Side, a San-Francisco based real estate brokerage that partners with top-producing agents, teams, and brokers to handle back-end operations, has enlisted Elizabeth Tse as its chief operating officer.
Co-founded by Guy Gal, Edward Wu and Hilary Sanders in 2017, Side has been expanding its team of C-Suite executives since the summer. In July, Darren Johnson joined the team as chief revenue officer. And now, Tse comes over from her role as senior vice president of operations at the freelancing platform Upwork.
Elizabeth Tse
“We’re very grateful and happy to have [Elizabeth] come on and act as our chief operating officer,” Gal, who is Side’s CEO, told Inman. “She brings all of her amazing experiences scaling other companies that had IPOs into our organization as we continue to grow, build out and eventually prepare for our own initial public offering [in a few years’ time].”
Before her role at Upwork, Tse has served as COO of Samasource and VP of Global Billing, Payments and Collections at eBay. She has also served on the boards of Upwork Escrow and Upwork Talent Group.
At Side, Tse will oversee onboarding, brokerage operations, people operations and IT teams as the company expands to more partnerships and agent teams.
“I am passionate about improving people’s livelihoods and it was personally important for me to join a company with a mission that closely aligned with mine,” Tse said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Side’s talented team to further empower great real estate agents across the country to create and grow their own businesses.”
Side currently represents over 1,000 agents across California, Texas and Florida and generates an average of $40 million in sales per agent, according to the company. Future plans include expanding to more states, partnering with more teams and eventually moving toward an initial public offering in the near future.
Guy Gal
The pandemic, Gal said, has proven to be a defining moment for their company as they felt pressure to continue working harder and moving in the direction of their expansion goals. Since pent-up demand from the spring has only increased into the summer and autumn, that meant amping up performance and making sure that agents reach and help more clients.
“Shelter-in-place orders and the pandemic has accelerated existing trends rather than change things,” Gal said. “It revealed the cracks and, in some cases, broke them but if you are on trend with what is in the near future, it helps you get there faster.”
An earlier version of this story stated that agents at Side generate $28 million annually. The dollar figure has been updated with a more current figure, $40 million.
