Frank Nolan moves at the speed of San Francisco real estate, which is to say, fast. The 6-foot-3 president and co-owner of Vanguard Real Estate strides through properties in about 90 seconds, often leaving his Audi RS e-tron GT double-parked outside.
After the run-through, Nolan usually has “edits.” “I think the lower you list this, the better,” he told one Vanguard agent with a 1,000-square-foot Portola cottage. “Windows,” he said to another, who assured him the cleaners would be there before the open house.
This routine happens every Wednesday morning as part of a company-wide caravan to see the new Vanguard listings coming to market. The field trips take place directly after the weekly sales meeting, a catered breakfast affair with about 100 agents at the firm’s Mission headquarters in a converted bank, and more Zooming in online. Between meetings and tours, Nolan fields calls from clients and agents who want his advice. Plus, he manages his own listings, often at the $10 million-plus price point.
Nolan is detail-oriented but doesn’t consider himself a micromanager, at least not anymore. His team usually knows what he wants before he has to ask.
“I’ve always been more of a hunter than a gatherer,” he said, preferring face-to-face business cultivation to back-end paperwork and listing prep.
San Francisco agents say Nolan’s Energizer-Bunny stamina, positivity, and no-bull insights have been essential to Vanguard becoming the largest independent brokerage left standing in the city. Think of Vanguard as a Super Duper in a sea of Burger Kings and McDonald’s. Nolan doesn’t just run the kitchen; he rolls up his sleeves to flip burgers and pops up in the front of the house to convince customers to come back for seconds.
Leading the biggest little brokerage in San Francisco and being the go-to for its 445 active agents and 44 support staffers is demanding. There are ongoing battles against agent attrition, and the firm’s only recent attempt at a merger with another independent ended up in court. But Nolan believes Vanguard will persevere.
“Everyone’s trying to attack us at all times, take our people, and disrupt our space,” Nolan said. “It’s not easy when people come and go, or when a new player comes to town. We have a lot of experience with rebuilding and regrowing and staying relevant, but it’s hard work.”
Vanguard CEO James Nunemacher started the firm as a young agent in the 1980s because he didn’t like the attitudes at other brokerages in town.
“No one was nice to me,” Nunemacher said. “So I set out, and Vanguard was born.”
The real estate industry was different then, and there was no reason to believe his nascent company couldn’t make it. In the ensuing decades, most of the other indie firms have been gobbled up. Hill & Co., for example, was bought by Alain Pinel Realtors, which was acquired by Compass.
Another long-standing independent, McGuire, was sold to Sotheby’s, which became part of the Compass colossus after a $1.6B merger with Anywhere that also included other major firms like Coldwell Banker and Century 21. The combined Compass represents 60% of the real estate volume in San Francisco, according to a 2024 analysis (opens in new tab); even before the merger, Compass’ Bay Area sales volume was about ten times that of Vanguard, according to the San Francisco Business Times. (opens in new tab)
Vanguard is also growing but has taken a slow and steady approach; it now has 17 offices in total, mostly focused on San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay, and recently expanded its presence in wine country with two new satellite offices.
Nunemacher, who is a housing developer as well as an agent, met Nolan while leasing out a multifamily project he had built in Noe Valley in the late 1990s. At the time, Nolan was a part-time leasing agent and part-time waiter. Despite being new to real estate, he made an immediate impression on the more experienced developer.
“He was young, energetic, and represented the tenants in such a way that he was optimistic about it,” Nunemacher said.
He asked Nolan how much he made at all his jobs combined, then said he’d make double if he quit and came to work for Vanguard instead. Nolan has changed “one million percent” in the 26 years since, Nunemacher said, surpassing his mentor in sales and representing San Francisco’s financial elite in their home sales and purchases. But some core traits remain.
“Frank’s a gentle, kind soul, yet forceful at the same time, and that’s key for his success,” Nunemacher said.
Thirteen years ago, Nunemacher asked Nolan to be his business partner. Nolan likes to remind his former boss that his pitch on the partnership was that Nolan “wouldn’t have to do a thing” and could continue working on his own listings, just as he had before. The reality is that, while Nunemacher is still heavily involved in development and big-picture planning, Nolan is the one on the ground fielding day-to-day calls from agents, on top of serving a demanding high-end clientele.
The fit 53-year-old gets up around 5:30 for his mandatory morning workout, a rotating mix of weight lifting, cardio, personal trainer sessions, and swimming. (He used to swim in the bay, until a surprise encounter with a barking seal scared him out of the open water.) He doesn’t always make time to eat until dinner but does dine with his husband, Tom Berry, almost every night. Sometimes they go out — his favorite cheat meal is a burger or the French dip from Hillstone — and sometimes they stay in at their Liberty Hill home with their French pug mixes, Gladys and Patty.
Nolan and Berry, the national director of business development for Sunrise Senior Living, have been together almost as long as he’s been at Vanguard. They married 12 years ago. Their moms became best friends on a trip to Bali with the couple a few years before the wedding and now live five doors from each other in a senior living community in the city. Nolan and Berry are “guncles” to several nieces and nephews but Nolan feels the time has passed to have kids of their own.
“I love kids,” Nolan said. “I wish we would have done it sometimes.”
With both their workloads, it’s hard enough to find a night to get away to their second home in Sonoma, which Nolan calls “heaven” and where he tries to disconnect.
“You never know when it’s going to get busy,” he said. “You just never know.”
It’s Nolan’s time-intensive, personalized approach and “utter positivity always” that directly contribute to Vanguard’s ongoing ability to thrive as an independent, said Stu Gerry, who worked with him as a waiter at Bix back in the day and is now a commercial agent at Compass.
“Frank doesn’t tell anybody to be anything other than who they are,” he said. “I think that’s the best thing about Vanguard.”
Like many in real estate, Nolan is a big fan of self-help books and has a particular affinity for “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. He regularly hands out copies as a gift. Its basic tenets are: Say exactly what you mean, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best. He and his four-agent Nolan Group Team within Vanguard use the short-hand “four agreements” as a catch-all get-it-done phrase anytime there’s a setback or challenge.
Internalizing the book’s ethos has allowed Nolan to remain calm even when some of Vanguard’s biggest agents jump ship.
When Dan Dodd decided to leave Vanguard in 2018 because he “fell for the tech stack” at Compass, he distinctly remembers Nolan’s sanguine reaction.
“He said, ‘Someday when I answer this call, you’re going to say, ‘I really want to come back,’” Dodd recalled.
That premonition came true last summer, when Dodd decided Compass was too big, running his own Side-backed firm was too small, and Vanguard was in the Goldilocks zone.
“It felt full-circle, and at the same time, it’s kind of a scary thing” to change firms, Dodd said, which is why he never wants to do it again. “I joke around that Vanguard is where I will go out feet first.”
Vanguard has been approached about buyouts and mergers over the years, Nolan said. A deal was in the works for the firm to join with Red Oak Realty, a 50-year-old East Bay independent, but the negotiations fell apart, leading to litigation.
In a subsequent lawsuit, Red Oak accused Vanguard (opens in new tab) of a “poaching campaign” using protected information from the failed 2022 merger discussions to recruit top Red Oak agents to Vanguard’s East Bay operations. Red Oak CEO Vanessa Bergmark confirmed that the suit is still active but declined to comment further.
Nolan wouldn’t say much about the accusations but claimed he told his team specifically not to recruit from Red Oak and is looking forward to being deposed so he can tell his side of the story.
“They came of their own will,” he said of the former Red Oak agents, using reasoning from “The Four Agreements” about false assumptions to explain Bergmark’s assertions to the contrary. “She made up a story in her head.”
In the last year, Vanguard opened its first non-California office, in Miami. The next targets include the Peninsula and Lake Tahoe, but Nolan and Nunmacher are still working on getting the strategy just right.
Nolan’s standing among San Francisco luxury agents is critical to the wider perception of his small firm. He goes out of his way to be gracious, even in defeat.
Compass agent Nina Hatvany recalled a recent deal in which she represented the seller of a sought-after Pacific Heights home, as well as a buyer who had reached the final round of bidding. Nolan’s client was the main competition. Both parties had a chance to give their best and final offer, and Hatvany’s client won. Other agents might have been angry or insinuated that Hatvany passed along insider info to get her buyer to the winning figure. Nolan called her to say he was happy with the process and appreciated her even-handedness in her representation of the buyers and sellers.
“First of all, to even appreciate that I have tried to be fair and pleasant and reasonable is unusual,” she said. “To have somebody actually thank me for trying was fantastic.”
Though Hatvany is “very happy” at Compass and loves her management there, she said Vanguard’s tradition of having agents detail the stories behind sales at all price points at its weekly sales meetings and the company tours that follow sound lovely.
“Compass is pretty big, so there isn’t time for people to share their adventures of the week, and certainly nobody caravans together, so that definitely is over and above,” she said.
Toward the end of this particular Wednesday-morning high-speed loop through the city, Nolan stopped in at Jordan Golani’s $1.6-million listing near Duboce Park. Golani came to Vanguard in January after four years at Corcoran Icon because he liked its in-house design services as well as the “pre-COVID vibes” of its bustling Mission main office.
He beamed when Nolan commended him on the “A-plus marketing” of the condo, which went on to sell for nearly $2.2 million in less than a month. Their interaction was brief but clearly made an impression.
“Frank is the only guy running a brokerage who is as familiar and reputable and hands-on,” Golani said. “He knows everybody’s name. No one’s doing that.”
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