combined earnings.
- Part I: We Know What You're Dealing With
- Part II: What's Already Happening Around You
- Part III: What Vendors and Partners Keep Telling Us
- + 5 more sections
Keep the Brand, Hand Off the Back Office
One owner with three photographers went from an $84,000 month to a fifty-something-thousand month and asked me in September why he could not let go. The Growth Partner answer is a back office that runs twelve functions under your brand for 35% of collected revenue, with the shoots and 100% of the company staying with you.
- What the model is
- What you keep
- What it costs
- + 3 more sections
The Price Rise You Hear About a Year Later
One owner raised prices, sold the agency, and learned from the new owners that eleven clients had quietly left over it. Another raised on January first and most of the list never noticed. The difference was a $25 listing website nobody had asked for.
- Why nobody tells you
- Never raise without adding
- Why the increase happened at all
- + 1 more section
Apply
Five questions. No wrong answers.
Eight Core Partner seats, filled by invitation and application. Five questions, reviewed personally. The bar is character and values, not revenue alone. If it isn't a fit, that's a completely valid answer too.