Stop calling marketing materials “data,” Darryl Davis writes. Zillow’s study is a position. Compass’s survey responses are a position. Your CMA, with your local comps, on this home, is data.
Last month, Zillow gave the industry a number. The portal released a study claiming sellers who listed privately lost a combined $1.36 billion over three years, and that off-MLS listings sold for 1.3 percent less than listings marketed on the open market.
The study landed two days after Zillow’s federal antitrust lawsuit against Compass and MRED, and one day before Compass CEO Robert Reffkin took to LinkedIn with a counterattack of his own.
This is the moment the fight stopped being about lawyers and started being about your next listing conversation.
Context
On May 12, Zillow filed a Sherman Act case in Northern Illinois alleging that MRED, the Chicago-area MLS, and Compass had coordinated to use MRED’s rule-making power to force Zillow to display Compass private listings nationwide, or lose access to its Chicago feed. A Compass spokesperson said Zillow was “punishing agents” for following their clients’ wishes, and that “Compass believes homeowners should have the right to decide how to market their homes.”
Two days after the filing, Zillow followed with a study. One day later, a survey. The study put a dollar amount on the seller’s choice to go private: $1.36 billion lost over three years, and another $1.49 billion lost when one brokerage represented both sides of the deal.
The survey put a percentage on the seller’s preference: 61 percent said broad online exposure produces better results than a private network, and 85 percent said they want an agent who can pre-market their home to the broadest online audience.
Reffkin pushed back. On LinkedIn, he revived an internal Zillow strategy document and said it highlights Zillow’s plan “to sue a brokerage in order to keep agents and homesellers from marketing outside of Zillow.”
So now we have two narratives, two dollar figures, two surveys and two CEOs talking past each other. And one agent. You.
Analysis
Let’s be fair to both sides.
Zillow’s methodology has weaknesses worth naming. The study used the Zestimate as its benchmark for what a home “should” have sold for. The Zestimate has been criticized for years as directionally useful but not surgically accurate. Comparing a Zestimate to a sale price and calling the gap a “loss” is a useful framing, not a settled fact.
Let’s be fair in the other direction. Real estate has been telling sellers for a century that more exposure produces better outcomes. Auction theory backs that up. Common sense backs it up.
If you put a home in front of every qualified buyer in your market, the price moves up. If you put it in front of a smaller group, you accept less competition. The directional truth in Zillow’s $1.4 billion number is uncomfortable for the private listing argument because, on average, the math has to bend that way.
Both things can be true. The study is overstated, and the underlying logic is sound. That is the honest read.
When two large companies put a dollar figure on your client’s decision, the only person in the room who can do the math honestly for that specific home is you. Don’t outsource that conversation to a corporate study or a corporate spokesperson.
Compass’s “seller choice” framing isn’t wrong. Sellers do have the right to decide. Some have genuine reasons to go private. A homeowner in a contentious divorce. A trust sale. A property with a sensitive tenant. A listing that has been through one bad round and needs a discreet reposition. These are real situations. They are also a small minority.
The honest question isn’t whether a seller has the right to choose. They do. The honest question is whether the agent explained what the choice will likely cost. On Zillow’s data, the average cost is roughly 1.3 percent. On a $750,000 home, that is about $9,750. On a $1.5 million home, $19,500. Those numbers belong in your seller’s hands before they sign anything.
A seller’s right to choose is only real if the agent explains what the choice costs in their specific numbers, not in industry averages. Coach, don’t close. Serve, don’t sell.
Roughly 55 percent of Compass listings flow through private exclusive or coming-soon pathways, according to its own shareholders’ report last year. That means more than half of all their sellers are choosing a private listing, knowing they are risking losing money on their house.
Really? Do you believe that? The internal data inside one of the loudest brokerages tells a quieter story than its press releases.
What agents should do
Run the math on your last 10 sold listings. Ask yourself two questions.
- Was the home priced and marketed for maximum exposure?
- Would 1.3 percent more on average have moved the seller’s net?
If the answer is yes, you already know what the right conversation looks like.
Build a short, plain-language one-pager that walks a seller through three options: broad exposure on Day One, delayed marketing under the National Association of Realtors carveout and private exclusive. Show what each pathway looks like in their actual price range. Quote their home, not the industry.
Document your recommendation in writing. Whatever the seller chooses, put the trade-off in the listing agreement and the file. The lawyers will spend the next two years arguing about who said what. Your file should be boring.
Stop calling either side’s marketing materials “data.” Zillow’s study is a position. Compass’s survey responses are a position. Your CMA, with your local comps, on this home, is data.
Closing
This week, the fight is corporate. The lawsuit, the studies, the LinkedIn posts. Next week, the fight is on your listing appointment.
A seller is going to ask what all of this means for their home. The answer isn’t a side. The answer is a math conversation, an honest one, that ends with a seller who understands exactly what choice they are making and what it costs.
That’s the work. That has always been the work.
Canopy MLS CEO Anne Marie DeCatsye does not see her organization’s latest expansion as an effort to create a national MLS — but she does see it as a sign that the traditional geography of the MLS business is under pressure.
In a conversation with Inman, DeCatsye said brokerages have become national and mega-regional businesses, while many MLSs remain tied to geographic boundaries that consumers and brokers increasingly do not recognize.
“Consumers don’t see borders with respect to data, so it’s sort of outdated for MLSs to box themselves into a territory,” DeCatsye said.
Her comments came after the Charlotte-based Canopy MLS announced this week that licensed real estate professionals and brokerages from across the country would be able to join its platform. The MLS also said brokerages would be allowed to submit listings through approved third-party or proprietary systems, a move Canopy said would allow firms to better leverage their existing technology investments while maintaining standards for accuracy, compliance and data integrity.
In its announcement, Canopy stressed that the moves were “not intended to create a national MLS or favor any particular brokerage, technology provider, or business model.” Rather, the MLS framed the changes as part of a broader effort to give brokers more flexibility while preserving the MLS as a cooperative marketplace.
For DeCatsye, the larger issue is not whether Canopy or other MLSs are “going national,” but whether MLSs can remain useful to brokers whose businesses no longer fit neatly inside local MLS boundaries.
“Brokers have gone national or mega-regional,” DeCatsye said. “The brokerage industry has completely changed and MLSs are just now realizing, well, we probably need to accommodate that in a way we haven’t been.”
‘The brokers are fed up’
Canopy’s announcement comes amid a flurry of MLS activity and industry debate over private listings, delayed marketing, broker technology and MLS consolidation.
In recent weeks, MRED, Realtracs and Bright MLS have all announced moves that expand access, listing networks or broker-facing services beyond traditional market boundaries. Those moves have drawn attention in part because they involve Compass, which has spent much of the past year pushing MLSs to give sellers and brokers more control over how listings are marketed before reaching the broader public marketplace.
Canopy’s announcement did not specifically mention Compass, but it used familiar framing — broker choice, seller choice, flexibility and proprietary systems — that overlaps with the industry’s broader fight over private listings and MLS rules. DeCatsye said Canopy’s move should be understood less as a reaction to Compass and more as a response to long-running broker frustrations with MLS fragmentation.
Large brokerages increasingly operate across markets, while even regional firms may need to belong to multiple MLSs with different listing-input systems, data feeds, contracts and rules. Canopy, DeCatsye noted, is an owner of MLS Grid, which was created in part to address broker pain points around fragmented data feeds and inconsistent contracts.
But she said those efforts have not solved every problem.
“I’ve got to believe the brokers are frustrated, because it didn’t solve all their pain points,” DeCatsye said.
She added that she has a difficult time understanding why some MLSs would resist responding to broker needs.
“I really have a hard time getting my head around MLSs bucking the brokers on what they need, and I’m getting the sense that they are, and the brokers are fed up,” DeCatsye said.
That frustration, she added, is partly why Canopy decided to make clear that brokers outside its traditional service area could join the platform if they find value in doing so.
Canopy MLS serves more than 22,000 subscribers across parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, but DeCatsye said broker and consumer behavior no longer stops neatly at MLS borders. She pointed to North Carolina’s mountain markets, where she said five MLSs serve a region where consumers are unlikely to understand or care about the boundaries between different territories.
“I don’t think consumers really see borders in the North Carolina mountains,” DeCatsye said. “I don’t think we’re doing the brokers any justice, even local brokers, who aren’t national, by having to have them be part of that many MLSs.”
A narrower view of seller choice
Still, DeCatsye pushed back on the idea that Canopy is embracing a broad shift away from public listing exposure.
Canopy’s announcement included support for “meaningful seller choice” and recognized that some sellers may have valid reasons to limit the marketing of their homes, including privacy, security or unique personal circumstances. But the MLS also said sellers should understand that broad marketplace exposure “typically provides the greatest opportunity” to attract qualified buyers, maximize competition and achieve the best possible outcome.
That is a meaningful distinction at a moment when Compass and other private-listing advocates have framed seller choice as a challenge to traditional MLS distribution rules. DeCatsye said the industry debate has placed too much attention on office exclusives, pocket listings and limited-exposure options.
“I agree that the emphasis is in the wrong place,” DeCatsye said, adding that the focus on limited and office-exclusive listings has been “blown out of proportion” by the trade media. Canopy, she said, believes some sellers may have valid reasons to limit exposure. But she said those cases should not become the norm.
“There’s going to be sellers with valid reasons to have limited exposure of their listings,” DeCatsye said. “But we strongly believe that the broader marketplace exposure is going to be the best opportunity to get qualified buyers and sell at the highest price and get the most eyeballs on it.”
The risk, she said, is that consumers become confused about whether limited exposure is actually in their best interest.
“It would be valid for some sellers,” DeCatsye said. “It shouldn’t be a reason for all sellers.”
‘Tweaking it,’ not changing the architecture
Canopy’s latest announcement builds on listing-option changes the MLS began rolling out last year.
The MLS previously declined to adopt the National Association of Realtors’ delayed marketing exempt listings category and instead moved forward with its own listing options, including Limited Exposure and Firm Exclusive listing categories. Those options allow some listings to be withheld from public feeds or limited to agents within the same firm.
Canopy has also modified its Coming Soon-No Show status to suppress price history in certain circumstances. The changes place Canopy inside a broader industry debate over whether limited-exposure listings, suppressed price history and paused days-on-market calculations give sellers valuable flexibility or impact market transparency and advantage firms with larger internal networks.
DeCatsye rejected the idea that Canopy — and others instituting similar measures — are changing the entire architecture of the MLS system around a relatively small share of sellers who may prioritize privacy or want limited exposure. Instead, she said, Canopy is making narrower adjustments for specific situations while preserving broad exposure as the norm.
“I would call it tweaking it,” DeCatsye said. “Slightly modifying it.”
Office exclusives and pocket listings, she noted, have existed for years and Canopy’s approach, she argued, is to create controlled options inside the MLS rather than ignore those practices or push them outside the system entirely.
“We’re just trying to not necessarily preserve the status quo, but make some accommodations where some business models have changed,” DeCatsye said.
Canopy’s goal, she added, is to give sellers options while balancing the needs of buyer agents and preserving access to listing information “to the greatest extent possible.”
Compass did not direct the move, CEO says
Canopy’s announcement came after MRED, Realtracs and Bright MLS each announced new initiatives involving Compass, raising the question of whether Canopy’s move was also shaped by the brokerage giant’s push for more flexibility around listings and MLS participation.
DeCatsye said Compass’ recent moves with other MLSs were part of the broader industry conversation Canopy was watching. But she said Compass did not direct Canopy’s decision.
She acknowledged receiving outreach from Compass CEO Robert Reffkin last year, as many other MLS leaders did, and said she regularly speaks with large broker-owners, including Compass. But she said Canopy had already been examining its own listing policies and would make decisions based on its own market and subscribers.
“I can tell you, last summer I got the same email everybody else got from Robert Reffkin, and my response was, we’re already looking into this, and we’ll do what’s best for Canopy,” DeCatsye said. “I’m not going to be directed by one firm. And Canopy’s not going to be directed by one firm.”
That distinction was important to Canopy’s board, she said, because the board includes representatives from large firms, small firms, outlying counties, franchises and national firms.
“It was very important to our board of directors that we make the statement that we’re not aligning with one broker,” DeCatsye said.
Consolidation pressure will remain
The same forces pushing Canopy to open itself beyond its traditional borders could also accelerate consolidation among MLSs, DeCatsye said.
She stopped short of calling for one national MLS and said Canopy is not trying to become one. But she said the current map of hundreds of MLSs does not always match how brokers, brokerages or consumers experience the market.
“A natural progression in the consolidation moment we’re seeing with the brokerages should be a natural progression of consolidation of the MLSs,” DeCatsye said.
DeCatsye has previously said the industry should not have one national MLS. She reiterated that view, but said there should be fewer MLSs than exist today. Still, she said MLS consolidation is not happening quickly enough.
The future she described is not necessarily one national MLS, but a more competitive MLS landscape.
“I’m hopeful that this sends a signal that MLSs need to be, in a sense, competing on at least mega-regional, if not on a national level, with each other,” DeCatsye said.
Defending the MLS
But DeCatsye’s call for MLSs to adapt was also a defense of the MLS itself. Her concern is not that MLSs should become less central to the industry, but that they need to become more responsive to brokers before brokers look for other ways to solve their own problems.
That means giving brokers more flexibility around technology, listing input and seller options, she said, while still preserving the cooperative marketplace that gives buyers and sellers access to reliable listing information.
At times, DeCatsye said, agents do not fully understand that role.
“There’s a certain responsibility they have to step back and understand the bigger picture of why the MLS was created, why it exists, who it protects from a consumer protection standpoint,” DeCatsye said.
The challenge now, DeCatsye suggested, is figuring out how that cooperative model should evolve at a time when brokerages, technology platforms and consumer behavior have all moved beyond traditional local boundaries.
She also said the industry is at a “crossroads” over who should lead MLS policy — NAR or the Council of MLSs — and said policy should not be driven primarily by fear of litigation.
“NAR is walking a tightrope too,” DeCatsye said, adding that she has some sympathy for the organization’s position because it is risk-averse in a litigious environment. “My standpoint is that policy should not be made out of fear of being sued or not sued.”
Canopy, she said, is willing to make policy decisions it believes are right for brokers and consumers, even if that means accepting legal risk.
“If we are doing the right thing and we can justify what we’re doing, it’s best for all of our firms,” DeCatsye said. “If we get sued, we deal with it then.”
]]>A backyard garden can return nothing at resale, or it can be the detail that closes the deal.
As food prices are projected to rise 2 to 2.5 percent in 2026, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a growing number of homeowners are reaching for a trowel in response.
Longevity researchers say the instinct is sound; gardening is among the few daily habits shared by people who live past 100 in every Blue Zone ever studied.
But for real estate agents, the question of whether a garden helps or hurts a sale rarely has a clean answer. The data suggests it depends on what kind of garden, how it’s maintained and how an agent frames it to potential buyers.
What outdoor investment actually returns
The clearest numbers agents have come from the 2023 Remodeling Impact Report: Outdoor Features, produced jointly by the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Landscape Professionals.
Standard lawn care — the least expensive of 11 outdoor projects surveyed — returned 217 percent of its cost at resale, as estimated by Realtors. Landscape maintenance returned 104 percent. An overall landscape upgrade returned 100 percent.
Ninety-two percent of Realtors in the report said they recommend improving curb appeal before listing, with landscape maintenance and standard lawn care among the top-recommended projects by a wide margin.
Buyer demand for that outdoor investment is real and growing. In a survey conducted for Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, 76 percent of affiliated agents said outdoor living extensions — patios, porches and balconies — are the most requested feature among buyers.
Thirty-eight percent of buyers in the same survey ranked outdoor space as a top priority, and 71 percent said outdoor spaces that extend living areas are among the features most likely to make them fall in love with a home.
The gap between what buyers want and what pays back at the closing table frames the core conversation agents should be having with seller clients: The outdoor investments that feel the most rewarding are frequently not the ones that perform best at resale.
When a garden is an asset — and when it isn’t
A well-maintained raised bed or herb garden reads as a lifestyle amenity. An overgrown vegetable plot or a labor-intensive perennial border reads as a liability and likely a list of weekend commitments the buyer didn’t ask for. The NAR/NALP report found that elaborate gardens requiring significant maintenance can give buyers pause, regardless of how much care the seller has invested in them.
Shelton Wilder
The BHGRE survey reinforces that modern, low-maintenance landscaping, like neatly mulched beds, native greenery and drip irrigation, is ranked just behind styled outdoor rooms in what buyers respond to at the curb. The signal buyers want is that a home looks beautiful without demanding constant upkeep.
“Home gardens can absolutely help attract a certain buyer pool, especially in markets like Los Angeles, where indoor-outdoor living is such a big part of the lifestyle,” Shelton Wilder, CEO of The Shelton Wilder Group at Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California, told Inman.
“Buyers love the idea of fresh herbs, citrus trees, or a beautiful raised garden bed, but I always tell sellers not to overspend on it.”
Wilder said the front of the home remains the most reliable place to put money before a sale.
“First impressions matter, and clean landscaping, greenery and a welcoming entry can make a huge difference in how buyers feel when they first arrive at a property.”
For buyers, existing garden infrastructure like raised beds, compost systems and established fruit trees can represent real value. Properties with those features already in place may save buyers thousands in setup costs, a consideration worth raising with clients whose lifestyle aligns with the space.
Lifestyle demand at the luxury end
At higher price points, the garden conversation has moved well beyond curb appeal.
Jack Richardson
“Outdoor space has evolved from being a ‘nice to have’ into a strong value driver, particularly in the luxury end of the market,” said Jack Richardson, principal of The Richardson Team at SERHANT. “Buyers today are evaluating the entire lifestyle experience of a property, not just the interior square footage or stone choices.”
Richardson points to a quality of outdoor investment that sets it apart from most interior renovations. “Thoughtful landscaping is one of the few investments you can make into a home that actually scales in value over time,” he said. “Unlike many renovations that depreciate the moment they’re completed, mature trees, layered plantings, privacy hedging, and well-designed outdoor living spaces tend to become more valuable and more difficult — expensive — to replicate as the property ages.”
On the listing side, Richardson said garden spaces are reaching buyers who would not have ranked them as a priority before. “The best exterior spaces create a sense of permanence, privacy and serenity that’s increasingly hard to find.”
The Blue Zones connection
The appetite for that serenity may be grounded in something older than real estate trends.
Researchers studying Blue Zones — the five regions where people live past 100 at the highest rates in the world — have identified gardening as a consistent feature of daily life in each one.
The regions, identified by journalist Dan Buettner in partnership with National Geographic and the National Institute on Aging, span Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.
What those communities share is not structured exercise but movement built into the fabric of everyday life, with walking, manual tasks and gardening among them. Centenarians in these regions tend gardens into their 80s, 90s and beyond.
Research cited by the Blue Zones Institute finds that home gardening is associated with levels of happiness comparable to walking or biking, and that participants consistently ranked gardening among the most meaningful activities in their daily lives.
The mental health and movement case
That finding is supported by a growing body of peer-reviewed research reaching well beyond Blue Zones populations.
A University of Florida study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that twice-weekly gardening sessions lowered stress, anxiety and depression in healthy women who had never gardened before. A 2024 umbrella review and meta-analysis published in Systematic Reviews, drawing on decades of research across populations, found that gardening was associated with improvements in a range of mental health outcomes, including reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, lower stress and improved cognitive function.
Michigan State University research found that gardening boosted confidence, self-esteem and sense of purpose, and that those benefits deepened when people gardened alongside others.
For agents working with clients who are weighing aging-in-place options or looking for homes that support an active lifestyle without high-impact movement demands, the garden’s functional role could be worth bringing up as part of the conversation.
What agents should know before advising clients
The data points to a few practical distinctions.
For sellers, the financial return is clearest in the fundamentals: Lawn maintenance, clean landscaping and a welcoming entry. Elaborate vegetable gardens or high-maintenance plantings are worth simplifying before listing, or framing with intent. The goal is to let a buyer see the lifestyle potential without projecting labor costs.
For buyers, the question is whether the garden aligns with how the client actually wants to live, and whether the lifestyle benefits are part of what they are weighing in a home decision. The BHGRE survey found that outdoor living extensions ranked No. 1 on the buyer-approved layout wish list, above flex rooms, smart storage and dual primary suites — a signal that outdoor space is no longer a secondary consideration.
“We’re consistently hearing demand for outdoor living areas, gardens, pools and properties that feel like private retreats,” Richardson said. “There’s also growing appreciation for landscaping that provides both beauty and functionality — shade and privacy.”
As food costs rise and buyers increasingly weigh wellness alongside square footage, the garden conversation is becoming a more standard part of what agents are expected to know.
Property deed fraud and seller impersonation aren’t new. Deed fraud is essentially as old as recorded property ownership. What’s new in 2026 is who’s doing it — and how.
That’s the view from Brian Maughan, EVP and chief innovation and marketing officer at Fidelity National Financial, the title insurance giant whose brands include Chicago Title, Fidelity National Title, Commonwealth Land Title, Alamo Title and National Title of New York.
The fraud schemes he’s watching today look less like opportunists and more like operations, and they’re using the same artificial intelligence tools that real estate agents use to write listing descriptions.
“These types of schemes are becoming more organized, they’re leveraging more technology, they’re becoming more sophisticated,” Maughan told Inman.
The good news: Out of roughly four million residential real estate transactions last year, Maughan said a very small percentage involved any deed fraud at all. The bad news: the percentage that does is getting harder to catch.
“All fraud is bad,” Maughan said. “Whether it’s 12,000 transactions or one, it’s still a problem, but this is not a universal problem. I’d want real estate agents to understand the scale.”
The easiest targets
Maughan says two transaction types most often appear in the fraud attempts his company flags: vacant land and absentee-owner properties.
The data backs Maughan up. According to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Deed & Title Fraud Survey of real estate association leaders, vacant land accounted for 62 percent of title fraud cases reported over the past year, while owner-occupied homes made up just 12 percent. Detached single-family houses represented only 16 percent of reported cases.
The pattern is consistent: Scammers go where no one is watching.
The logic isn’t complicated. Vacant land has no occupant to knock on the door and verify. Absentee owners — out-of-state second-home sellers, long-distance landlords, owners who haven’t been watching the MLS — create a similar distance between the real owner and the transaction. That separation is what a fraudster needs.
“If I were a real estate agent and I saw someone come to me and say, ‘Hey, I’d like your help selling this vacant land,’ I should automatically be thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got my ears up,’” Maughan said.
He walked through a recent example: A vacant lot in Arizona with an owner living out of state, where no one had any idea the property had been listed. A fraudster contacted a local real estate agent, posed as the seller, and attempted to push the transaction through.
Without intervention, the agent would’ve had no reason to suspect anything. The contact information the fraudster provided matched the listing, and there was nothing visibly wrong.
What caught it was a title company cross-checking the contact information the “seller” provided against other public data sources, such as addresses, phone numbers and emails that hadn’t originated with the seller. The discrepancies surfaced, the actual owner was reached, and the transaction died.
“There’s enough public information out there about sellers that someone could pretend to be you,” Maughan said. “And if I’m an eager real estate agent who’s looking for a listing and I don’t go through my own due diligence, it’s really important that you have a title insurance company that knows how to do this.”
How a trained eye caught a deepfake
Deed fraud is also moving into territory that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago.
Remote online notarization, which allows closings to take place via video without in-person attendance, has become a vector for fraud. In one case that Maughan described — drawn from a composite of similar recent transactions — two individuals appeared on a notarization call, presented government IDs that passed automated credential checks and seemed ready to sign.
Everything lined up: the story they told, the property details they knew, the documents they had. Then one of them stood up, and the deep fake image was distorted.
“When you have a deep fake technology, you can disrupt the image,” Maughan said. “And if there’s any disruption in that image, the processors aren’t equipped to cover that up.”
A trained employee noticed. They asked the signers to run through a series of physical movements — putting hands in front of their faces, removing glasses, standing — designed to stress-test the AI overlay. The image kept breaking, and the “sellers” turned out to be AI-generated.
“The employee realized pretty quickly it was an AI-generated overlay on the video call,” Maughan said. “The fraudsters had the story down, knew the property, had the fake IDs — but this one employee caught it.”
Fake IDs, he noted, have also gotten easier to produce. The combination of fabricated identity documents that pass automated checks and a deepfake overlay for the video call means that some fraud attempts are now engineered to defeat the standard digital verification stack.
Human judgment, backed by pattern recognition built from seeing many transactions, is what catches them.
“That’s just one example of how bad actors are leveraging sophisticated technology,” Maughan said. “They’re becoming less deterred by the idea of impersonating someone on a video call because they’re more comfortable with the technology. It doesn’t happen every time. But if you go to a title company that’s never seen this, I’m not sure you’re going to get the benefit of that expertise.”
The low-tech version
Not every case involves cutting-edge technology. Some rely on the oldest trick in the book: a forged signature from a known, trusted name.
In another recent example that Maughan shared, a deed had been recorded on a vacant property, not as part of a sale, but simply recorded. Ownership had changed on paper without any transaction behind it.
When the property eventually came through a title company’s process for a legitimate sale, underwriters reviewing the chain of title noticed the anomaly: a document that changed ownership without a sale attached.
The notary seal on that document belonged to a local notary whom the title company’s staff knew personally. They called her, and she said it wasn’t her signature.
“I know the notary, so I’ll just call them. Is this your signature? And they go, nope,” Maughan said. “That local expertise — well, I know that notary — flagged it immediately.”
3 things real estate agents need to know
Maughan’s advice for real estate agents isn’t complicated, but it does require slowing down.
First, acknowledge that the problem is real, even if it’s not universal. Most transactions aren’t touched by deed fraud. But the ones that are can destroy a client relationship, and increasingly, the attempts are sophisticated enough that an agent without a strong title partner won’t see them coming.
Second, recognize that the technology enabling fraud is advancing faster than most agents realize. AI makes it easier to compile convincing backstories on property owners, and deepfakes make it possible to pass a video notarization.
Fake IDs have gotten cheaper to produce. The fraudster who tried to sell that Arizona vacant lot was probably a lone actor working from public records. The one trying it today may have an organized crew, a software toolkit and a playbook built from dozens of prior attempts.
Third — and this is where Maughan is most direct — pick the right title partner. He’s biased, he acknowledged, but the argument is structural. A title company that processes transactions across multiple states sees fraud attempts that a local-only operation may never encounter. When something new surfaces in Florida, it can be shared in Northern California before that scheme reaches the West Coast.
“The best defense is the partner you work with,” he said.
Elderly homeowners and long-tenured property owners are a particular concern, Maughan said. Seller impersonation requires an actual property to impersonate, which means people who’ve owned homes for decades are a natural target pool.
Americans 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in fraud losses last year, a roughly 60 percent jump from the prior year, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. That’s nearly double the $4.6 billion reported by victims in their 30s and 40s combined.
“If I’m a real estate agent, I would just be really cautious if I’m working with someone who’s owned a property for a long time and maybe is really, really unfamiliar with this process,” he said. “Do your due diligence. Help them out.”
]]>HomeLight recently launched EVA, an artificial intelligence-powered escrow agent designed to automate most tasks required to close a residential real estate transaction.
And the company announced $40 million in new debt financing from funds managed by BlackRock to scale the platform nationally.
Drew Uher
A typical escrow requires upward of 120 discrete tasks that are time-intensive, difficult to coordinate and error-prone. HomeLight says that EVA automates most of them, from opening orders and pulling HOA documents to interfacing with lenders and wiring funds.
“When we look at the intersection of AI and title and escrow, it’s really staggering,” HomeLight founder and CEO Drew Uher told Inman. “We feel it’s effectively a foregone conclusion that this industry will be radically different in five to ten years, because there’s a lot of repeat back-office work that has to happen in order to close an escrow.”
From frustrated to ‘lights-out excited’
The product has been in development for roughly 19 months, with the first automated workflows going live in early 2025. Uher said accuracy climbed quickly from 25 to 30 percent at launch to the 80 to 90 percent range — and then stalled there for about six months.
“As recently as December 2025, I was honestly frustrated with the project,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if this was even a fully solvable problem.”
It apparently is. By the first quarter of 2026, Uher said EVA hit what is effectively 100 percent accuracy — first with one workflow, then another, then another.
“All four major workflows reached 100 percent accuracy between February and early May of this year,” Uher said. “We’re lights-out excited by this. We’ve now automated about 25 percent of the surface area of the escrow process, and it gives us confidence that we have line of sight to automating most of it.”
That framing carries a caveat: Uher defines 100 percent not as zero uncertainty, but as zero false confidence.
“When I say 100 percent accuracy, it’s okay if EVA encounters a truly weird corner case and says, ‘I don’t know how to handle this, I’m escalating.’ That can still count as 100 percent,” Uher said. “What I can’t have is EVA saying ‘I think I know how to do this,’ doing it incorrectly, and making a mistake. In title and escrow, you’re dealing with people’s money — often life savings — and the stakes are extremely high.”
Inside the EVA workflow
EVA stands for “Escrow Virtual Assistant.” Uher described it as a virtual employee, a collection of different AI agents. “The secret sauce is that we’ve built EVA over 80 different tools she can use to access the outside world and get real work done,” he said.
Uher was quick to mention that EVA isn’t a “chatbot experience.”
“We’re talking about an AI agent — or a collection of AI agents — that can actually go out and do things,” Uher said.
For example, EVA monitors the escrow officer’s inbox, waits for an open order request to arrive, opens the email and the PDF, and reviews them for 20-plus key pieces of information needed to open the order. Uher said that “she” then goes into the system of record and enters all of that information.
“If something’s missing, she contacts the agent directly — ‘Hey, I’m missing the buyer’s phone number, do you have that?’ — waits for the response, and adds it to the file,” Uher said.
Once the order is open, she emails the agent the order number, kicks off the title search process with the title vendor, kicks off the HOA process if one is associated with the file, sends intake forms to the buyer and seller, iterates with them if they have questions, and notifies the buyer where to send their earnest money deposit.
On the HOA flow, Uher said certain states have websites with databases of HOA documents. In Texas, there are two or three major sites that contain most of the state’s HOAs.
EVA can search those sites, pull up the relevant documents, and even use HomeLight’s credit card to purchase them on the company’s behalf. She also has access to hundreds of county tax and assessor offices and various regulators.
Things still on the EVA product roadmap include advanced title analysis, curative work, and signing scheduling. But EVA has also automated lender title requests, notary QC, post-close prep and several other parts of the flow.
The competitive window
HomeLight’s entry into title and escrow in 2019 predates the AI tools that are now making this automation tractable. Uher acknowledged the early years were slow going. All the relevant information in a typical escrow is stored on paper, and reliably extracting it required more robust AI models that didn’t arrive until 2023 or 2024.
The competitive window, he argues, is genuinely open.
“When you look at the title and escrow industry, it’s probably in the top 1 percent of all industries where AI can bring about real, meaningful change — and no one is really doing anything about it,” Uher said.
Uher continued that the “large incumbent players” generally aren’t technologists.
“No new startups are getting funded right now because of the state of the capital markets,” he said. “And the existing title and escrow players have largely been sold or merged. So there’s really no one innovating in the space right now.”
He noted that some software companies are building systems for title and escrow, but they have thousands of customers, each with their own workflows, so they’re building for all of them.
“We are an AI-first title and escrow agency with one workflow — our workflow — and we’re building technology to close escrows reliably, 100 percent of the time, on time, with 100 percent accuracy,” Uher said.
HomeLight is currently the only customer of its own technology. It’s not licensing EVA to other title agencies yet.
The bigger story
Victor Lund, managing partner at WAV Group and CEO of RE Technology, sees the launch as legitimately significant, but says the headline story may be underselling what’s actually at stake.
Victor Lund
“The data exhaust from escrow is enormously valuable,” Lund told Inman.
He pointed to the market capitalizations of data companies like Cotality and Black Knight as a frame for what HomeLight could eventually have access to if it scales.
“If you capture all this information at scale, you could license it to those companies or directly to capital markets players,” Lund said. “Brokers and agents don’t even think about the value of that data. They’re just processing transactions.”
Lund also flagged the security dimension. “If AI is handling wire transfer instructions, there’s no human with a screen that could be compromised,” he said, noting that wire fraud is one of the most common and costly forms of real estate transaction fraud.
Whether EVA is actually more secure than the status quo is unknown, he cautioned: “None of us have seen it yet.”
The bigger unknown, Lund said, is the go-to-market strategy.
“How do you sell escrow?” Lund said. “You have to retrain real estate agents and brokers. And first of all, brokers will want to use their own escrow company, so there’s built-in competition. The go-to-market is the hardest thing we don’t know about.”
HomeLight’s likely path, he said, runs through its 2020 acquisition of Disclosures.io, which became a standard listing and offer management platform for Northern California transactions.
“The play is: go to all those disclosures.io customers and say, ‘Would you like us to handle escrow for you?’” Lund said. “They can offer a lower price, better service, and as long as there’s no kickback or rev share, that’s RESPA-compliant. Just a better deal.”
‘That’s all profit’
Uher is direct about the labor implications but draws a line.
“Right now, 80 to 90 percent of the work we do in escrow is repeat back-office work that, frankly, no one wants to do,” he said. “AI can handle all of that.”
His framing for the humans who remain in the process: own one of two tracks. The first is an agent-facing service role — someone accountable to agents and clients when things go sideways, what Uher called “a throat to choke.”
The second is escalation and edge cases, the genuinely bespoke corners of a transaction that still need human judgment.
Lund put it more bluntly. A good escrow officer handles maybe 20 closings at a time. If AI handles the checklist work and a human handles the exceptions, that same officer could manage 100. “That’s all profit,” he said.
The housing market is shifting. Existing-home sales remain sluggish, competition is intense, and buyers’ expectations are evolving. Yet while some agents are struggling, others are finding new opportunities in emerging niches, changing consumer preferences, build-to-rent communities, luxury markets, mixed-use developments, and office-to-residential conversions.
Join us for a discussion on where buyer demand is heading, what today’s consumers really want, and how real estate professionals can reposition their businesses to capitalize on the next wave of opportunity.
]]>We had been waiting for a response for three months when the email I was waiting for in agony finally came.
A neighbor who was planning to sell her home agreed to show it to my wife and me.
We had heard through the grapevine that the woman down the street planned to list her home on the MLS using a real estate agent. After an email introduction, she said she was glad there was interest in her home, and that she would at least let us see it before it went on the market.
The ensuing four months gave me greater insight into the everyday work that Inman readers — the real estate professionals who run the industry — put in to make a living.
We consider ourselves some of the lucky ones.
We moved to Salt Lake City in 2017, back when it was less expensive to buy a typical home than rent one. Three years later we locked in a 2.875 percent interest rate and thought we were all set.
But after two more kids, the reality of remote work and developing a better sense for what we wanted in a neighborhood, we decided to sell our home and rent one in our ideal neighborhood.
Taylor Anderson | Inman reporter and Utah sales agent
It felt like a bet, one that made our families question our sanity. Who would trade a historically low interest rate for one starting with a 6? Why give up homeownership on a gamble?
The truth is, I knew a contingent offer wasn’t going to cut it for a bigger house in a neighborhood we hoped to stay in long-term. So we sold, stashed the equity and set off on a plan to establish ourselves as valued members of the new neighborhood.
At the same time, I set out on another journey.
On warm summer nights after putting the kids to bed, I’d come back to the office in the three-car garage and begin taking online courses to become a licensed real estate sales agent in Utah.
I was on a plane to see family in Chicago on Christmas Eve when I got the email: test passed, background check and fingerprinting completed, the Utah Division of Real Estate issued my license.
As an Inman reporter who covers the biggest brokerages in the industry, it could be a perceived conflict of interest to hang my hat at a company I might write about. So I kept my license inactive and unaffiliated with any brokerage.
By this point, my wife and I had probably visited the local MLS more than 99.9 percent of agents in all of Utah.
Around 8 a.m. in early January, a listing went live, and I called the listing agent less than a minute later.
“I didn’t even know it was live yet,” the agent told me. It was a phrase I’d go on to hear from three other agents within just a few weeks.
I’ve heard agents compare the late-winter, early-spring market in Salt Lake City to the heyday of the COVID housing market. Houses would list on Thursday, there may or may not be an open house, the description would be updated mid-weekend with that familiar phrase: “MULTIPLE OFFERS. HIGHEST AND BEST DUE MONDAY.”
With each house, I would play a combination of agent, homebuyer and investigative reporter.
I’d run the house through my own due diligence checklist, checking permit history, zoning, sewer lateral age and ownership. Then I’d call and pick up even more information from the listing agent.
It might have felt like a game if I weren’t looking for a forever home to raise my kids in, and with a self-imposed June 1 deadline to get it done before our lease expired or we’d be locked in for another year.
In total, I made four offers, some of them well above asking and each optimized with the seller’s desires in mind, before I learned why it wasn’t working.
A key to my strategy of competing — and winning — in a hypercompetitive market was that I wasn’t asking for any buyer agent compensation. If I was going above asking and tacking on another 2 percent to 3 percent for the seller’s profit, I thought, I’d win for sure.
After the fourth loss, I pieced it together.
As an unrepresented buyer, I was a perceived risk to the seller and a likely future headache to the listing agent. Besides, the sellers likely agreed to give more compensation to their agents if the buyer was unrepresented.
So while I was treated seriously and respectfully throughout this process, I was losing. And as a competitive person with a real deadline approaching, I needed to shift my approach again.
We briefly worked with a discount broker for two reasons.
First, with two of the houses we made offers on, I would have needed to add a basement apartment to be able to stomach the monthly payments. (Remember, we were taking swings to hit a homer and level up into a forever home.) Getting a check for 1.5 percent of the home price would have helped me achieve that.
Second, I really did want to experience this as an agent. I found someone who inherently took care of my BAC problem and also appreciated that I was ready, willing and able to carry my weight through the transaction.
We made one offer with that agent — who was terrific to work with — before lightning struck.
After three months of relative silence from our neighbor, she opened the door.
I mean that literally.
She had been traveling and completely unreachable for a time, then going through a period of deep grief from the loss of a loved one.
All the while she was contemplating.
She’d sold homes on-market and off-market before. While preparing to sell this home, she met with three agents. She didn’t “vibe” with any of them, she said, while talking with us in her living room in April.
She had decided she was open to offers, that she wasn’t going to use an agent, and she gave us her price range.
Having been embedded in the neighborhood, I knew her range was solid. I also knew that if she put the house on the market, a frenzy would ensue, and we likely would lose.
By that point, the transaction no longer felt entirely transactional.
We spent nearly two hours walking through the home while she told stories about the property, the landscaping and the decades of life that had unfolded there. She talked about wanting children in the home again. She talked about neighbors and community. She appreciated knowing who would live there, not just what they would pay.
And all the while I was using the chatbot of my choosing (at the time, ChatGPT), which played part strategist, part guidance counselor throughout the entire process.
The bot advised patience at times when I would have otherwise had none.
It helped me workshop delicate emails and texts to avoid sounding overly aggressive or transactional while still moving the deal forward. It helped me think through timing, financing structures, appraisal risk and possession dates.
When rate sheets came in, the bot would analyze the short- and long-term impact of each option. It would double-check documents before they were sent and signed. At one point, it even helped us sequence a move across the street with two young kids and effectively no room for error.
Most interestingly, the bot often slowed me down rather than speeding me up.
There were moments when I wanted to push harder for answers, follow up again or force clarity around timing. Instead, the chatbot repeatedly advised restraint, patience and collaboration.
That turned out to matter.
The seller eventually accepted our offer with a clean and straightforward process that worked for her.
The inspection went smoothly. The seller proactively offered to pay for radon mitigation if elevated levels were found. We coordinated directly on possession timing, title and moving logistics. The final agreement gave her several days after closing to finish packing and loading movers before possession transferred to us.
I didn’t trust the bot to analyze pricing. At least for now, it doesn’t have access to the most accurate data that would help it nail down numbers I would trust. Those only come from the MLS.
And despite how this story may sound, ChatGPT did not replace the role of a real estate professional.
I still had to:
- evaluate risk
- build trust
- coordinate timelines
- understand contracts
- communicate clearly under pressure
- and make judgment calls with real financial consequences.
What changed was that I effectively had a continuously available strategic sounding board helping me think through every step of the process.
There may be some of you who think the seller and I each made a series of mistakes.
Maybe she could have gotten more if she had worked with an agent. Maybe I overpaid. Maybe both of us took on unnecessary risk.
All I know is that documents have been signed, closing costs paid, we’ve funded and recorded, and I’m writing this from my dream home.
The future is here. Agents should take note.
The inquiry went out to brokerage leaders in New York after Compass grew into a real estate behemoth in the state and beyond.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has opened an inquiry into the expanded footprint of Compass International Holdings in the state.
That’s according to a report published on Wednesday by The Real Deal that Inman has also independently confirmed.
Agents within the antitrust division of James’ office have reached out to leaders at top brokerages in New York to collect information.
Neither the attorney general’s office nor a Compass spokesperson would comment for the story.
The scope of the inquiry isn’t immediately clear, though it comes after Compass has ballooned into the largest real estate enterprise in the nation through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company closed on its $1.6 billion merger with Anywhere Real Estate. That merger set Compass above all other real estate enterprises by far.
That acquisition followed Compass’ purchase of @properties last year for $444 million, which came along with the brand Christie’s International Real Estate.
Compass is now so large that consumer advocates have warned the company is poised to dominate local markets and influence industry governance.
“In the five markets examined, the Compass share of unit sales ranges from 30 [percent] to 40 percent and, in terms of sales volume ($s), the percentages are even higher,” the Consumer Policy Center said in a report it released in April. “Moreover, the percentages of unit sales for its main competitors are much lower.”
In recent months, Compass has exerted its influence by partnering with local multiple listing services and pulling its listings off of Zillow.
MRED in Chicago, Realtracs in Nashville and BrightMLS in the Mid-Atlantic have each announced they would expand to allow subscribers to join no matter where they’re based. As part of those announcements, each MLS said they had partnered with Compass to ensure they have all of Compass’ listings.
Meanwhile, Compass severed its listing feed from Zillow, meaning that if the MLS also severs Zillow’s data feed, Zillow would have no access to display any listing from Compass International Holdings.
That occurred briefly in Chicago, when MRED moved last month to sever Zillow’s direct data feed. More than half of all listings in the market went dark before a judge ordered them to be temporarily restored amid a court battle between Zillow, MRED and Compass.
Realtracs has also said that it would sever Zillow’s data feed on June 8.
Investors appeared to take the report seriously, as Compass stock was down more than 10 percent midday on Wednesday.
In the face of the current market, Eric Bramlett writes, manage expectations clearly, stay close to your clients and build the kind of trust that has a long shelf life.
Heading into spring 2026, market optimism was reasonably grounded. Rates had briefly dipped below 6 percent in February, inventory was slowly rebuilding, and the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist was projecting a 14 percent jump in existing home sales for the year.
Then March arrived, and existing home sales hit a nine-month low of 3.98 million, the slowest March pace since 2009.
What happened, and what agents need to do about it, are worth separating. The first is mostly context. The second is the job.
The buyer-seller standoff is still the story
The most persistent dynamic in this market is a valuation gap that neither side is willing to close. Sellers are still anchoring to peak-era pricing. In Zillow’s quarterly agent sentiment survey, respondents described sellers as stubborn about price expectations, with one telling Zillow that sellers still expected to “get triple the asking price.” That’s an outlier in phrasing, but not in sentiment.
On the other side, buyers aren’t panicking. They’re waiting. April’s existing home sales ticked up just 0.2 percent month-over-month, with NAR noting that days on market are lengthening as consumers take more time before making decisions. And home sales were essentially flat in April compared with a year earlier, even as newly listed homes rose at a faster pace than sales.
More inventory, more hesitation. That combination tells you buyers don’t feel urgency. And without urgency, most don’t move.
Affordability improved, then got worse again
Rates bottomed near 5.95 percent early in the year, briefly creating the best affordability conditions in four years. Then came the Iran War. According to ICE’s April Mortgage Monitor, 30-year rates rose roughly 40 basis points from that floor, pulling approximately four percent of buying power back out of the market right as the spring season kicked off.
NAR later revised its 2026 forecast from 14 percent sales growth down to 4 percent, citing that rate increase as the primary driver.
But rates are only part of it. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun noted in April that despite a record-high stock market, consumer confidence was historically low, and buyers were taking their time before committing. New home sales fell 6.2 percent from March to April and 11.3 percent year-over-year, with NAHB’s chief economist projecting further declines ahead.
When qualified buyers have financial capacity but lack confidence, rate cuts alone won’t get them off the sidelines. The decision calculus has shifted, and agents who treat this as a rate problem are misreading it.
5 ways agents can navigate a housing market that refuses to rebound
1. Reset seller expectations in the first meeting, not the third. Price reductions after extended days on market cost sellers more than an accurate list price would have. Bring current comp data and absorption rate to the listing conversation before the seller’s number gets set in stone. That’s when the conversation is still movable.
2. Use hyperlocal data; the national numbers are noise for your clients. The Midwest and Northeast are outperforming while many Western markets continue to soften. If your clients are reading national headlines, they’re not reading your market. Know your submarket’s actual days-on-market and list-to-sale ratios, and lead with those.
3. Reframe buyer patience as a strategy, not a problem. Buyers who are taking longer aren’t broken. In this environment, a buyer with a clear plan and realistic expectations is a better client than one chasing urgency that isn’t there. Help them think about negotiating position, which is stronger right now than it has been in years.
4. Move the conversation from rate speculation to pricing strategy. Clients who are waiting for a rate drop are waiting for something outside their control. The price they negotiate, the concessions they ask for, the due diligence they do, all of that is still within their control. Shift the frame, and you shift the energy in the room.
5. Increase your communication cadence, and make it worth reading. Pipelines don’t hold themselves together in slow markets. Agents who check in with useful context — a relevant local data point, a comp that just closed, an honest read on what’s moving — stay in the conversation. Agents who go quiet or send generic check-ins don’t.
The market you have
Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, expects home sales to “move sideways before starting to gradually rise at the end of the year.” That’s a realistic planning horizon, in my view.
The agents I respect most right now aren’t waiting for the market to turn. They’re doing the harder work of managing expectations clearly, staying close to their clients and building the kind of trust that has a long shelf life. That’s what good brokerage looks like in a market like this one.
AI vibe-coding tools have made it easy for anyone to build custom tools in minutes, but they’re routinely insecure, non-compliant and off-brand. Cloze’s new Forge platform is a direct answer to that risk.
Choosing software for a real estate business comes with a frequent pain point: Either use a pre-packaged platform that may or may not work for the way you do business or “back up a truck with money” for a custom solution.
According to Dan Foody, founder and CEO at Cloze, vibe coding offers the best of both worlds, despite adding its own brand-new set of problems.
Dan Foody via LinkedIn
Agents are already using AI tools to build apps and software, whether brokerages know it or not. While their output may look good on the surface, they can also expose data, skip compliance language and break brand standards, creating a potential nightmare scenario for supervising brokers and broker-owners.
That’s why Cloze is rolling out its new Forge product, a platform that allows brokerages to build and deploy custom tech solutions with security baked in.
Why vibe coding presents a liability for brokers
Standard vibe-coded applications are often insecure by default, protected by an API key that exposes all of the app’s data if stolen or hacked. Managing access requires custom tech solutions that most brokerages aren’t prepared for or equipped to do.
“You can’t trust AI, right?” Foody said. “You can’t trust it because it hallucinates. You can’t trust it to do security right for you. You can’t trust it to do what’s in your best interest. Can’t trust it to know what matters to you.”
Cloze Forge replaces API keys with what it calls “declarative security” — auditable, external rules that set limits on which records and fields each app can access. That means that instead of the code having to say “trust me,” Foody said, the security layer guarantees that only the data fields needed are available for access.
What Cloze Forge does
Forge comes with six pre-defined app types, each with its own built-in security profile. In addition, Forge Studio is a vibe-coding tool powered by Claude Code. Apps built in Cloze’s Forge system are secure, compliant and owned outright by the brokerage.
Data comes from brokerage listings, MLS data, transactions, clients and communication history, all provided by the Cloze Intelligence Engine.
“Creating a branded digital experience is no longer a technology project; it’s a business decision,” Foody said. Now, “brokerages can load a brand kit into [Forge] so that any app that you build will automatically follow the brand standards.”
The first Forge app, launching today, is an Open House app, totally vibe-coded and offering a custom branded check-in experience with QR posters, kiosk mode and offline capability. Visitors who check in with the app have their data flow into Cloze relationship intelligence, agent follow-up, marketing workflows, financing interest and long-term client engagement systems.
According to Foody, the Open House app screens for a variety of potential stakeholders when visitors check in. For brokerages with in-house mortgage, for example, a screening question for financing interest sends contact information to a mortgage rep.
Meanwhile, open house attendees without representation flow to available buyer’s agents. At the same time, the listing agent still gets a record of all visitors and their information for follow-up after the event.
A compliance story the industry hasn’t yet tackled
Departments of Real Estate haven’t yet pursued cases against AI-built agent tools, but that day is coming. Brokers are responsible for what agents publish under their license, so rogue, vibe-coded tools create a supervision gap.
By creating an auditable, enforceable environment tied to their in-house policies and procedures, Forge heads off many of the potential objections that regulators and brokers will be wrestling with in the months ahead.
“All the security rules are fully auditable and can’t be avoided,” Foody said. “When you make the security something that is well-defined outside of the app, that can be audited and reviewed, then [compliance] becomes a much easier problem to manage.”
Cloze already serves Baird & Warner, Brown Harris Stevens, Sotheby’s, William Raveis and Windermere and sees customization as an essential part of the new competitive real estate landscape. As the superapp era gives way to individuated, brokerage-owned tools, brand differentiation is increasingly essential, both for client services and agent recruitment and retention.
“In a world where you’re competing against the Compass brand, which is everywhere,” Foody said, “the more unique you can be, the more differentiated you’re going to be.” Cloze offers an opportunity to use tech to differentiate and problem-solve without having to employ dozens or even hundreds of engineers, he added.
For his part, Foody sees no end in sight when it comes to the level of customization potential, saying, “We’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible here, I think.”
Troy Palmquist is the founder and principal at HomeCode Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.