Add Your Heading Text Here Let’s just say it plainly: most agents outside of Compass are watching the Reffkin/Zillow war like it’s a corporate soap opera that has nothing to do with them. That’s a mistake. A real one. The Setup Here’s the conventional wisdom: Compass and Zillow are fighting over listing policy. Compass wants
The MLS Isn’t Dead. But It Just Got Punched in the Face. For decades, the MLS has been the undisputed infrastructure of residential real estate. If you wanted a listing to be seen, you put it in the MLS. If you wanted to find listings as a buyer’s agent, you pulled from the MLS. The
Why Transaction Volume Is a Vanity Metric Real estate celebrates transaction count like it’s the ultimate measure of success. “I closed 50 deals last year.” “Our team did 100+ transactions.” It sounds impressive. Sometimes it is impressive. Often it’s meaningless. Because transaction count tells you almost nothing about the health of a business. The Problem
The Signal – February 20, 2026 https://youtu.be/DBlNdXFMLJk The Fed’s January meeting minutes revealed something the headline didn’t mention — and it should change how you’re managing your pipeline heading into spring. Some members raised the possibility of rate hikes. Two voting members wanted to cut. The committee called its own forward path “genuinely uncertain.” That’s
Affordability Is at a Four-Year High. Why Aren’t Buyers Acting? The data released this week from NAR contains a number that should be generating a lot more conversation than it is. The Housing Affordability Index hit 116.5 in January — its highest reading since March 2022. For context, that index measures whether the median household
The Compass/Zillow Fight Isn’t About Private Listings. It’s About Who Owns the Consumer. The coverage of last week’s Compass/Zillow ruling mostly treated it as a real estate procedural update. Injunction denied. Zillow policy stands. Compass appealing. Legal case continues. That framing is accurate and almost entirely misses the point. What played out in a New
When Splits Actually Matter…. And When They Don’t Commission splits dominate real estate conversations. Agents obsess over them. Brokerages compete on them. Entire recruiting pitches are built around them. “We offer 90/10.” “We’re 100% commission.” “Our splits are the most competitive in the market.” Here’s the thing: for most agents, splits matter way less than
https://youtu.be/ZXWXfuypMDQ?si=DAc918Qze0L4OGQrNAR’s chief economist called it a “new housing crisis” this week. January home sales dropped 8.4% — the biggest monthly decline in four years. And honestly? The number is bad. But there’s a difference between a crisis and a problem that’s been building for three years finally showing up in the data. In this week’s
Nothing Broke This Week. The Market Has Been Broken for Three Years. The “new housing crisis” framing that came out of this week’s sales data is wrong. Not because the numbers are good. They’re not. January existing home sales dropped 8.4% to a 3.91M annualized rate, the slowest pace since December 2023. That’s a real
The “New Housing Crisis” Headline Is Real — Just Not For The Reason They’re Saying If you woke up this week and saw Lawrence Yun calling the housing market a “new housing crisis,” you weren’t wrong to pay attention. January existing home sales dropped 8.4% from December — the biggest monthly decline since February 2022,
