Stop focusing on the past, coach Darryl Davis writes. If you want to compete in today’s real estate landscape, you have to shift toward what’s next.
For a stretch in the late 2000s, more than half of every business smartphone in North America had a BlackBerry logo and BlackBerry’s keyboard on it. Then a company in Cupertino made the keyboard irrelevant, and the business case for buying a BlackBerry collapsed in slow motion.
The fall is the part everyone remembers, but it’s the pivot that broker-owners need to study. BlackBerry didn’t survive by building a better keyboard. It survived by quietly walking out of the phone business and into automotive software, embedded systems and cybersecurity.
Today, the company’s QNX platform powers safety, infotainment and digital cockpit systems in vehicles around the world, and BlackBerry’s IoT division has been posting consistent double-digit revenue growth while the cybersecurity arm has been carved out as a separate business. The brand that became shorthand for a hardware failure is now a software story.
Let that sink in for a moment because here’s the truth: The residential brokerage industry is staring down its own Blackberry versus iPhone moment.
Compass completed a $4.2 billion acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate in January, creating a combined firm of roughly 340,000 agents with more deal volume than the next five largest brokerages combined.
In late April, The Real Brokerage announced an $880 million deal to acquire RE/MAX, merging a cloud-based, AI-powered platform with one of the industry’s most recognized franchise brands to form Real REMAX Group, a 180,000-agent global operation.
Days later, eXp World Holdings acquired NextHome, adding a franchise model to its cloud brokerage and adopting a new ticker, AGNT. The pattern is unmistakable: The franchised models that defined the past 40 years are not just losing share to cloud-based and tech-forward competitors, they are being acquired by them. The consolidators pay differently, train differently and own the agent relationship differently, and now they are absorbing the legacy brands whole.
If you are a broker-owner watching this from inside a traditional shop, the temptation to try to build a better keyboard is real. Hire harder. Cut splits deeper. Add a new CRM. Run a recruiting campaign aimed at last quarter’s agent.
That is exactly what Research In Motion did from 2007 to 2012. They shipped more devices, refreshed the operating system, defended the keyboard … and ultimately lost.
What BlackBerry actually did right (eventually)
When John Chen took over BlackBerry in late 2013, the business looked unsalvageable. He made three decisions that broker-owners should print and tape to the wall.
First, he stopped pretending the old product was the company. Within three years, he had exited handset manufacturing entirely. The brand survived. The product line did not. The willingness to amputate the thing that built the company is what bought the rest of the business time.
Second, he doubled down on assets that were undervalued internally. QNX, an embedded operating system BlackBerry had acquired in 2010, was treated like a side project for years. Chen made it the strategy. Today, it is the company’s growth engine.
Third, he changed who the customer was. BlackBerry stopped chasing consumers and started selling to enterprises, automakers and governments. Different customer, different sales cycle, different margins, same intellectual property at the core.
What this looks like in a brokerage
The hardware in your brokerage is the desk, the office lease, the franchise sign and the legacy commission split. The software is your training, your culture, your data, your client relationships and your agents’ production capacity.
Most brokerages still get judged on their hardware. The ones that will be standing in 2030 will be judged on their software.
Compass and Anywhere are betting that scale plus a unified technology stack is the survival path. Real is betting that a low-overhead, equity-and-revenue-share platform attracts the production tier that no longer values a corner office. REMAX, eXp and the franchise networks are each running their own version of the same calculation. None of these companies is right for every market or every agent. All of them have read the BlackBerry case study, whether they admit it or not.
The question for an independent broker-owner is not, “How do I compete with Compass?” The question is, “What is my QNX?”
It might be a coaching and accountability program that turns average agents into above-average producers. It might be a niche specialization (luxury, relocation, new construction, senior transitions) that no cloud-based competitor can replicate at scale.
It might be a property management arm, a title or mortgage joint venture or a referral network with brokerages outside your footprint. It might be a training pipeline that takes new licensees and makes them productive faster than anyone else in your market.
What it cannot be is, “We have always done it this way.”
3 questions to take into your next leadership meeting
Sit down with your leadership team, and answer these three questions out loud:
- What part of our business model is the keyboard? In other words, what are we defending out of habit rather than economics? If a clean-sheet competitor opened across the street tomorrow, would they replicate it or would they laugh at it?
- What asset do we own that we are under-investing in? Every brokerage has one. Sometimes it is a piece of intellectual property, sometimes a person, sometimes an app idea, sometimes a relationship, sometimes a market segment. Find it before someone outside the company does.
- Who is our real customer? Agents are not customers. They are partners and product, depending on the day. Consumers are customers. Builders, lenders, attorneys, employers and investors are customers. Some of the most resilient brokerages in the next cycle will be the ones that figured out which of those they actually serve and serve them better than anyone else.
The integrity of our profession does not depend on saving the brokerage model that existed in 2015. It depends on broker-owners willing to do what BlackBerry was finally willing to do: look at the product honestly, name what is dead and move resources toward what is alive.
That is leadership. The other version is a press release about a recruiting bonus.
Whoever controls listing access controls what the real estate market looks like, brokerage owner Eric Bramlett writes. Courts may or may not restructure that in the Zillow-Redfin-FTC case.
A federal judge recently refused to dismiss the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Zillow and Redfin, and the case will move forward.
At the center of it is a February 2025 deal in which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to exit the multifamily rental listing advertising market for up to nine years and to exclusively syndicate Zillow listings on its sites. The FTC says that amounts to paying a competitor to stop competing.
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Whether or not the courts ultimately agree, this case has opened a conversation the industry has largely avoided: Who decides where listings go, and what happens when that decision concentrates in a small number of hands?
How listing visibility gets decided
Most consumers start their property search on one of a handful of major portals and assume the results represent the full picture. Anyone who has spent time on the ground in this industry knows the inventory on screen and the inventory that exists are two different things.
Syndication agreements are why. Brokerages and landlords choose where to send their listings, and platform deals determine what surfaces where. Under the agreement at the center of this case, Redfin’s rental sites would display only Zillow listings for up to a decade, making Zillow the exclusive provider of multifamily rental inventory across the Redfin network. A renter searching on Redfin was essentially searching Zillow’s inventory without knowing it.
That example comes from the rental side, but anyone working residential knows the same logic applies. Platform deals shape what buyers see, too, and on whose terms. Syndication agreements are the invisible architecture of listing access. That architecture has been consolidating for years, and this case may be the most direct scrutiny it has faced.
When the market narrows
There’s a consequence to concentration that gets lost in the legal framing. By Zillow’s own account, it controls close to two-thirds of U.S. real estate audience share for listings and describes itself as 2.5 times larger than its nearest competitor. At that scale, the choice of where to advertise stops being a choice. It’s a calculation about whether you can afford to be invisible.
For smaller brokerages, the situation is familiar even if it’s rarely stated plainly. Listing visibility runs through systems we didn’t negotiate, on terms we had no part in setting.
On the residential side, that plays out in what agents pay for lead generation on platforms that aggregate our listings in the first place. The competitive pressure falls on agents. The terms of distribution are decided elsewhere.
Zillow and Redfin have argued that their partnership benefits consumers by aggregating more listings in one place. That argument has some logic to it. But consolidating inventory behind an exclusive arrangement also consolidates pricing power, and that cost lands somewhere. Usually on landlords paying for placement or renters absorbing whatever gets passed through.
What regulatory pressure changes
This case will not resolve quickly, and anyone expecting overnight structural change will be waiting a long time. But litigation reshapes behavior before verdicts arrive. Platforms operating under antitrust scrutiny tend to write their next agreements differently, and that shift alone can open up room that didn’t exist before.
The breadth of this action is worth noting. Attorneys general from five states joined the FTC in bringing it, which tells you this isn’t a priority confined to one administration or one regulator with an agenda. If the case succeeds, remedies could include unwinding exclusivity clauses, reopening distribution to smaller competitors and restricting the use of long-term contracts to consolidate market position.
For independent brokerages and regional platforms, those outcomes would represent the first real opening in a market that has been closing around them for years.
Whether that happens or not, the scrutiny itself is already part of the record. That’s harder to walk back than a single deal.
The transparency question
Listing distribution has never been neutral. It has always reflected the interests of whoever controls it. What’s changed is that a federal court is now paying attention, and the industry can’t treat that as background noise.
The argument isn’t against large platforms. Zillow built its position by being useful to consumers, and that counts for something. The argument is against arrangements that eliminate competition under the cover of convenience and then ask everyone else to build their businesses around the outcome. Independent brokerages, landlords and renters have all been adjusting to a market shaped by agreements they had no seat at the table for.
Whoever controls listing access controls what the market looks like. Courts may or may not restructure that. What agents and brokerages can do is stop treating platform dependence as inevitable. This case is a reminder that the terms of this industry weren’t handed down. They were negotiated, and they can be renegotiated.
April home sales barely budged — up just 0.2 percent from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million, and flat year over year — while the median existing-home price climbed to $417,700, its 34th consecutive month of year-over-year gains, according to the National Association of Realtors. Inventory rose too, up 5.8 percent from March to 1.47 million units.
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The data describes a market that’s more fatigued than frozen. Shoppers are showing up, but they’re just not pulling triggers.
James Harris, CEO of Breezy and formerly of Million Dollar Listing, talked with Inman about what the NAR numbers mean on the ground, and why the answer looks very different depending on which market and which buyer you’re talking about.
A national number that masks a split market
Harris says the impulse to read the NAR data as a single national story misses the structural divergence now shaping the market.
“The days when almost every major metro was moving up together are behind us for now,” Harris told Inman. “Certain markets that saw aggressive appreciation during the pandemic are still working through affordability issues and excess inventory, especially in parts of the Sun Belt and secondary markets.”
The Case-Shiller Index confirmed in February that the housing slowdown has spread well beyond its Sun Belt origins. Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., now sit alongside Tampa, Phoenix and Dallas among markets posting year-over-year price declines.
Harris expects that trend to continue, not as a crash but as a realignment. Markets with constrained supply and durable long-term demand — particularly New York and parts of the Northeast — are holding. Everything else is repricing.
“Real estate has become much more hyperlocal,” Harris said. “You can no longer paint the entire country with one brush.”
What spring buyers actually look like
The buyers who are transacting this spring don’t look like 2021 buyers, according to Harris. They’re patient, deliberate and operating with leverage they didn’t have two or three years ago.
“Buyers today are simply more selective and more patient,” Harris said. “They’re analyzing properties much more carefully and negotiating harder than they were two years ago.”
Turnkey properties are pulling away from the field, and Harris says buyers are avoiding renovation exposure. Construction costs, permit delays and contractor uncertainty are all factoring into purchase decisions in ways they didn’t during the frenzy years. Properties that are move-in ready and priced correctly are still trading quickly, while everything else is sitting.
At the top end of the market, the dynamic shifts. Lifestyle remains the dominant driver for wealthy buyers. Features like privacy, security, wellness amenities and outdoor space continue to command premiums, but those buyers are largely insulated from the rate environment pinning everyone else down.
Don’t try to perfectly time the market
With mortgage rates still elevated, a significant share of would-be buyers are parked on the sidelines waiting for a meaningful drop. Harris thinks that’s a miscalculation.
“If rates do come down meaningfully, competition will likely increase immediately,” he said. “You may end up paying more for the home itself even if the rate improves slightly.”
His read on timing: Don’t try to optimize it. If the property is right and the long-term affordability is there, waiting for a fractionally better rate is a trade that buyers tend to lose.
“Historically, the best opportunities often come during periods of uncertainty, not when everyone feels comfortable again,” Harris said.
The advice tracks with the most dramatic example in recent memory: When rates collapsed to historic lows in 2020 and 2021, pent-up demand flooded back almost immediately, home prices surged and buyers who had been waiting found themselves in bidding wars they hadn’t anticipated.
The appeal of new construction
Homebuilder confidence came in stronger than expected alongside the NAR data, a result Harris says he wasn’t surprised by.
Builders have a structural advantage right now. They can offer rate buy-downs, financing incentives and a genuinely turnkey product in a market where resale sellers are largely unable to compete on those terms.
“Builders understand there’s still a major housing shortage in many parts of the country, and they also know there’s a large group of buyers waiting for the right moment to re-enter the market,” Harris said.
New construction’s appeal is partly a function of the weakness of resale. When existing homeowners won’t list because they’re locked into low mortgage rates, builders are often the only sellers with new products and room to negotiate.
What real estate agents are working with
For real estate agents, the NAR data confirm what most have already felt in their pipelines: This spring isn’t delivering the volume boost the calendar usually promises.
The bifurcation Harris describes creates real strategic complexity. An agent working with entry-level buyers faces a client base that’s deeply rate-sensitive, squeezed by insurance costs and competing for a thin slice of affordable inventory. An agent working the luxury segment is dealing with cash buyers whose calculus is driven by portfolio management and lifestyle, not monthly payments.
“Luxury buyers are far less rate-sensitive,” Harris said. “Many are paying cash or have significant liquidity, so their decisions are driven more by lifestyle, wealth preservation and long-term value.”
The agents threading both worlds are the ones pricing accurately, identifying genuinely turnkey properties, and counseling buyers out of the wait-for-the-perfect-rate posture that’s stalling deals across much of the country.
“Quality properties that are priced correctly are still trading quickly,” Harris said.
That’s as true now as it was in 2021. The difference is that the definition of “correctly” has tightened considerably.
]]>It’s been only a few months since the Compass-Anywhere merger closed, but the new Compass International Holdings is throwing its weight around with Zillow and MLSs, and other big brokerages have raced to meet this moment of consolidation.
What do agents and leaders across brokerage types think about the shifting landscape?
To help the industry understand where things are headed next, Inman once again invites you to take real estate’s most ambitious monthly survey: the Inman Intel Index.
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Intel is asking a range of questions intended to help the industry track revenue prospects for the summer, commission trends and other pressing matters.
Click through to add your insights to the industry’s knowledge base, and check back for analysis of the results in the weeks to come.
Thank you,
Team Inman
]]>“AI” and “authenticity” are the industry’s loudest buzzwords, but how do you leverage AI and automation while staying human and keeping it real? Billion-dollar producer and Million Dollar Listing alum James Harris breaks down how he stays present, booked, and busy, while using AI to scale communication, streamline tasks, and stay consistently available, protecting the relationships and personal touch that drive elite-level sales.
Elevate your skills and set yourself up for success in 2026. Watch the session above, plus get fresh content added weekly, with Inman Access.
Wells Fargo was sued in 2022 for exclusionary hiring and lending practices. The bank still denies wrongdoing, despite the settlement.
Wells Fargo has settled a four-year discrimination lawsuit, in which the bank’s board was accused of allowing exclusionary hiring and lending practices.
Bank shareholders, employees and job applicants filed the suit in September 2022, alleging that the company failed to follow through on its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures and that its lending algorithm resulted in disproportionate mortgage denials for minority borrowers. The plaintiffs alleged the board was aware of the issues, but declined to fix them.
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A Bloomberg investigation backed the plaintiff’s claims, with 2020 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data revealing that Wells Fargo denied Black homeowners refinance applications at a higher rate than it accepted them. The bank approved 47 percent of Black homeowners’ refinance requests — a rate that was 33 percent lower than the average rate for all other major lenders.
“Nationwide, only 47 percent of Black homeowners who completed a refinance application with Wells Fargo in 2020 were approved, compared with 72 percent of White homeowners,” the report read. “While Black applicants had lower approval rates than White ones at all major lenders, the data show, Wells Fargo had the biggest disparity and was alone in rejecting more Black homeowners than it accepted.”
Wells Fargo still denies wrongdoing, but has created a three-year $100 million mortgage assistance program for borrowers in disenfranchised communities. The bank will also pay $10 million to shareholders.
“Defendants are entering into this Stipulation for settlement purposes only and solely to avoid the cost, disruption, and uncertainty of further litigation,” court documents read. “Defendants agree that the Litigation was filed in good faith and with an adequate basis in fact, was not frivolous, and is being settled voluntarily.”
“We are pleased to have reached a settlement,” Wells Fargo added in a statement to Realtor.com, which reported the news on Thursday.
Wells Fargo isn’t the only lender to face discrimination claims; Navy Federal, Fannie Mae, Rocket Mortgage and Solidifi have also faced claims that they targeted borrowers and employees of color during the hiring and lending processes.
Those lawsuits are still working their way through the courts.
Every Friday, we round up the most popular, most read, most critical stories of the week to give you a quick catchup on the big headlines you might have missed in the hustle and bustle of the workweek. Here’s this week’s Top 5 as chosen by our readers.
P.S. Don’t miss The Download, our weekly column that breaks down one of the week’s top stories and equips you with what you’ll need to meet next Monday head-on.
It’s not enough to simply use artificial intelligence tools, Jimmy Burgess writes. You need to use them with intention. These prompts provide the starting point.
Pre-marketed listings from agents at Redfin and Compass International Holdings will appear as “Redfin Early Access” listings.
As a dispute over pre-marketed listings boils over in Chicago, Zillow and MRED have accused each other of violating agreements.
A $773 million bulk sale of mortgage servicing rights is at the center of a new lawsuit pitting two of the mortgage industry’s biggest rivals against each other.
Daniel Houston and Ted Irvine with Canva
Drill down into your real estate market and compare it to hundreds of others with Inman Market View’s interactive maps and charts.
Windermere’s Principal Economist Jeff Tucker looks at how political and financial upheaval are shaping the real estate market.
The first number to know this month: $108. That is the current price of a barrel of oil as of May 19, and it is still dramatically elevated from its price range below $60 before the U.S. launched a war on Iran this year.
In fact, despite several tantalizing hints of the end of the hostilities tying up the Strait of Hormuz, prices have been over $85 a barrel pretty consistently for over two months now. As long as the flow of oil is constricted, those price pressures will stay elevated.
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The second number to know this month: 3.8 percent. That is the year-over-year change in the Consumer Price Index, representing a sharp acceleration of inflation from the 2.4 percent pace as recently as February. It reflects the higher costs of energy rippling through supply chains, and now inevitably raising prices for consumer products and services.
Moreover, the producer price index also just jumped sharply to a 6 percent year-over-year gain, well above the consensus forecast, which is a good indicator of even more pain coming for consumers.
10-year Treasury bonds and more than 1M active listings
Higher inflation also tends to feed into the interest rates on bonds, and this spring has been no exception: now the 10-year Treasury bond is yielding around 4.6 percent after dipping just under 4 percent on the eve of the Iran war.
And we know higher Treasury yields usually mean: higher mortgage rates. After some volatility and false starts downward last month, mortgage rates have surged up even further in mid-May, approaching 6.75 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. That will help to dampen homebuyer demand in the spring buying season, which is in full swing.
Speaking of the housing market, we saw just over 1 million active listings at the end of April — about 60,000 more than this time in 2020, and 40,000 more than this time last year.
That year-over-year growth rate of just under 5 percent helps continue a trend of decelerating inventory growth, as the market looks more and more balanced this year — with neither a glut of home listings building up nor a frenzied shortage condition, at least on average across the country.
Pending home sales were also basically flat from this time last year, but if mortgage rates stay above 6.5 percent, I expect the months of May and June will look weaker than the same time last year. Once again, that means the forecast depends on whether durable peace can take hold and whether oil begins to flow again in the Middle East.
Ryan Young leads one of Ohio’s top-ranked real estate teams, the Young Team, which his parents, Terry and Jeffrey, founded in 2003. Ryan also admits that he often can’t get his agents to make phone calls.
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Ryan Young
That’s not a Young Team problem, though. It’s a real estate problem. Teams spend thousands on marketing platforms that generate high-intent leads, then watch those leads transact with competitors because no one followed up.
Young knows this as both the CEO and co-founder of Fello, a proptech platform used by about 3,000 real estate teams nationally, and as a customer of his own product.
“Fello is amazing. It creates a significant amount of engagement in my database,” Young said, paraphrasing the feedback he’d heard for years. “Then you’re telling me that these people are actually listing their homes with our competition?”
Fello’s answer to this problem is Felix, an AI agent the company is positioning not as yet another voice bot, but as what Young calls an “agentic operating system” for real estate teams.
Felix calls, texts and emails leads autonomously, adapts its outreach strategy in real time as new data comes in, and hands off qualified prospects to human agents, sometimes while still keeping the prospect on the line.
The product is currently in beta with about 20 teams, and Fello says it plans to launch publicly within the next 30 days.
‘Do you want us to call them for you?’
Fello launched in 2021 as a direct-to-consumer iBuying concept, initially called FlashHouse. Around the same time, interest rates began to climb, and Young said they realized iBuying wasn’t scalable for them.
“In October 2022, we pivoted quickly to a SaaS, subscription-based model, selling our platform to agents all over the country,” Young said. “Agents would sync their database into our platform, and we’d market seller messaging on their behalf: get a home value, get a cash offer.”
The model grew quickly. Young said they currently have about 3,000 real estate teams on their platform and about 40,000 users.
“And what was interesting over the past three years, we’ve done a masterful job at creating all of this engagement through email marketing in these people’s databases that they really were just very dormant and very quiet and kind of sleepy,” Young said. “And we woke them up, right? Much of database engagement is predominantly on the seller side.”
Fello had a problem, though. Many of their customers loved the platform and said it was creating engagement. But then the prospects who were engaging were listing their homes with their competition. Fello’s customers couldn’t get their agents to make the phone calls and consistently reach out to these prospects.
“We heard this feedback so consistently over the past couple of years that we joked, ‘Do you just want us to call them for you?’” Young said. “And honestly, we finally realized, maybe there is a way we can do exactly that.”
Felix is the answer to that joke taken seriously. The AI agent ingests Fello’s underlying contact data — property ownership history, equity positions, mortgage type, AVM estimates, MLS activity — and builds an automated outreach strategy for each contact. When a contact’s status changes, the strategy updates automatically.
The demo Young gave Inman illustrated the specificity.
In one case, Felix detected that a contact had recently purchased a new property while still owning a home he’d held since 2003. Felix’s outbound text referenced both properties by address, and the prospect engaged. Within hours, Felix had called him and transferred the conversation to Young’s team as a live listing appointment.
Adjusting strategy in real-time
What separates Felix from the wave of AI calling tools entering the market, according to Fello co-founder and Chief Product Officer Tom Schrader, isn’t the voice but the connective tissue beneath it.
“It’s not the fact of even just making the call, because nobody’s going to make the calls anyway,” Schrader said. “It’s to get a result that requires zero effort.”
The setup process involves Felix scraping the real estate agent’s website to understand their markets, then beginning outreach without the agent configuring scripts, cadences or triggers. Schrader said Felix will stay with a contact for months or years, adjusting its strategy as intent signals change.
One example Young showed: a prospect who mentioned using a 401(k) for a down payment during a call with Felix. Felix subsequently generated and sent a personalized email outlining 401(k) withdrawal strategies for homebuyers, not from a template, Young said, but composed in the context of that specific conversation.
“When people see this, they’re like, how did you guys have a template built for 401(k)s?” Young said. “I’m like, there are no templates.” In other words, Felix had customized the email in real-time exactly for that scenario.
The all-important handoff to a human agent
The handoff from Felix to a human real estate agent is the part of the product Fello is most focused on getting right.
Most AI calling tools, when they qualify a lead, put the prospect on hold and try to transfer to a human agent. It’s a process, Young says, that produces roughly a 70 percent drop-off rate before the agent picks up.
Felix instead keeps the prospect in a live conversation while simultaneously briefing the agent on a separate line, then bridges both parties when the human real estate agent confirms they’re ready.
Young’s team received 30 handoffs on a single Monday during the beta, he said. The platform’s notification dashboard showed handoffs arriving minutes apart in real time during the demo.
“You’re focusing on the bottom of the funnel, not the top of the funnel,” Schrader said. “And that’s all you have to focus on.”
On compliance, Fello uses its existing email platform to capture TCPA-compliant consent before Felix initiates calls or texts. The company built its own consent-capture tooling rather than using a third-party service, Schrader said.
Felix is also scrubbed against the Do Not Call registry, and the platform has state-specific settings for two-way consent requirements and pre-recorded call disclosures.
‘Have you ever seen the movie Her?’
Getting the voice to sound human required more than swapping in a premium text-to-speech engine. Schrader said Fello layers proprietary prompting and what he called “disfluency engineering” — deliberate pauses, hesitations and inflection cues — onto third-party voice engines, including ElevenLabs.
“We focus on how we get better inflection and better emotion, better pausing. The natural disfluencies that we need to introduce into the cadence of speech to make it feel human,” Schrader said. “That is not something that just happens without being intentional about it.”
Schrader joked that, as founders, he and Young were naturally very “obsessed” with getting it exactly right. “We went super granular on all the little things that make a human sound human,” Schrader said.
In the demo calls Young played, two separate prospects told Felix mid-conversation that they thought they were talking to a real person. Both continued talking after being told they were, in fact, talking to an AI agent.
On one of the calls, the prospect stopped after a minute or so and said, “It seems — it certainly seems like I’m talking to a real person, but just something about this makes me think it might be an AI call. Am I talking to a real person right now?”
Felix replied, “Oh, you caught me. Yeah, I’m actually a digital assistant with the Young Team, so you’re talking to an AI, but a really friendly one. I’m here to help get the conversation started, gather some info, and then connect you with one of our human experts who can dive into the details with you. Does that work, or would you prefer I have a real person call you back directly?”
The prospect, who sounded less annoyed and more impressed, said, “This is one of the most sophisticated AIs I’ve ever talked to. I thought for a while I was talking to a real person.”
In another call played for Inman during the demo, the prospect said, “Can I just tell you something? If you had told me you were an actual person, I would have believed you.”
The Felix AI agent confidently replied, “Honestly, I’ll take that as a huge compliment. I know I’m digital, but I really do try to keep things feeling natural and actually helpful. [That] made my day.”
The prospect replied, “Even though you’re not real.”
Felix, quick with a response, shot back, “Hey, I’m real enough to have this conversation with you. But seriously — do you want me to have someone reach out about that appraisal question, or are you feeling pretty good about where things stand?”
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Not everyone, of course, wants to talk to a bot. But Young’s answer to that objection is the call length.
“These aren’t one or two-minute calls. Some prospects are talking to AI for 15 to 20 minutes. And the reason is context,” Young said. “We built the platform on rich data: home equity, mortgage types, properties owned. So when the AI reaches out, it’s not a cold call. It has enough information to have a genuinely meaningful conversation.”
AI voice adoption is accelerating fast. Conversations with AI can still unsettle some people due to the “uncanny valley” effect of hearing something that sounds almost human but not quite. But familiarity is winning out. Millions of consumers have grown up talking to Siri and Alexa, and are now increasingly turning to the voice modes built into ChatGPT, Claude and other AI platforms.
“Have you ever seen the movie Her? This is where I think our world is heading,” Young said. “I think people actually are starting to prefer talking to AI.”
‘I can’t imagine going back to the old way’
Young said Felix has set approximately 60 listing appointments for his team during the 90-day beta period. The Young Team has been using the Felix product and acting as a live laboratory to test and improve it.
The comparison Young keeps returning to isn’t other AI calling products. It’s the inside sales associate model that many top teams have built their operations around.
“I can’t train an ISA or an agent in 90 days,” Young said. “I’ve had ISAs with me for a year, and they still don’t know the homes that we’ve sold in the past. Felix knows all that stuff, and he knows it instantaneously. I don’t have to fire Felix and then go rehire a new ISA.”
But then Young continued, “Here’s the scary thing. It’s great for Fello. It’s scary for our industry. I can’t imagine going back to the old way.”
Young said that if he lost Felix, he would suddenly have to hold his agents and ISAs accountable for all the calls and texts Felix had made.
“The biggest challenge that our industry has is that we’re not really strong operators. We’re salespeople. And we grow big companies,” Young said. “And we struggle to create a consistent process. And there’s a lack of accountability.”
For most real estate professionals, Young said, they “want to be out and about selling, and we struggle for discipline.”
“And so we’ve had this vision to build this agentic operating system of like, how do you lean into what’s happening in the world, this agentic future that’s happening, and help that be your operations and consistency so that you can ultimately be out selling homes, doing the things that you love to do,” Young said.
Zillow and Compass have launched dueling marketing media campaigns over the disappearance of Chicagoland listings from Zillow.
As the battle between Zillow, Compass and MRED plays out in court, both sides have launched an all-out marketing blitz aimed at convincing agents, brokers and consumers who is to blame for the disappearance of Chicagoland listings from Zillow.
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The fight since MRED pulled the plug on Zillow’s listing feed early Wednesday morning has spilled over into paid Instagram ads, LinkedIn comment threads and brokerage marketing channels. And now, Compass says it’s preparing to take its message to physical billboards in Chicago.
In a post unveiling the effort, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin revealed a handful of billboard renderings with the message “Zillow doesn’t have all the listings” and asked agents where the company should place them. A Compass spokesperson confirmed to Inman that the company is preparing to run billboards in Chicago, though they did not provide specifics on placement.
Robert Reffkin’s Instagram post announcing Compass’ Chicago billboard campaign.
In the comments, Compass allies suggested locations ranging from Chicago expressways and major sports arenas to the National Association of Realtors’ front door on Michigan Avenue.
Meanwhile, Zillow has been running paid ads on Instagram, telling agents that “MRED cut our access to your listings” while promoting its “BeOnZillow” direct-feed program for brokers who want to send listings directly to Zillow. Compass has launched its own paid-ad blitz arguing that “Zillow can’t show you what it doesn’t have,” while promoting its website.
Compass-controlled brands @properties | Christie’s International Real Estate, Coldwell Banker Realty and Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty have joined the messaging push, with each posting variations of the message that consumers may not find all available Chicago-area homes on Zillow.
The dispute has also made its way onto LinkedIn, where Zillow and Compass executives and corporate communications staff have been responding directly to posts and pushing the issue to an audience outside of the real estate industry.
Errol Samuelson, Zillow’s chief industry development officer, has responded directly to posts, arguing that Zillow had “not suppressed a single listing in Chicagoland,” and adding that the whole debacle was over Zillow’s decision not to show nine Compass listings in Florida, Georgia and California.
Reffkin, meanwhile, has argued that Zillow’s feed was pulled because the portal filtered listings by agent or brokerage name, pointing to NAR’s non-filtering policy, while also sharing screenshots of national mainstream media coverage and arguing that “the consumer everywhere will know they can’t find all the home listings on Zillow anymore.”
Redfin has also confirmed to Inman that it plans to launch a targeted marketing blitz in Chicago as well, highlighting that consumers can search and find all available listings on its platform. Rocket-owned Redfin began a listing partnership with Compass earlier this year.
An example of a targeted ad that Redfin plans to run in Chicago.
“This fully integrated marketing campaign invites buyers to compare Redfin against any other site,” Rocket CMO Jonathan Mildenhall said over email. “With complete MLS inventory, plus the exclusive launch of ‘Redfin Early Access’ listings that buyers cannot find on any other major site, we are confident that Redfin will become the preferred site for homebuyers in Chicago.”
Zillow sought emergency relief in court Friday morning, asking a judge to intervene after MRED shut off the portal’s access to Chicagoland listings. The court fight could still change the facts on the ground quickly, particularly if Zillow wins emergency relief requiring MRED to restore its feed.
But regardless of the outcome in court, the advertising blitz has heightened the stakes and pushed what might otherwise have been an industry dispute into the court of public opinion and consumer trust.
Update: After publishing this story, a Zillow spokesperson confirmed to Inman that a federal judge ordered MRED to restore Zillow’s access to listings that originate in the MLS.
Reporter Taylor Anderson contributed to this report.