Deep Dive: The Portal Wars

Hey everyone, this is Mike DelPretty and you're listening to Context, podcast where I'm talking to industry leaders about what's changing in the world of real estate. This is another deep dive where we're going to be talking about the portal wars. And my guest today is a good friend, Scott Bond. Hey Scott. Mike, how are you? Good, good, thanks. Scott is the VP of Brokerydge, North America at Renny. And in the past has been in the world of real estate portals for many, many years, including Zillow and then Property Finder in the Middle East. So yeah, Scott, what's your quick background overview here? Yeah, absolutely. Again, thanks for having me, Mike. Yeah, so I spent almost six years at Zillow. I had two lives at Zillow. One was as a general manager in the premier agent business. I think I joined in about 2016. And then about two years in, Greg Schwartz tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, want you to go build this sales team for this thing called Instant Offers?" I really had no idea what was getting myself into, but I said, "Yes, of course, because when Greg pulls you aside, you just say yes." And yes, so did that for a number of years. Of course, that became Zillow offers. Zillow offers, you know, there's a big story there as we all know about what happened in that world. And then I got recruited to go to Dubai. And we got a chance to be the country manager for Property Finder in Dubai. I led the UAE, had a chance to have some oversight to Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi, Cairo. It was quite an experience for an American kid from Kennewick, Washington to go experience. Did that for about 18 months. And then we wanted to move back. So we moved back to Seattle. And yeah, I got a chance to go to work at Rene out of Vancouver, British Columbia. We're a developer services company. Also we have this 350 agent brokerage. And I've had a chance to open up offices down the West Coast and spend a lot of time back and forth between Canada and the US. So it's been a great experience. And it's really well-rounded out, I think, my real estate experience so far. Right. And yeah, I appreciate you being here. I've enjoyed doing more of these deep dive long form podcasts this year, one on Redfin, one on Building a Brokridge. And you know, when I was sitting around thinking about topics, portal wars popped up. And I was thinking, oh, who could I talk to about this? That smart intelligent has some good experience and you popped mine. And I appreciate you coming to Boulder for a coffee and chatting about this. Yeah. Well, hey, it was honored to be asked. And yeah, I think what's interesting is, you know, I'm probably not the smartest guy to be able to talk about this. But I think my experience being at Zillow, my experience now being on the brokerage side of the business and then being abroad as well, I think really kind of helped me to understand the portal business even more. You know, I think I obviously had a great insight into it while I was at Zillow. But then when you go abroad and you see the portal, the classified business, it kind of changes your perspective on how the ecosystem works. And I know you saw that as well by being abroad and the work that you've done. But I think now I have probably even a better view of the ecosystem and feel even probably more clear about kind of, you know, where the, where the opportunities lie, where everybody's going and, you know, kind of what all of these nuances right now that are taking place ultimately mean. So what does portal wars mean? When I think about it, the US market, it was like the world's most boring horse race where you kind of had the players and nothing changed, you know, for a number, I mean, a long time, you know, the Zillow realtor.com and Redfin. And then this long tail, a whole bunch of others. CoStar came in, acquired homes.com and has been investing, you know, a billion plus dollars in that to try to compete. And then in 2025, we had Rocket come in and acquire Redfin. So 2025 has been really a pivotal year. And this, it kind of boils down to the question, kind of, kind of challenge or portal displays a number one. So I'll start with that. What do you think? It's, it's a question that we could probably stay on that question alone for the entire podcast. But, you know, look, I think the way I view it, and by the way, I completely agree with you when you say it was a boring horse race for the longest time because, you know, when I joined Zillow in 2016, they had just acquired truly about a year before. There was no denying who the number one market leader was, you know, a realtor.com was kind of a nice competitor. Redfin wasn't really even talked about because, you know, there wasn't really an agent product that we were competing with. And, and, you know, and obviously homes.com wasn't, wasn't around. It was kind of Zillow and realtor to some extent. Now fast forward to today, you've got all these competitors in the place. And I think, you know, there's a lot of cash that's fueling this right now. There's a battle for the consumer as well. Tech is probably fueling this even more in this, you know, AI age, which I know we'll talk about it, you know, here in a minute. But I think what's interesting is, you know, if you, if you, if you ask the question, you know, can the number one be unseated? My short answer is no, but they certainly can be disrupted. And I think when you take a look at everything that's happening, going back just a couple of years ago, you didn't have all these lawsuits. You didn't have the, you know, the AI innovation is taking place today. You didn't have the partners with the cash that's in place today that you do have. And now I think you have agents and teams that have always been looking for ways to diversify. And now I think we're going to start to see that a little bit, you know, it was this thing where like, everybody hated Zillow, it was trendy to hate Zillow. It still is trendy for everybody to hate Zillow, but it was trendy to hate Zillow because that was where all your business came from. Now I think if you're an agent or team, you have a chance to diversify a little bit and look elsewhere. But it can Zillow be knocked off of the number one perch. My short answer is no. Now there's a lot to unpack there. But, you know, my short answer is no. What what I've always said, I mean, listen, it's possible. If you go 20 years and the entire world, like there are some examples, right, in Spain, Italy, like there's these very specific examples. But in general, it hasn't happened. And you know, it hasn't happened. I think people's collective memory kind of disappears after a couple of years, right? In the UK, you had the number two portal, Zoupla, got acquired by private equity. A number of years ago, it was probably like seven years ago at this point. Silver Lake. And the idea was, oh man, they're going private. They're going to get all this funding. They have air cover to kind of do what they need, do what they want, grow. And nothing really happened, right? The needle didn't move. In Germany, activities happened. You know, in Australia and New Zealand, where I was, you know, people have tried and invested, but not a whole lot has happened. What I've always distilled that down into is it's the number ones game to lose. Like if the number one screws up enough, they can lose that number one position. But there's almost nothing that a challenger portal can do to knock them off that perch. What's the most, I mean, what's the most important metric to think about? Yeah. So back to that point about nobody being able to knock off the number one. And I love that you reference all these other countries because I think, you know, if you've only lived and worked in the US, you only see this Zillow Homes Realtor.com race. But you know, you mentioned, you know, like R.E.A. Group in Australia, everybody's been trying to knock them off for years. They've more cash and more positioning power than anybody, you know, him that in is it sweet in, right? You look at right move in the UK, like obviously co-stars now in the UK trying to knock them off. Can they? I doubt it. And so the answer is, I don't always know. It's like doubt it. And the reason being is because to go back to your question on the metric, the metric is consumer trust. Like we in the industry, I think take a look at products. We look at services. We look at ways the portals help agents and teams make money. But we forget that the real input there that drives the ultimate outputs is traffic and consumer trust. And so if you take a look at where these portals are winning, they're winning in traffic and consumer trust. We talk about all the time in Dubai. Like we had competitors all the time that showed up out of nowhere. In fact, in Dubai, there was a group of agents. There's a group of power brokerages who formed a portal who were pissed during COVID at property finder and they put all their money into it and they didn't even make a dent. And so what comes down to it is, who has the trust and who has the consumer traffic and those two things follow each other? That one example happens in basically every country around the world, right? Number one portal kind of pisses off their customers, agents and brokers get together and say, hey, we can do this. We don't need to be writing a check to this other company. We'll do it. Nothing happens. And it disappears. And we go back. I have a bunch of questions. You mentioned it was trendy to hate Zilla. Why? Why? Well, so by the way, if you take a look at all, and I know you know this, but if you take a look at all classified businesses and really look at the two biggest ones, right? Homes and automotive. The auto dealers always hate the auto classifies. Why? Well, the auto classifies control the traffic. Therefore, they control supply and demand. And they control the way that auto dealers have to ultimately buy back from them. Therefore, they hate the portal. You know, auto trader, car gurus, whatever it is because they usually control pricing, they control inventory, they control everything. Same thing goes in housing, right? So Zillow, Realtor, all these portals, you know, and let's start with, let's just focus on Zillow alone. It's trendy to hate Zillow because they're the beast. It's trendy to hate Zillow because they're number one. And by the way, like, and again, because they control the traffic, they control the trust, agents hate it when an agent, sorry, agents hate it when a consumer says, well, Zillow said. Well, and I know that that's unfortunate for brokers, but the reality of it is, Zillow has the trust. And so the, the, the, the like why they hate them all the time is because they have the traffic, they have the trust. But what I always go back to is if the portals disappeared tomorrow, if Zillow disappeared tomorrow, there would be a lot of teams who would be in a lot of trouble because their business has been completely built on it. So it always becomes this love hate. We used to talk about this all the time back. When I was at Zillow, we talked about this when I was a property finder. Agents have this love hate relationship with the portals because of those reasons I mentioned. Well, you said a lot of teams and I'm not disputing that. There would be a lot of teams that would be upset. But the percentage of the market that actively works with Zillow in terms of consumers that go through and find a house on there, or the percentage of agents that work with Zillow, that's like low single digit percent. However, if we look at the data that I think NAR put out in 2024, it was 76% of the agents in the marketplace didn't even do a transaction. So it leaves us what 24%, 25% or whatever the number is. And that is the group that is ultimately, that is usually on Zillow working leads trying to find consumers. Well, let's work it out. So how many productive agents are there in the US? I mean, I've done research on this. We were talking a couple hundred thousand, right? That are actually producing. Yeah. I think it's the number about 1.5 million licenses somewhere in there. Yeah, total. A little bit out of that in terms of actual producing agents. It's a couple hundred thousand. Yeah. This information isn't published. But last time I checked, or last time it was, number of primary agents, flex teams, whatnot. You're talking maybe 40, 60, 80 thousand agents. So if the total pool of producing agents is 400 thousand, yeah, it's not low single digit percentages. Yeah. It is a good number of the agents that matter, the quality agents out there. Well, I think it's that 80, 20 rule as well, right? The agents that are on the poor rolls that are doing the deals, they tend to make up the agents that are doing the bulk of the deals across the country. Now, I think you have all sorts of segments across the country that Zillow doesn't always play in, or Realtor doesn't always play in, whether it's the luxury market, or the agents that are in Beverly Hills, the million dollar agents aren't, you know, or I guess let's put it this way, the Ryan Sirhands of the world aren't dependent on Zillow leads. But yeah, I think, you know, if you take a look at those teams who do have that love-hate relationship with the portals, it always comes down to, they're usually the ones who are doing the bulk of the transaction. So, I mean, you were on the primary agent team talking to agents all the time. How did that go talking to customers that hated you? [laughs] Well, yeah, you, you know, you got used to it after a while. And I think what you learned was, at the end of the day, they actually loved you because of the fact that you were so impactful to their business. I mean, we would sit in teams offices where they would say, "Hey, when I first started buying Zillow leads, we had a small broom closet of an office, there was only three of us agents. Now, there's 300 of us on the team, and Zill ultimately made us made us who we are." And those were always really amazing, really rewarding stories, and we still hear those all the time, you know, from teams that we knew from the past and teams we ran into. I think that, you know, the other side of it, though, is I'm so dependent on what the portal ultimately does, right? Whether it was, you know, in Dubai, a property finder, whether it's the RIA group in Australia, whether it's Zillow or Realtor in the US, any changes or tweaks they make have massive down-fundal impact on the teams, and changes hard. And especially when you optimize your entire business for the way the portals work, and then all of a sudden they make a change, whether that's a data change, whether it's a privacy change, whether it's a policy change, then you got to scramble the fix, and that's a lot of times where that hate and frustration comes in. But then you adapt, you figure it out, and you move on. But again, this love-hate relationship kind of continues to coexist along the way. I mean, it's a tough need to let thread, isn't it, because what's good for the portal is typically going to be bad for their agent customers? So I think, yeah, what I think is missed a lot of times by agents and teams is the portal is always optimizing for the consumer. So they're optimizing for an easier consumer experience, and a lot of times that's conflicting for the agent or the team, because the agent or team is optimizing to create a transaction as quickly as they possibly can. So sometimes changes are made that are better for a consumer in terms of the process, whether it's speed, delete for them, or it's faster to get in front of them with data and information that the agent or team might not want them to have access to, because they want to control the process, or there's a policy change in the way data is threaded from the consumer to the ultimate agent. So these changes take place all the time, but I will tell you every portal across the world is always thinking about how do we make it easier for consumers, because we know that's the input, the more consumers that trust us, the more agents we can satisfy down funnel, but if we have no trust and no good relationship with the consumers, we have no agents down funnel ultimately to then end up making happy. But if a portal, I mean all these portals are public companies and they need to grow, they need to grow revenues, there's only so many places that revenue can come from, and typically it will come from an agent, right? Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think maybe, I think him that might be the only portal across the world, or one of the very few where consumers pay for listings. Do I have that right Mike? You know that world better than I do over there? Yeah, vendor, it's called vendor-funded markets, and that's Sweden and Australia, kind of the two top examples where the home seller will pay their marketing cost, and that could be two to $5,000 to get your property listed on the leading portal. Yeah, so what that ultimately means is, yeah, the agent, the portals always have this tough relationship to satisfy the consumer and satisfy the agent as well. So what is good for the consumer should be good for the agent, yes, but oftentimes those things are in conflict because agents, they want to be able to work those leads the way they want. They don't want to be told what CRM's use, they don't want to be told what, you know, what stages to change, you know, in a platform somewhere, you know, they don't want to be graded on, you know, if they're being a good agent or not. We launched super agent when I was in Dubai, and you know, at first, you know, it was a great thing, and then it kind of became a challenge to sell this back to the brokerages and teams, because they were selling, saying, you're giving awards to not my top agents, and you're rewarding them for like basic behaviors, not awarding them for actually being the best agents in the market who sell more inventory than anybody else. And for us, we just cared about who are the agents that are ultimately creating the best relationships with consumers and doing the behaviors the right way. So oftentimes these things are in conflict kind of as we go. But again, if there's no consumers at the top of the funnel, then it doesn't really matter down funnel long term. So earlier you mentioned trust. What is consumer trust? How do you measure it? And why is that important for a portal? Yeah. So it's important for a portal because trust. Okay, I guess if we back up a little bit here, real estate transaction, as we know, is the biggest transaction you're usually going to make as a consumer in your life. Therefore, it is a scary transaction. So when you go to a portal and you become a lead, I think you've said it best over the years, nobody wants to become a lead, but that's the reality is you become a lead. You want to know that you are ultimately being taken care of in this very scary transaction that's going to take place, especially if you're a first time home buyer. So I think Zillow did an amazing job of this in the early years with the Zestimate. And by the way, we noticed this during the Zillow offers days because we would make offers on homes. And if we were off of the Zestimate in a negative way for the home seller, that's the first thing they would say your Zestimate says X. You've been telling us for the longest time, my home is worth this. Why are you telling me it's now worth why? And that was an interesting moment for us to kind of realize, wow, I think we had even more power than we even thought because we told them the home was worth one thing. Now we're telling was worth a different thing, but trust becomes so important because if they come to you and they trust your data, they trust the information they're getting, they trust that you're taking care of them in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe. And you're not just passing them off like some random classified wood, then they're ultimately going to want to come back to you because ideally they're going to buy a home, they're going to have that home on your site, they're going to be browsing for future homes. And if that trust isn't there, they're not going to come back to you and want to use you again. So specifically why do consumers trust Zillow? I think it goes back to I think the Zestimate in the early days was and it was really the original trust metric. Okay, so Zestimate's good. And I know, you know, in the past, when I've had Zillow execs on my podcast, Jeremy Hoffman and Jeremy Waxman, I think it was Jeremy Hoffman who's talking about this aha moment for them, looking at just the percentage of leads that didn't get a call back. So is that part of trust kind of the efforts that Zillow's made about making sure that when you fill out a form, you get a call or an email or a text? Yeah, great, great call out. So and as we know too, every portal across the world and especially here in the US has that exact same problem where, you know, roughly 60% of most leads don't even get a call back or, you know, a text and email or anything. So that was one of the things that, you know, I remember, you know, around 2018 or so, right before I moved over to Zillow offers where we were making this big push where, you know, we were going to use what was at the time the premier agent concierge platform to get in touch with every single lead that came to Zillow because we notice that that trust. And I wasn't privy to all the information in the research, but that was a metric where consumers would come to us. They would become a lead on be notes to them sometimes and then nobody would reach back out to them and who do they blame they blame Zillow. So that was where, you know, Zillow's concierge platform at the time really did a great job of starting to reach out to consumers and create that relationship with them to ultimately get them in the hands of an agent. But if I fill out a lead form somewhere anywhere and I get a call back, who am I blaming? I'm blaming the website that I'm ultimately on, not the partner that's supposed to be calling me. or the salesperson, whomever. So yes, and again, that's a problem all across the world that we see when it comes to not calling back leads or creating a relationship with consumers that just isn't trustworthy because what are you doing with my information? - Well, yeah, and I'm trying to dig into trust. So why do consumers trust Zillow? We know why it's important, but why do they trust? Get the estimate, that's great. You know, they've probably seen the brand for years and years and years. This whole, you know, I feel a lot of forum, do I hear back from somebody? Like is that it? Is there any other buckets we're missing? - Yeah, I think, you know, there's also the first mover advantage, right? You know, Zillow was kind of the first, you know, data, first portal to democratize data, right? You know, if you go back when they launched in 2006, I'm gonna buy my first house in 2006. I didn't know anything about the buying and selling process. I was fully reliant on an agent at that time. You know, today you can do 70% of the transaction, maybe even 80% of the transaction, without ever even having to interface with an agent to get all that information. And so now there's home buyer guides, there's, you know, there's mortgage data, there's information on how to get pre-approved, there's FAQs, there's all the stuff specific to the market, not to mention, if you take a look at, you know, neighborhood data and, you know, traffic data and school data, that stuff creates trust as well. And we notice, you know, that's not only Zillow, right? Every portal has that, but that has also created trust over time in addition to being a first mover in these other things we mentioned. - Later on, I wanna talk more about exclusive inventory, but I just wanna dip into it now. In court a couple weeks ago, Zillow was making the case very clearly that if there were properties for sale that were not listed on Zillow, that would negatively impact consumer trust. Does that make sense, and do you agree with that? - Yeah. I think that there's a lot more to that than just about, I think that that's their argument, yes. And I think that argument makes sense of Zillow. I don't think though, based on the numbers that we're talking about, that it has that big of an impact. We're not talking about 50% of the market, right? We're talking about, I think at the peak, Compass Might ahead, was it 25, 27,000 exclusive listings? - Oh, not even close. - Or 9,000. - Okay, so we're talking about, you know, less than solo digits basically of the actual marketplace itself. So I think if you're Zillow, that is the argument to make, and that makes sense. And that is what they've been built on is creating trust. But, - But there is a connection here, I mean, if we're just talking out loud, there is a connection between data and trust. And that could be a real estate portal needs to have a lot of listings, right? If you go to propertyabc.com, and it's only got 50% of the market, you will lose trust. - Right. - If it goes to 90% of the market, you gain trust. And then there's also kind of data quality and timeliness. If the information's, and again, overseas, this is a huge problem where there's not MLS's kind of mandating particular data quality issues, right? But if a real estate portal says a home's for sale, and it's not actually for sale, you lose trust. If it says it has four bedrooms, but it's actually a one-pedroom studio, you lose trust. If the information hasn't been updated in 32 days, you lose trust. If you're getting email alerts within five minutes of when a new listing comes on, or there's been a listing change or a price reduction, you gain trust. So I'm positive here. I mean, you have to tell me if you agree. Is there a correlation also with trust and data? - 100%. - Yeah, and by the way, so Chris Rene, who's the CEO of our company, Rene, Rene Group Real Estate, Chris says, "You have to be one minute ahead of the market." And I think that that is the exact thought process here for a portal is I have to be one minute ahead. I have to have better data that refreshes faster than anybody else. So when the listing comes on, it can get in the hands of somebody very fast and ultimately help them to buy and sell the right property for them. And to your point of false listings and bad data and all that stuff, yeah, I had no idea that existed until I went to the Middle East. And by the way, I learned to appreciate the MLS when I was in a market where there was no such thing as an MLS. Because there was fake listings, bad listings, bad data, homes that had been sold, homes that were on the market that shouldn't have been fake listings that were just trying to get attention of buyers and sellers. And so yes, that trust piece becomes important. But I will say though, everybody in the US at least has access to this, right? So is it become like a complete differentiator today? Well, I don't know because we've kind of become used to this. Like Realtor Haset, Zillow Haset, Redfin, obviously had it kind of first because they were a brokerage as a portal as well. So I would say yes, 100% it does relate back to trust. But we've all kind of become used to that's the table stakes and that's kind of standard norm to some extent. Whereas in other markets across the world, they're still catching up. Right. All right, so the title of this podcast isn't trust and the trust. Real estate portals. But I think it's important foundationly to understand if we are talking about portal wars and entrants and who's number one and who's number two and how are they competing. What are the important factors? So let's rewind. Kind of three or four years ago, you were probably in Dubai? Just a couple of years ago, yeah. So yeah, I guess three, four years ago, yeah. You read the news, right? Coast ARCA has kind of acquired homes.com and is ready to invest a billion dollars to take on the challenger portal, your listing, your lead, which is a different business model twist that we should come back to. And they're going to run a super bowl commercial. What's running through your head as you read that stuff? - Waste of money. - Why? - Because, and again, I think it goes back to like, I don't think I quite understood this until I worked abroad, right? Where when you're number one, you're number one and it's your job to lose it. It's not number two or number three's job to ultimately take the number one spot. And so when I heard this, I thought, okay, well, that's super exciting and that's great. The co-starbothome.com, it'll make the ecosystem that much more competitive. And it'll be good for agents and teams to have another option to be able to advertise through and find new consumers and diversify the marketplace itself. However, when I heard they were going to run super bowl commercial, but also spend, I think they spend $600 million just a couple of years ago in advertising and marketing. I don't think that's the path to ultimately securing the number one seat just to advertise and advertise and advertise. And I think it goes back to again, what we just talked about, which is creating a vehicle for trust, creating a vehicle for consumers who want to use your platform and your site. And that maybe mixed with a really good ad campaign will make the impact and make a difference. Buying traffic, as we know, is a, it's kind of like a dopamine hit. It's kind of a short term thing. You can get the traffic, but can you keep them? Can you convert them? Right. And then I think let's go back to like really good portals. What do they do? They have really good traffic that trust them and believes in them. They have a great product that ultimately helps get them over to an agent. They have a really great agent that is incentivized to help that consumer to transact. If you don't have that whole ecosystem, it all kind of falls flat from beginning to end somewhere. And look, I can't comment on homes.com's entire ecosystem from beginning to end, but I suspect, and that's part of the challenges where Zillow has built that top to bottom very well. So spend all the money you want on traffic. If they'll show up one time, it doesn't really matter in the end. You know, as you're going through this, I'm just thinking of realtor.com. One of the advantages realtor.com has in the trust department that they've done, I think a good job on over the past couple of years, is part of the news core media empire. Those connections to Wall Street Journal Fox News, right? If you see realtor.com mentioned there, editorialized in there, if you see their data and data reporting there, that builds up consumer trust. Oh, I'm reading this in the Wall Street Journal. This must come from a credible source. All right, there's a lot to unpack on what you just said. It's a two part question. So part one is, if we're thinking about co-starrenhomes.com, is unseating the number one portal, the right metric for success? And then part two, you said, you know, what they're doing is not kind of the right path to unseat them. What is the right path? Yeah, so on your first question, look, everybody wants to be number one. Nobody gets into anything to say, I want to be a really good number two. Now, with that being said, there is an argument to be made that being a really good number two and a market the size of the US, or the market the size of some of these other countries we talk about, that's not a bad business model, right? And in some of these markets too, the difference between number one and number two is not that big of a gap. So again, it's not terrible to be number two, but again, when you're a public-a-traded company and you have shareholders to appease, and egos and pride and everything else in the mix, nobody wants to be number two. Let's just put it that way. Nobody puts a billboard up, this is we're happy to be number two. So there's that. Now, but again, can you have a very nice business model being number two? Absolutely, you totally can. And I think that's where like, by the way, when I take a look at what co-stars done by buying the portal in the UK, and the name is slipping in my mind right now, but right move has historically been the leader. Zubla was like kind of that number two. I think co-stars' whole idea is like, hey, we can buy somebody who's close and inject a bunch of money of them, and neither make them number one. Or by the way, maybe they also don't mind being number two, 'cause again, there's heavy cash and heavy margins in this business. So again, not the tariff, not the worst thing in the world, right? Earlier in your first instance, you said it's not the right path. Boy, it's a great question. I guess it's why I'm not, you know, is sitting there making these decisions right now to be, you know, in those rooms. Look, I think again, So there is a right path which is yes, you have to make investments. Yes, you have to go find traffic, no doubt. At the other side of the table though, you also have to have the value propositions that work for consumers and work for brokers and agencies, your brokers and teams as well. So it's kind of this perfect marriage of you have to spend the right amount of money with the right product that ultimately satisfies the consumer, builds the trust, builds the attention, builds the repeat behavior by the way. Like when I was in Dubai, I was always saying we need to have a zestimate type of a model because that actually gets people to keep coming back to the site. I've owned my same home for 15 years. I really have no reason to go back to Zillow but the reason I keep going back is because I want to check my zestimate. And so like having that like return mechanism to continue to have that traffic come in, having the right product set that allows me to see all the homes that are available, get pre-approved, be educated about the process, and then ultimately go to the right team that's going to help me. That's also going to make me feel that level of trust I just felt with the portal. Like all that stuff has to come together. And like it sounds a little serendipitous and you know Disney like, but I think in some ways Zillow kind of created that at one point in time in this kind of perfect storm, whether it was you know first mover advantage, you know the right brand, the zestimate, the right products, the right teams, realtor.com also kind of stopped investing in being a competitor if you remember going back to you know 2017, 2018, so Zillow really had a chance to rise above. So also there's a little piece of this where is it a little luck that's involved to? Yeah, there's a little touch of that right and I'm not saying that like in a portal across the world is lucky but like it all kind of has to work together at the same time to some extent. Well if consumer trust is so important, you need I think you need to be solving real problems for consumers. So the portal in the UK is on the market and that's the one the co-star required. They're kind of that number three position. But if you go way back and if you go to my website you can search for on the market and I wrote some stuff about them in 2017, 2018 when they started and same thing they started as a reaction to the dominant pricing power of the number one portal and again I forget. I don't know if they were started by brokers and agents but they were definitely started by an association that was very closely tied to them. But the problem I had with them at the time and I think it's pertinent just as much today as it was back then was they weren't solving a problem for consumers. Right? What's the problem for consumers? You're right. You want to go online you want to find all the houses for sale. Well I've already got that. I've got that in right move in Zoupla in the UK in the US. I've got that with Realtor Redfin in Zillow. I don't need a fourth option to do that. It's like what is the actual problem that you're going to solve for consumers? So what I think is also interesting here so to go back to the co-star and homes.com conversation right. So they've been advertising very heavily all this neighborhood data that they have more data points in a neighborhood than anybody else does. Well I think Zillow and Redfin and Realtor and your local agent kind of do anyways right? So there's nothing new there that's like wow I can't believe they have access to that. Well they were doing more. I remember I had David the former president of homes.com. He was in my class. He was on the podcast and he talked about that. So if you're listening and you want to dive in you should check that out. But I mean they had a thousand people that they hired and they threw the neighborhood stuff and he was showing off the videos they created and whatnot. I don't think Zillow has that. Does it matter? I don't took consumers? I don't know. But at the time I mean listen I'm a pragmatist and a realist. There's only so much you can do. If somebody gave me a billion dollars and said compete with Zillow or go after it. These aren't horrible options. They're probably good options that are in the top five of what you should be doing. By traffic. Okay cool. How can we compete? All right neighborhood data. Maybe that's the pivot that consumers care about. Because they can't do a home valuation that already exists. You can't do home search. Well home search already exists. Yeah. Well, and I think what's also interesting is that you're listing your lead conversation with the market. I think that that value proposition made sense probably in a board room or when you think about agents who have been pissed and unhappy at Zillow for years and years and years about the way their listings are marketed. I just don't know if it ends up having enough juice in the marketplace. Well, I think it's great. It's a great rallying call for agents. You can imagine if there were agents picketing Zillow headquarters that would kind of be on their sign, right? My listing my lead. That's what agents typically don't like about Zillow in that model. But for consumers, to consumers care. And I don't think so. I mean, I think about these kind of classic business strategy Clayton, Christensen, the jobs to be done. Like consumers, if they're on Zillow, they don't care about any of the stuff that you think they do. They just want a question answered or they really they want it to or the home. Yeah. Which, by the way, is usually why when a bunch of angry agents or angry brokers get together to create that third portal or fourth portal in the marketplace, it doesn't work because their focus is usually on what's right for the agent. Right. And it goes back to what I've said several times. What's right for the consumer is ultimately the win. The outcome is dependent upon the total amount of consumers who trust you at the top of the funnel who can funnel down to the very bottom and work with an agent at the end. And so that whole, you're listing your lead thing. Yeah, it's a great rally cry. It's a great short term hit of like, yeah, come work with us because you've been pissed off for years. But again, kind of an empty calorie thing. I've seen, I've seen worse examples around the world of challenger portals trying to disrupt the status quo. I've seen worse. I think co-stars effort in the US is a super solid effort. Right? They're not, you can't point to it and say like that's a whorble to stay correct. This isn't working, right? And if you have the cash and that's how you can compete, go for it, you know, by traffic. But what I want to fast forward to is, has it changed the competitive landscape today in a meaningful way? I don't, I mean, you know, I'm on here to give you my opinion. I don't think it has. Yeah. Now again, I go back to, is it okay to be a number two portal in this marketplace? Of course. Absolutely. Like if you can unseat realtor, which by the way, realtor, you know, I keep hearing is doing some really great things. And, you know, I hear agents and teams are very happy with realtor. And so, and that's kind of been a curve that's come back to some extent. You know, we haven't talked about Red Fan and Rocket and obviously the cash they have now. But if you take a look at, you know, co-star if they can be number two and, you know, and kind of eat at Zillow a little bit and kind of, you know, nip at them kind of an ongoing basis and maybe disrupt and, you know, cause them enough disruption over time, then it certainly could be a good strategy. Well, I just don't think the ecosystem has really changed what's today compared to even five years ago. Yeah. If we look at, you know, a variety of different metrics. I don't think, you know, so what's the timeframe? So let's say over the past five years and, and all the disruption going on in portal wars has, has traffic changed. I think the answer is no. I've done this research and that was really interesting is that the traffic is additive, right? Consumers will look at more than one website. So homes.com's increase in traffic, which has been substantial, whether they're buying it or not. It's not substantial. It has not come with the expense of any of the other portals. Yeah. And, and it's not like, oh, a little bit. It's zero. If you look at that stuff, it just has not come at the expense. So consumers will look at a number of portals. If you look at revenue has, has homes.com's, man, that's a mouthful to say, has, has their revenue come at the expense of any of the other portals? Theoretically, you have to say, yeah, a little bit because that share of wallet. Right. There's only so much there. Yeah, there's only so much. You can't just kind of conjure, unless you do the US treasure, you can't conjure money out of nothing, right? So, so theoretically, it has to. But the quantum of revenue is relatively low. I think the last quarter I looked, homes.com's revenue was about one-seventeenth that of Zillow's. And it's hard to compare apples to apples and apples to oranges. But the point is, the revenue numbers are low enough, where I don't think it's had much of a material impact. Right. Agreed? Yeah. And to your point, too, it has to come from somewhere. So, has it been, you know, a little bit, you know, chipped off of, you know, some of the other guys? So, yeah, probably just some extent. Or maybe, you know, as I say that and listen to you, or maybe not, you know, maybe there's the traffic. Yeah, maybe there's a big team. Yeah. Right. The 300 agent flex team or realtor.com VIP Pro, whatever team. And they're like, oh, homes. I've seen this super bowl commercials. Right. The salespeople are really, they won't stop calling. Sure. I'll try it out and see what happens. To your point earlier, too, that they're still, and this is obviously a fact, Zillow only still plays in a small percentage of the marketplace transactions that happen, right? You know, if there's going to be, you know, four and a half million transactions or whatever the number is this year, Zillow is playing in a very small amount of those transactions. So it could be net new consumers, net new eyeballs that are showing up to some extent, you know, new teams all of a sudden, they're like, hey, I haven't, maybe I tried Zillow 10 years ago. I've been unhappy ever since I'm going to try it. So there's, it's not a complete loss. And so to my point earlier, I say waste of money and the super. That's probably not completely accurate. But again, when I go like, can you unseat number one? No? Can you be a very nice number two? Absolutely. Right, so then if we look at Holmes.com and has it changed the status quo, maybe we're positing no in these financial metrics? I don't think it's changed the competitive position. It hasn't really harmed any of the existing portals. It's certainly interesting to watch, to say, "Okay, if you hand a bunch of smart people a billion dollars and say disrupt the portal landscape, different than what's happened overseas. When you get these little upstarts in the UK or Sweden or New Zealand or Australia, they are not funded anywhere near this level. So now we kind of have the answer to say, "Okay, this is what happens there." So you really need to distill it down to, "Okay, then just is it a quote-unquote successful business financially? You're spending this much, you're making this much." And it's no secret, right? Now, Holmes.com is spending a lot more money than it's making. Which again, that's how you grow businesses, right? And people always tell, you know, it's a bit of a hail Mary, but people always use the example of Amazon or Tesla. Oh, yeah, well, they lost money for 10 years. And that's fine and true, but you can't have that as like the one example for every company that loses money. Not every company that loses money eventually becomes Amazon or Tesla and then makes a lot of money. Well, I think you also have to look at the long-term play there as well. Like, you know, I don't think Andy Florence has any intentions of doing this for a year or two and then just seeing what happens, right? This is a long-term play for shareholders, this is a long-term play for the business. And we've also seen some, you know, Realtor kind of took a step back a number of years ago. And kind of was, you know, they were very third, very fourth system extent. Now they've showed back up again. So this is an ecosystem that's only going to continue to evolve. Yeah. What I, so what I think is interesting though is, so I've been playing around with online with my content library and this Ask Myke AI chat feature. And the magic there is I've layered a couple different AI chat bots with different roles on top of each other. And one of those roles is the skeptic. And its job is to assume the other AI is wrong and point out the areas that's wrong. And I think this is maybe, you know, if we answer the question, has co-star and homes.com entry changed the status quo? I think this is where the question is most interesting and gets to yes. I think it has from an optical standpoint, right? They're basically, I mean, as a company, they're out there and they're criticizing Zillow's every move in very loud, very big ways. And bringing, you know, really shining light on how Zillow makes money, right? Homes.com calls it the lead diversion model. And they're talking about your listing, your lead, right? And in the, you know, co-star is also active in the UK and in Australia. And whether it's Quinson, it's not both markets. The leading portals are facing new pressure around the same thing, right? It's been raising prices year after year for doing, you know, not a whole lot more. Your customer's kind of hate you. Nope. What do you get? Like this is not okay. So I think as a disruptive skeptical force, really challenging the status quo in a loud and sometimes pretty abrasive way, it is kind of forcing a bit of a reckoning. Whether it flows through or not, I'm not sure. But it is forcing people to really ask those questions and look carefully at, you know, how they're spending their money, which websites are going to. And what the future of that looks like in this cycle of where we're at right now. Well, and keep in mind, too. I agree with everything you just said. And keep in mind, competition is good for everyone. So, you know, if a fifth player, all of a sudden, showed up tomorrow, it's not a bad thing for everybody involved. Now, is it good for the number one in the marketplace? No, it's not because it is disruptive. And they do kind of create skepticism. And they do put doubt in the mind of everybody else. And they will steal like little pieces of your revenue from time to time. And they may even sue you, you know, as we've seen. But, you know, competition is good. It's good for the consumer. It's good for the agent. The agents all want more competition because it allows them to diversify their offerings. And so it's not a bad thing. I mean, you know, looking good, other point to other industries as well. I think when electric vehicles started to come out, you know, every gas powered automaker was like, this is terrible. This is worthless. These cars are bad. Let's look at the negatives. Well, here we are fast forward, you know, I guess, you know, 12, 13 years later. I guess maybe even more, like, almost 20 years later, right? And, well, there's more people driving electric vehicles than ever. And now all the gas powered automakers are getting into the electric vehicle game, right? So it does create good things with the consumer over time. Right. Yeah. And that's kind of the beauty of the free market deciding, you know. You can have as many corporations talking about as many things as you want, but eventually consumers will make their own decision, hopefully, and, you know, buy an electric vehicle or a gas vehicle. And we have the same thing in the real estate space in the US, the portal space, right? Agents can vote with their wallet where they want to spend money and who they want to partner with. On a variety of factors, right? If you're with Zillow, it flex, you've got this really interesting model where you don't have to pay upfront, you pay a referral fee, that referral fee has gone up a little bit over time, and it's a big number. But, you know, it is what it is. And you have, you know, you kind of, you're in Zillow's ecosystem, the super app. And there's this ancillary push. So you're kind of playing by Zillow's playbook. Nobody's, you know, nobody's forcing anyone to be in that program. There's no gun to anybody's head saying you have to be a Zillow flex agent. Right? You are free to come and go. And that proposition is different. It's realtor, it redfin now with rocket, and at homes.com, the your listing your lead, you get certain things. And then consumers can decide too. I mean, that's just, you're just typing in a different URL. Right? So I think the beauty of the system is we're not forcing anybody to do anything. Yeah. People can choose. And they're going to choose based on what the inherent value they get out of it. And I get into problem solved, a real problem that I actually have solved for a good value. 100%. And, you know, I think you and I have had this conversation too. There is a life cycle for every tech company in the world. And I do think that, you know, there's an interesting timing here for co-star or for for anybody in this marketplace right now. Whereas, you know, we're in a disruption period of time right now with with AI. For the longest time consumers, you know, a subset of consumers thought they could sell their own homes and buy their own homes without an agent anyways. AI is only going to democratize more and more of that as time goes on. You know, and I do think that there is this like, there's a life cycle of consumers where, you know, will our kids and our grandkids still use Zilla one day? I think the answer is probably going to be no. And so those who kind of show up today, you know, do have a chance to unseat somebody at some point in time. So, you know, again, I go back to my first comment was waste of money. Well, maybe today, but is it will be a waste of money if we look back 10 years from now? Did they spent this billion dollars or whatever they did? Because this life cycle that consumers typically have with brands, you know, you go back to, you know, the AOLs and the Yahoo's and even Facebook has had a shelf life, right? Everybody has kind of a shelf life. Now, it's not me saying that, you know, Zilla's going to fall off tomorrow and we're no longer going to use it. But just if you look at the time test of kind of tech brands over time, there is a little bit of a fall off that tends to happen. So, it'll be fascinating to see what will our kids start to, you know, migrate to homes.com for whatever reason at some point in time. I don't know. There is a story to watch their years from now. Well, I think there's an interesting kind of one to punch here going on again going back to this optical battle and creating disruption. Right? If you, the fur, you know, if it's a one-two punch, the first punch is creating foot, right? Fear, uncertainty, disruption. But for that to really land, you have to do the second punch, which is to take advantage of that disruption to build something and compete and have strength. So, you know, co-stars going out in multiple markets creating, creating, fun in different markets and challenging the status quo, it needs to be well positioned to move really, really fast and capitalize that. And I think the companies that are going to be best positioned to do that are those with almost nothing to lose. Right? Classics start up strategy. Right? If you have existing customers and revenues and shareholders and quarterly earnings, you're going to be really cautious. Yeah. But if you're a private business or close to private, you have a fast decision making process and you really have nothing to lose by giving something to go. I think those companies are going to be the ones that will get the market share gain over time. Well, to your point, you still have to have a really good product. You still have to be able to create trust. You can't just have the consumer come in the front door and have nothing to offer them because they'll go out the back door very quickly. You know, interestingly enough, we saw this in the streaming business with Netflix, right? Like Netflix was kind of the first mover in the streaming business. They still are the 800 pound gorilla today, even though everybody has a streaming platform now. But why do people continue to stay with them? They have, they have the most supply listings in the scenario. They have the trust because I know every time I turn it on, the app's going to work. And I'm going to get what I need. And you know, everybody's kind of been eating it them for the longest time now, right? And so if I showed up to them back then or I showed up to them now, they don't have something to offer me. I go out very fast. And again, I think the same thing goes here with with the portal businesses as a consumer wherever I show up. If there's not something for me that allows me to get my questions answered to get pre approved for a big scary mortgage to help understand. the best place to buy, with the way the market's moving, and ultimately work with an agent I trust and love, well then forget it, I'm out. And that exit process happens very quickly for consumers. And we even used to see this where consumers would fill out lead forms with, even though they didn't know they were becoming a lead always, with multiple places. I see a home on Zelo, I see a home on homes, I see a home here, who kind of gets to me first and builds that relationship, then it's agnostic to who the portal is to some extent. But the portal builds that relationship with that agent to create that back to the consumer. So the bar is so high though, isn't it? I mean, if you're a portal like Zelo, I mean this was your job, right? You can only do so much. You have to rely on an agent as the critical last mile partner, and there's tens of thousands of them and they're dizzy, unavailable, on vacation. You just don't know, you can only control so much of that. So we had this period of time. I remember going back to my early days a premier agent where that trust conversation started to come into play, because we noticed consumers were filling out lead forms, and nothing was happening with them. And then what does the research say? Was Zelo never called me back? And so what we noticed too is it wasn't OK just to take a credit card from any agent who wanted to buy leads on the platform. And I think this was where the evolution really started of the Concierge program really got-- was mandated. Flex now is a thing where you're kind of seeing the high-tie rises all boats. But yeah, there was this period of time where it was like, well, just because they have a credit card doesn't mean they're a great agent for our platform. And I think that's where you saw Zelo go from, probably at the peak over 100,000 premier agents to 80,000 to-- we hear numbers almost half of that today-- kind of by design, right? So again, if you don't have that agent on the other side, who can create that relationship, there's trouble. Which by the way, I know we're going to talk about Redfin and Rocket. Redfin's kind of historically had this beat on them that they don't-- that their agents haven't always been like the top notch in the market. However, when now you control the agent marketplace, and you have the cash, and you control the mortgage marketplace, you do have the opportunity to light some really good dynamite there on fire, because you have control. And that's the challenge that Zelo has always had. Homes.com has, Realtor has, every portal across the world has, you don't control that last mile. And that does become a challenge for you. So you have to work really hard on the upfront, right? The data, the-- again, I go back to Zelo with the Zestimate, right? It's something that keeps me coming back on going. Whether the Zestimate is accurate or not, does it matter? Because it is a great tool to get me to keep coming back and to keep building trust and see that homepage and feel good about what I'm seeing. So there's a lot there, but controlling that last mile is incredibly important still, no matter where you are. Yeah. All right, so you mentioned Redfin and Rocket having this degree of control. And I think that's a good opportunity to kind of pivot into this next section, really talking about the end-to-end ecosystem, this holy grail of real estate. So maybe we'll come back to the Rocket Redfin thing in a second. But the holy grail of real estate, like let's just talk about that. I mean, this isn't anything new, right? People have been trying portals, companies have been trying to capture the entire transaction for a decade plus now. What's your experience? Like what have you seen with that? Is it possible? Well, so I think trust has kind of been the word we've used so much, right? So what really is a value here is when you are able to control the process from beginning to end, and you're able to do it with a level of trust. Consumers are going to want to work with you from beginning to end. And they're going to want to come back to you again. They're going to want to refer their friends and family and everybody else to you. So when you don't control the agent transaction, when you don't control the mortgage process, when you don't control Title and Eskro, all these weird things that kind of like have to happen as part of the transaction. And then not to mention the millions of documents and emails and everything else that just happened by nature of buying a home, it does become challenging for the portals themselves. Now, when you take a look at Rocket and Red Fan, and now they're able to say, we control the portal, where you're going to enter in the ecosystem, we control the agent who's going to connect with you and talk to you and work with you. We can train them, script them, coach them, teach them with our data, everything. We now control the mortgage process from beginning to end as well. And like we truly control it because they can talk to each other and be friends in that relationship. And now we own maybe not the whole last mile, but pretty much the entire last mile. I do think that they have an advantage all of a sudden. And we don't see that across the world very often. I think they're very unique today in this. But they don't control the agent. If it's an employed agent, they quote-unquote, lowercase C, control them. Accurate, yes. But if it goes out to their agent network, it's the same as the Zillow thing, right? They can lightly influence them. Well, but I wonder the overtime, like what that will look like if they will lowercase C, control more of them as time goes on. Can you, I just love saying it. Can you lowercase C, control agents? Well, I think that there is-- I think we're seeing ways to lowercase C, control these agents. And I think that-- and listen, let's be honest with ourselves, we're seeing this right now in the lawsuit with Zillow and the class action lawsuit where they have created a system where they are trying to control or controlling flex agents or partner agents. And what's happening now is results of that is we're seeing this lawsuit where this group of consumers are saying, well, hold on a second. I thought I had freedom in this process, but you kind of dictated me to this mortgage company over here, which you own. So there are ways to do it. And Zillow is kind of lowercase C, control the agent ecosystem for a long time. But no, you can't control everything. You don't have access to the way they communicate, all their emails, you don't have access to the things they say, the phone calls they pick up and make. So no. But there's levels and degrees of it, I think. So what is it about Rocket Plus Redfin now that's materially different in terms of a portal, let's say, exerting influence on that? Well, so-- Is it the mortgage side? I do think it's the mortgage side. OK. All right. And we're hearing very high attachments in the marketplace right now. We're hearing numbers as high as 60% plus in terms of attach rate, which by the way, that's also the kind of holy grail we've been talking about for a long time in the portal business. It is great. You can get the consumer. You can get them to the agent. You can get a piece of the referral transaction that's great. But how do we get more and how do we grow over time and mortgages the way to do it? So now, if you're able to attach it that high of a level, and what I assume levels that will grow over time as this relationship gets more and more meld together, then it does become a great relationship all of a sudden. I think it does become good for the consumer, which puts them in a unique position. What have you learned about this from your time it Zillow offers? I've learned that there is, by the way, really good power in the ability to hold the consumer's hand from the very beginning to the very end. And whether that trust is there or not, you create an illusion of trust. So let me say it from the standpoint. During the Zillow offers days, we had consumers who already trusted us because of the zestimate. That's how they came in. And they raised their hand and they said, I looked at my zestimate. You had a little box by that that said, I should get a cash offer. And now I'm here, right? Then we had a Zillow team of Real Estate agents, my team, who reached out and talked to these consumers. Then these consumers said, wow, I really love that experience. That person I talked to made me feel good that I trusted them. I trusted Zillow. I trusted them now. Then we got them an offer. Then we sent an inspector to their house who went in and said, hey, don't you have a lovely home here, right? And then we called them back and we said, good news. Your offer looks really good. Trust continues to build, build, build. Then all of a sudden we said, by the way, you can sell your home to us. No problem. You want to buy a home. Great. Here's one of our trusted partners. By the way, we have a trusted mortgage partner. So like beginning to end, that became really important. Now, I think this is where I look at Redfin and I look at Rocket and I go, they have that ability to some extent now to be able to own that process from beginning to end and create that trust that the other portals don't really have the ability to do fully. But on this-- OK, that's helpful. On the Zillow offer side, what did you learn from going through that? I learned that consumers want their hand held. Yeah. By a human being. By a human being. Yeah. At the time, yeah. I think today you would think about engineering the process a little bit differently. Going back 2018 through 2021, I think it was-- we were growing so fast. It was very human engineered. But yes, by a human being to allow me to feel like this process is simple, safe, secure, and I'm going to get everything I need and want out of this transaction. Do consumers want to get everything from one place? I don't think consumers know that going in. I don't think consumers think about that going in. But I think once they realize they can, then they want to opt in. Assuming that they trust that they're getting the right mortgage, the best mortgage, that they're signing their documents in the right place, the safe place. that they're getting the agent that they trust and believe in and all those things. Yeah, there's an analog here with just a real estate agent. It's the same thing, right? If you're working with an agent you trust, you may get a respa compliant mortgage referral and title everything, right? It all comes from there. I'm just thinking about my own personal experiences and what I've heard in the industry. I mean, it's exactly the same, right? Yeah, yeah. By the way, I always go back to, you can't unseat the local agent. Right. I know this whole podcast, anything we talk about is about pornoles and zillow and the wars that exist and homes and all this stuff. But by the way, you can't unseat the local agent who knows everything about the marketplace, knows the trusted vendors, knows the trusted mortgage partners, knows how to pick up the phone and make you feel safe and secure through the process. You can't unseat that. And so I think this is the other thing. You know what I mean? Everybody always talked about like, well, you know, the pornoles are going to put the agents out of the business and tech's going to put the agents, no, it's not. No, because at the end of the day, a good local agent, now good is the word here that we have to emphasize because there's a lot of agents and not everybody's trained at the same levels and everybody's doing it full time as a profession. But the good local agent, I would put that up against the seamless end in portal experience any day. Hmm. What's the lesson to be learned there if you're a portal? I think you have to figure out how do I create an experience that causes a consumer to feel like everything is there, everything's one stop shop. Everything is available at my fingertips. Somebody's going to answer the phone 24/7. None of this, like, you know, the teams out of the office, weekends, holidays, anything else. The lesson is like you have to be on 24/7. Because by the way, the good local agent will be, you know, you talk to any agent, they'll tell you they feel calls and tell midnight 1 a.m. some nights. Yeah. And, you know, they know what's happening in those marketplaces and good trust and good relationship is built with those little moments. And so I think the lesson for the board is, how do you recreate that? It's a very difficult thing to recreate. Well, here's an example that I've heard and I love to say this as much as I possibly can because I think it's great. This came from Brittany Hodeck, who's written a great book called Creating Superfans. But the idea is, you know, in an organization, create a chat room or a Slack room or something like that where everybody can just kind of pop in the best consumer experiences they've had in their everyday day life. Right? You have to call your health insurance company or you go to the grocery store. If you had a great experience, you pop it in there. And you think about how can I take that and translate it to what we're doing right now. Maybe a pop in my head is you were talking through this 24/7 no vacations, no weekends. Right? I mean, you get it. I mean, in the past 24 hours, I've had to call phone numbers and I've talked to human beings and I've talked to robots. You know, and I've had to go through phone trees and I've had to leave messages. You know, there's good experiences and bad experiences there. Yeah. And it seems like based on what you're saying and what we're talking about, that leads to trust. Yeah. If it's done well. It's not the big moments that we tend to focus on. Like when we talk about this business, we talk about like shopping, right? Like so I'm online looking for a home. That's like a big moment. Well, okay, that's a big moment in the eyes of the tech companies or the portals whomever else. I think in the eyes of the consumer, like they're browsing and, you know, they're looking to see what's out there, right? The other big moment is like getting pre-approved. So, okay, yeah, filling those documents, that's important. Yes, there's no denying that. You know, the other big moment is like dates and times to go to or a home. Yes. But you know, it's way more important than dates and times to to or a home. It's who shakes your hand and greets you and is on time and is there when you show up to go see the home. You know, the pre-approval letter and everything is great, but it's the person that calls you and makes you feel good about the fact that you just got pre-approved and we're so excited to go on this journey with you. And, you know, now we can look at homes and ex, you know, ex dollar amounts and like, again, it's those little moments along the way. And by the way, you think about any good consumer experience you have, it's the little moments, right? It's like when Starbucks, you know, you know, sees you over time and now knows your name. And when they see your carpool and they just make the order for you, right? Like that has nothing to do with an app. That has nothing to do with like, you know, ordering ahead or, or, you know, what kind of order you got. So, like, these are those little things. And I think at scale, it does become hard, by the way, for the portals to recreate this experience, which is why, you know, I think again, I always say the good agent still can win no matter what. So, I'm, the question here is, is this ecosystem play a big deal for the industry? What I've said in the past is it is in the sense that the portal wars were non-zero some, meaning, you know, a new portal can come on and it can gain traffic and gain revenue that's not of the expense of anybody else, right? It's, it's kind of a rising tide lifts all boats. It's non-zero some. But the ecosystem play is zero some. In the US, there's only four million transactions in the year. So if rocket is able to capture one more through its ecosystem, that's one less transaction that gets filtered out to the rest of the market. If Zillow captures, you know, a hundred transactions from its super app and Flex Team strategy, that's a hundred transactions that don't get filtered out to the rest of the market. What, what do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think the reality of it is that, you know, this, this play, this ecosystem play and, and it's the right move. It's, it has to be done, right? I think if you want to compete in the future and if you want to create an experience, it's going to continue to bring consumers back to you and, you know, make you feel good about this scariest transaction you'll ever make, then I do believe that the ecosystem play from beginning to end is the right move. Now, you know, I was at Zillow and we started talking super app and Zillow offers was ending and this was kind of the next big play. And, you know, in some ways, they've started to move towards creating this and now rocket and redfin are creating this and, you know, I'm sure we'll see, you know, co star create something like this as time goes on, like it's just natural. They all, there's nothing original anymore. Everybody just, you know, does the same thing and competes. So I do think it's the right move for the portals. Does the consumer ultimately care about it though at the level that we do in the industry? I don't know. You know, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if a consumer says I chose, you know, I chose redfin because Rocky get bought them and everything's housed in no, like consumers don't usually say that consumers will say something like, you know, I heard from somebody that redfin was really good. So I use them and this was my experience or I heard from somebody that Zillow had a mortgage company and I can kind of do it all there. So that was great. But like, do the consumers kind of consumers are not as educated beginning to end as we give them credit for? Right. Right. And if a consumer uses the Zillow ecosystem, the super app, they're kind of bundling stuff for convenience. If a consumer uses the rocket redfin ecosystem, they're bundling for savings. Right. What's, you know, and in red fins or rocket acquisition documents, they talked about basically they're inferring this 20k savings number, right? And they're not exactly writing 20k checks to consumers. Maybe they don't know. But will consumers care about savings? Will they care about a number? How big does the number have to be? Hey, didn't Redfin try this for a couple decades and it didn't really move the needle? That's a great question. Will consumers care about the savings? I think, I think in theory, I think if it's market of the right way, consumers will say yes, they care. But what they really care about is does everything go smooth and seamless. I would trade savings for a safe, seamless, smooth experience. By the way, it's the same as like, you know, people will always tell you the number one thing that matters to them in their career is money. Like I care about money. I want to make more money than everybody else, right? It's actually not the number one thing. It's usually like 1a, 1b, you know, however you want to do that. Usually it's like fulfillment. It's like your wise, you know, being fired on. It's like you get to work on things you love. It's like environment. It's like culture. All that stuff. Money usually is like secondary. No, they'll tell you. Well, if I don't make X, I won't work here. But in reality, all the other things like the psychological safety and impact of your career is way out ways like if I make, you know, a hundred thousand or a hundred and ten thousand, right? And I think it's kind of the same thing here. I think with consumers, like they would say to you, I want to save all this money, yes, but not at the expense of a poor experience. So I think they'll come in that way and it's a great marketing tactic. But if the experience doesn't add up, it still doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Yeah. I think that's probably the big aha moment for me out of this is I think about the ecosystem play as a pretty mechanical financial tool, right? You know, X plus Y equals Z-Save Ains or your bundling. But based on what we've chatted about so far today, it's this idea of trust and the experience and the little things that are really going to make this work. Yeah, it's the little moments. It really is. I know agents who will say all the time that, you know, it's those little phone calls along the way that ultimately add up. It's those little conversations that, you know, meeting somebody at the local Starbucks because they are scared about their process that they're going through to try to buy and sell a home. It's those phone calls at 1130 at night. It's those emails or those texts that say, "Don't worry, I got it. I'm on it." And, you know, I do think that's difficult for the major tech companies to ultimately try to recreate a seamless as that solo agent can. But, you know, again, if you can recreate it completely great, if you can create the illusion or the optic of it, that's great as well. But, if you can't deliver on it, and I'm not saying these guys can't deliver on it, but if you can't deliver on it, it also won't matter over time either. So, this isn't anything new. Companies have been trying to do this end-to-end ecosystem. system play for at least a decade. Correct. Why is it different now? I'm not sure. I'm not sure it is. And I'm not sure that, again, I'm still not sure that it matters for the consumer. Again, I think the marketing element of it is nice for the consumer. And that creates the optical illusion of like, this is the place to get it all done. But I'm not sure that it's going to make this big material impact as time goes on in the industry. And we're going to look back and go, that's the only way you want to buy and sell a home one day. Like I, you know, I'm not sure our kids or our grandkids will change the way they buy and sell a home because of this like seamless end-to-end process. I don't know. I mean, you know, and I think the data tells us that, right? Like, there still is a very small percentage of the transactions that are happening in this quote unquote, you know, end-to-end ecosystem. And the numbers aren't doubling and tripling year over year unless I'm missing something year, right? No, it's a grind. It's a grind. And any, it's a very expensive business to be in and too. By the way, you've got to spend billions and millions of dollars to buy these companies to thread them together and to make sure they talk, to make sure they're compliant. There's a lot of lawyers involved. Like, so it's not a thing where we're seeing like this like material change. By the way, I'll always go back to automotive when I start comparing the housing industry to. I think we've still largely buy and sell cars the same way that we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. Yes, okay. There's Carvana, which will deliver a car to your front door and, you know, there's the market places that, you know, are kind of the same. And I can buy a car across the country and have it shipped and whatever else. And I can get a value for my car. But, you know, it still doesn't beat the experience of like going in and talking to somebody and understanding I'm really getting the right deal and the best deal. That's the local dealer. And so like, again, like, I think everybody's trying to disrupt all this stuff because it makes sense. And that is a great marketing story. And it's a great story for shareholders. And it's a great story to get consumers to show up. But does it ultimately matter? I don't know. Time will tell. Yeah. I think why it may, why it might matter or why it's a big deal now is the same way that it's basically rocket, right? You have a very, very well-funded, deep-pocketed player able to do this. I'd say it is a scale that has not been attempted before. So in the same way that co-star was coming in to try to disrupt the portal landscape, what's interesting about that is same thing. Very, very large, profitable, well-funded company able to throw a scale of resource behind it that we haven't seen yet. So that's what's new. That's what's new in 2526. And that's why it's worth watching to see what actually happens here. Cash does matter. Yeah. There's no denying that. And so I think when you win the rocket Redfin announcement was made, I do think a lot of us in the industry went, oh, OK, this is different. They have a lot of money and they have a mortgage product that has already been heads above everybody else. And so now they're coming in to try to disrupt this. Yeah, then I have to think that if you know, I have to think that the executives of Zillow paused for a minute and went, oh, OK, because Zillow kind of announced in 22 that this like super rap was going to be the next thing. And in some ways they've moved that way. And some ways they still are just threading things together to some extent. And you know, it's to see then somebody come in with as much cash as rocket has. It does change the game for sure. And I think the other thing the rocket's doing is they're willing to leave money on the table. It's not just bundle. It's bundle and save. And that's a material difference. Right. If somebody taps into that ecosystem, they see a rocket commercial or they go to redfin.com, will they stay in the ecosystem for 20 grand? Yeah. And I don't know what the answer is. But I think the one thing we can say with a high degree of certainty is no matter what happens. It is going to be an incremental grind. And it's not going to be this binary zero to one type thing. It is an absolute grind of a business. And I think that's why when you see a rocket coming with a cash they have, that's why we probably look to them and go, oh, OK, this might be different because they do have that money because it is a grind. It is not a thing that overnight you flip the switch on and you just combine all these businesses together. There's all sorts of marketing messages you have to weave. There's all sorts of legal messages you have to weave. There's all sorts of aligning the internal operation that has to be done. There's aligning the external operation, whether it's the partners or the vendors you're working with. And there's the tech journey as well. There's a massive undertaking that goes into this. And I think, again, will it matter to the consumer? I don't know. I'm curious to see what the Super Bowl commercial would be for that. Not to say that rocket would, but if they did, if they ran a Super Bowl commercial, extolling the virtues of the end to end ecosystem and consumer savings, what would that look like? And think about the impact there. Yeah. Well, funny enough though, when you talk about bundling and saving and all that stuff, there's an industry that does it very well. That's still, it's a grind and it's the insurance business. They've been talking about bundling and saving for years and years. Every weekend when I watch the NFL, progressive and all-state and state farm and everybody tell me all the time, I can bundle and save all my insurance. I still have been with all-state for the last 20 years. And so, it's interesting. Everybody's talking about these marketing messages in an industry that is a much cheaper price point and a much easier thing realistically to move and make a difference on. It shouldn't compare the insurance business to buying and selling a home, but when you talk about that Super Bowl commercial, do I see that and go, no way. I can do it all there or do I go, oh, and do I get skeptical and go, but are they really giving me the best deal? Because I know Steve, my mortgage broker who I've bought and sold three homes with, and I know Paige, my agent down the street here who has helped me buy and sell a number of homes. I trust them explicitly. Am I going to trust the big company? Well, that's the test. Insurance is a commodity. Real estate isn't true. Let's see what happens. True. And it's a really, really great example of watching consumer behavior and action. And, you know what, intuitively, from being in this industry about, I don't know, eight, nine, ten years, and seeing all these examples of things work and not work and being in it and being outside of it watching, I'm more bearish on it because I think, I don't know, the thing I've learned about real estate is if logically it makes sense, the opposite is probably true. It's so counterintuitive. Will it work? Yeah, it'll probably be like this incremental grind. But it kind of goes back to Zilla when the rest of the lawsuit and this idea, like, you've got, Zilla has had to influence its partners to use the mortgage product. You know, it's these carrots and sticks, carrots and sticks. It really comes down to human psychology at the end of the day because the rational arguments perhaps aren't enough to move the needle. Yeah. Well, your whole concept, and I'm going to butcher it a little bit, but your whole concept of like the thing that we think creates the most amount of disruption and actually really doesn't at the end of the day, I think that there's probably a lot to that theory. And again, I'm butchering the exact statements that you've used in the past, which is basically like this thing over here that we're all thinking is going to be like the thing probably isn't because history tells us that like there's so much change that happens in this business. And so, you know, again, but I will say it is the right place to go. It is the right thing to do. If I was a portal today, and by the way, when I was in Dubai, you know, and we're a property finder, like I was trying to, you know, this was one of the things I really wanted to try to enact upon is we had a mortgage company and how do we stitch that into the process? And, you know, how do we ultimately create a better partner network? And how do we, you know, create a more trust and seamless transition? So you come to one place and you buy in sale and you get a mortgage and you're really happy. And that's it. So like, it's the natural place that ecosystem, I think, should go over time. Will it make the material gains we think? Again, I probably said it twice already. I don't know. Is it only natural because real estate portals have kind of tapped out their core revenue streams? Yes, this is a way to grow. Yeah, I mean, look, you said something interesting earlier, which is like everybody kind of keeps raising prices or raising the referral agreement, you know, you know, fee or whatever. And that's normal. When I was in Dubai, we raised prices. I was there for 18 months. We probably raised, we raised prices every month, right? Which is why the other agents started to say, well, start our own platform and undercut you. But like, yeah, you kind of tap out to a certain extent. Commissions aren't going up, right? And by the way, home prices have already flat or down in many markets. So the pool of commissions hasn't really changed yet. The portals are taking more and more and more of that pie to some extent because they have to keep growing. So where do you then find other revenue sources? Well, you find it in mortgage. You find it in, you know, Thailand, Eskir. You find it in two-oring products for the agents. You find it in docuSign, you know, in, you know, digital, you know, sign products for the agents. Like, so you have to keep finding adjacent revenue to some extent. Yeah, but you're, I mean, you're ultimately solving a revenue, a portal's revenue problem, not a consumer problem. Correct. Well, that corrects. Yeah, that exactly, which brings us back to the point of like, will it matter to the consumer? Yeah. Yeah, that is the issue that's being solved, right? Listen, these companies don't start to have stagnant revenue. They don't start to have reduced revenue over time when that happens, people get fired and companies rebrand and remove and whatever else. So the reality of it is, yes, this is a company, this is a portal revenue problem over time that might get shoved onto the consumer as a great seamless, simple way to buy a home. And again, will it work or not? I don't know, is it working or not? Hard to say, but again, back to your point, it's a grind of a process to try to get material gains over time. And again, I'm just not so sure the consumer cares in the long run as much as that early marketing message can resonate, but do they really care when they're going through the process? I think it's to be determined. All right. Yeah, that's probably-- I mean, there's some interesting learnings and insights out of that. And that's probably as deep as we can dig into it. For the third and final part of this conversation, I want to move on to you just said, you're not sure if consumers care about it. And you've been in the world of portals for a while. So what is the thing that-- what's the number one thing that consumers care about when we think about portals? I think we have to go back to why do the consumers show up to begin with? They show up because they're in the early stages of wanting to buy a home, right? Or sell their home, everyone look at it. So the consumer shows up for that reason, right? I'm here to buy a home. I'm here to sell my home, I'm here to buy a home, et cetera. That is ultimately why they're there. That's why they want to work with a portal. That's why they showed up to the portal. And if that gets met, then everything is satisfied for the most part. Now, there's obviously C-SAD and net promoter scores and everything else that happens in between there have actually happened the way we wanted it to happen. But that's why a consumer comes to the portal. And so I think we all have to remember that. Like for those of us who have been in the portal game or aren't it, we have to focus, we have to make sure we're focusing our satisfaction on that end result. And again, I think that's where Zill has done a really good job of creating that trust and allowing consumers to be able to find the data they need, to be able to do the transaction, to be satisfied, to come back again over and over and over again and repeat the process. And so that's where then I go. Do as a consumer care as much about. They can get a mortgage here and the touring product happens here and the best VIP agent in the market according to the portal is like that agent. I don't know. But if you solve that problem of helping me buy and sell home, well, everything else is kind of secondary to some extent. I think what consumers care about 100 times more than that is inventory and seeing all the listings, everything for sale. And that's ultimately at the end of the day. It's kind of the one and only thing that consumers care about when they're choosing a portal to go to. I don't think they know that though until they actually get into the process. And I agree with you by the way, but I don't think they know that until they show up and then they realize, uh oh, like where are the homes? Where is the inventory? Why are the photos not good? And so I guess keeping on that note, yes. So inventory is important. The photos are important. The listing description is important. The real time data being accurate is important. So the second that home goes pending, it says it's pending. So all that stuff becomes very important as well. I don't think they realize it though until they get into the process. So if somebody's, if you imagine a consumer sitting in front of a computer on Zillow, they're scanning, you know, they're on Zillow for 20 minutes and then they open up a new tab and they type in realtor.com. Why did they do that? I, my assumption would be that they went to a different site because, um, because one, they were maybe curious to see if there was different inventory somewhere. Two, they might just not have found the experience to be the right fit for them for whatever reason, right? It's the same reason that like, you know, someone wants to drive a Tesla and someone wants to drive a Rivian. Like, you know, we all have consumer choices that we want to make. But again, I think it does go back to like, well, is there enough inventory? Are the photos right? Is the data right? Do I like the agents I'm seeing? Do I like the, you know, the, maybe price points are different somewhere else? Is data the right way here? I saw a bunch of homes that were already pending. So like, consumers will go through that whole journey as well as they go through it. But like, I think why they'll go to other portals as well? Because, you know, curiosity too, right? I saw that homes.com commercial, right? I keep seeing the, you know, the guy from Shits Creek, you know, telling me about homes.com. And, you know, I'm going to go check it out. I'm curious. So, optionality becomes important for the consumer here. Yeah, I think, so I think that's true, but I want to challenge you. I mean, I think somebody, if somebody sees the homes.com commercials and they pick it up, that's curiosity. Oh, what's this? What's actually there, right? And, you know, if somebody's on Zill and then they go to Realtor, you listed out all the possibilities of why they would do that. But I would really clearly say, I think it comes down to one thing. It's, it's foamotes, fear of missing out. If somebody's on Zill over 20 minutes, and then they open up at Realtor.com tab, it's because they want to make sure they're not missing anything. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's totally fair. And, you know, again, because this goes back to this, is the biggest transaction anybody's ever going to make in their life. Right, right. And so I want to make sure I'm educated on it the way that I think I should be. And again, that's why we've seen the portals do a lot of work around, you know, that education of what's it like to buy and sell home for the first time. And, you know, again, the data that goes into, you know, the home, the neighborhood, the what's it like to get a mortgage. You know, and this is where Zillow did a great job of democratizing this data, because the agent controlled it all at one point in time. And whether they like it or not, you know, the portals do a really good job of helping educate consumers. In fact, I've often argued that, you know, today, when you go to buy a house for the first time, you can get educated on it up to about 75, 80%. Now, that last mile, you need that human to kind of help you walk through the process. There was a time, though, and our parents and grandparents bought and sold homes, where you kind of showed up with no, no, no wing of the process. I mean, I saw this in the middle east, right? Like who owned the data? The agent still owned the data. So you still kind of had to show up to an agent and go, well, tell me about this community and this area and whatever else. We're way past that now in the US. So I'm more educated than ever as a consumer in the US because of the portals. So for thinking about the importance of inventory and listings and fear of missing out, that gets us to, you know, exclusive inventory, which is this other very, very big power move that's happening here. What, when's the first time you read or started seriously thinking about exclusive inventory? It wasn't problem. Well, you know, and actually I'll take it, take this to an end to part. So it was probably when we started Zillow offers, because I remember hearing about Open Door, and Open Door was the first mover in the IBying business. And the narrative internally was, at first, was nothing to really worry about. I think then that kind of came back around at a certain point in time to say, well, hold on a second. If somebody does have the ability to control the audience, control the inventory, and have homes that don't have to be marketed outside of their own portal, that could be a problem. And so I'm not saying that was the reason that Zillow offers was born, but it was definitely a talking point along the way. You know, if Open Door had gotten 5% market share in the top 25 or 30 DMAs, well, that could have been a little bit of a problem. And let work that thread out. So they have 5% market share. They have 25,000 houses that they own at any one time, and those are only listed on Open Door.com. Well, that was the theory, right? Right, right. Yeah. And the risk to Zillow, a portal, is people are going to start going to Open Door.com, and maybe they're still going to Zillow, but we just don't have that inventory. So if they find a home they like on Open Door, and they start clicking the buttons and filling out the forms there, we're, we're shit out of luck. Well, correct. I mean, you just mentioned here a couple minutes ago, which is like one of the reasons that people might leave your portal is because you don't have all the inventory, right? And when I was in Dubai, it was all about supply. We talked about supply all the time. And whether the supply was good or not, it was like, how do you just get more listings and more supply? So yeah, so that was probably the first time I remember really thinking about exclusive listings as being an opportunity or being a problem, if you will. And then, you know, I would go back here just a couple years ago, where, you know, or actually less than a year ago, really where compass really started pushing these exclusives. And I found it in, you know, my day, my day job with with Rene, where we were talking to compass agents, and they were saying to us like, hey, we're really being incentivized to get these exclusive listings. And I was like, well, tell me more. And so that was really where to me, it started, I started to say, well, if compass is going after this, this must be something. And then obviously, you know, the Zillow compass, you know, lawsuit started and here we are today. But I understand though, if you're a portal, why it's a problem. Now, I think you can, you can say it's a problem for consumers and it's a problem for, you know, trusting the marketplace and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it goes back to what we said. If you're a portal who doesn't have all the inventory and somebody else controls a piece of the inventory, you don't have, that's a big problem for you. Now, then you have to debate and go, okay, well, how much is it? Is it a tenth of a point or is it 10% or and what marketplace is it? Then there's a lot of debate from there. I'm with you, Scott. I think it's a big problem. But then if I keep thinking about it and talking about it, I ask myself, I'm like, well, is it, is it really a big problem? Right. Well, yeah, I think, you know, okay, listen, if a, if compass, for example, controlled, let's just use the number of 5%, right? 5 to 10% of all listings in a large market, if we just took the top 25 markets, right? The New York CLAs, the Dallases, the, you know, these large scale markets. Does that become a problem for a zillow for redfin for a realtor, et cetera? Yes, it does. Because now all of a sudden, you've eroded some of that trust, which is, hey, by the way, we have all the listings, like come here, we have all the partnerships with the MLSs, we have all the data real time, up to date, et cetera. And then you can't say that anymore. So that becomes a problem. It also becomes a problem because then all of a sudden, you've kind of confused the consumer to some extent. Because now you're on zillow and you're looking around and then somebody says, by the way, you looked at Compass's exclusive listings. Wait a minute, hold on, I didn't know they had exclusive listings. Now I kind of got to talk to a Compass agent to get the back door access to the listings that are out there that like, do I trust this? Am I, now I'm kind of confused in the process as a consumer? Wait a minute, why do you have these? Why does zillow not have these? So it becomes a problem for the consumer to some extent. But it really becomes a problem for the portals. If now you can't say you have everything that's on the marketplace. Right. And that's where we're at right now. That's what's happening in real time. And if we loop all this back to say the portal wars, I don't think that says any impact on the ecosystem. But if we think about portal wars, right now, the portal's product, we've kind of alluded to this. It's relatively undifferentiated because of the MLS system. The same listings are everywhere. And the product, yeah, the product is undifferentiated. Zillow has the zestimate, which there's some brand benefits to that. And homes.com has some neighborhood information. But consumers really only care about one thing, the listings. So if we get into a world where different portals have different listings, which, by the way, is exactly how the rest of the world work. Correct. You have this in Dubai. And it's the same in every other market that doesn't have an MLS. I mean, we incentivized brokerages to give us exclusive listings in the Middle East. What did that look like? Well, you get a little bit off of your-- you get a little more bonus credits. You get some money off your package. We'd sign you to a long-term deal and give you all sorts of perks and whatever else. Absolutely. And you're in a little bit of a lawless, but a little bit of an unregulated marketplace, a lot of the foreign countries are. You do it. And you do it because you want to control the inventory. So that's kind of interesting. If we play pretend and we're co-starred, we have a billion dollars. And it's four years ago. And we're thinking, oh, how do we differentiate our product? What do we do? If I was in charge-- and if I could have, I would have taken that bill-- well, not all of it. You still got to advertise. But I would have taken that money and done exactly that, build up exclusive inventory. But you can't in the US because it's quote unquote against the rules, clear cooperation, MLS. It's the-- both sides of the coin when you have this broker cooperative marketplaces everywhere. Imagine if you had taken that money-- again, we're playing pretend-- but imagine if you had taken that money and you would have gone to anywhere and compass and let's name EXP and real, right? Let's do that. Let's go to those and Keller Williams. And he said, put your listings on my portal. And we'll give you some kind of cash incentive or discount for your agents or whatever. Yeah, well, I've been a real problem all of a sudden if your Zilla were realtor or whatever. And obviously, like you said, we can't do that. But that is what ultimately wins at the end of the day. Well, we should-- Yeah, and I mean, we got to stay on this because that idea of, oh, we can't do that, that's what's changing right now. That's what's changing. The reason you have to call a compass agent to get access to the listings is because compass cannot put those listings on compass.com without violating a whole bunch of rules and subjecting its agents to fines and out bans from Zilla. But I think it's fair to say that that's being challenged. Yeah. Now, it is terrible for a consumer, though. Like, if we're just going to take that angle, it takes us back to-- it takes us back 20 years all of a sudden now when we think about this business. So it is terrible for a consumer could be great for a portal if we're just talking portals for consumers, right? Or a brokerage. If you're a portal like homes.com, and you've got $100 million to pay out for exclusive listings. And I want to be clear, when we say exclusive listings, there's two ways this could happen. One is exclusive forever, kind of like Netflix content. And then there's also exclusive for a period of time, which can be anywhere from a couple days to a week. And if you think about that kind of infamous compass billboard that I use in all my reporting on this stuff, it's find homes before anywhere else, like a week before they're listed somewhere. So when we're talking about exclusive inventory overseas, it might be exclusive forever. But in the US here, we're really talking about days to a week, just so you can throw that billboard up. If we go back to trust, you want to be one minute ahead of the market. I just need to be two days ahead of the market. And if I can say find listings on Mike Delparty.com two days before Zillow, I'm going to get some traffic. Yeah, 100%. And that's why I laugh because it does go back to, it's the marketing message. It's the marketing message that works. It's why Coastart said, you're listing your lead with agents to get them to turn their heads the other way. It's why compass wants to be able to say, we have listings other people don't, because they want to put the billboard up. And so at the end of the day, it's how do you get that attention of those eyeballs? And so it will be fascinating to see what ultimately happens as this all plays out. I do stand behind. It's bad for consumers. It's fascinating for the industry. But if it plays out in a way that becomes favorable, that exclusive listings are acceptable, well, yeah. If I'm Andy Florence, I might change my thought process with all this money all of a sudden and call up the anywhere's of the world and the exp's and the Keller Williams and say, well, what do you think about just doing exclusive deals with us? Right. It's not a bad idea. And again, I saw it happen. I saw it work in the Middle East. Yeah. I mean, the reason it-- yeah, again, the reason that hasn't happened is because, well, you might think that leaders of these companies-- you might hope that leaders of some of these companies have a moral position on this. And I mean, I don't mean to sound facetious, but they do. You know, some of course. And others, actually, they're like, oh, wow, I could take $20, $30, $50 million straight to the bottom line, pure profit. That sounds great. But then is that getting your agents to do that is that violating their fiduciary duty? It gets into a whole big thing. Well, let me ask you, Mike. Where do you think that this all ultimately plays out with exclusive listings? Not just today, but also for the future, because my belief is this is something that will just continue to boil up over and over and over again as time goes on. Well, I think Compass is really running at it. They're dead set on changing the status quo. And that is the rules that are percolating and have percolated out of NAR and 530 MLSs and Zillow and the real estate portals about what you can and can't do. And what's going on in court is not the legality of private listings. That's not it, right? Compass sued Zillow over the legality of Zillow's listing ban and allegations of collusion and antitrust violations. So there's nothing that's going to happen in court. That's going to change this. This is really just Zillow's listing ban. And if you look at the number of compass exclusive listings over time, which is something I do, and I've published a number of articles on this, it's going up until the right. It's going up until the right, regardless of the amount of op-eds, research, podcast episodes, even Zillow's listing access standards, clear cooperation, rules, it kind of doesn't matter. It's still going up until the right. So we are going to see-- I don't know how it's going to-- well, how is it going to play out? I don't know. I don't know where we're going to get five years from now. Is it going to be this crazy, vulcanized world where there's little pockets and pools of listings everywhere? You know, I like to think we're in a free market. And people will decide based on value. Consumers will decide where to go based on value. Consumers will decide what agents to work with and where to list their homes based on value. Portals will compete on value. My hope would be that it distills out in a way that's generally good for most people based on the value they attribute to the system. Would you list your home with a compass agent exclusively? I mean, I'm one data point. What is that? Well, I'm just curious, because we've been talking a lot about the consumers, right? And now you're also talking about the data going up into the right, but it's not going up into the right that fast, right? Like they're adding listings. But it's not like it's this consumer phenomenon. It's like, I get a material benefit with putting my home with a compass agent. So I always think-- Here's the-- I mean, we're getting into this world of one-off data points, which I generally have for, because there's no value. I'm familiar with a situation where somebody was trying to sell a home and it was overpriced. And I knew it was overpriced. Everybody knew it was overpriced. And it hit the market. And it was overpriced. And nothing happened. And it didn't sell. And there were price reductions and price reductions. And you're going to look at that listing, like the person who bought it would have pulled up that listing. It would have been for sale for 65 days. And it would have had 10% to 15% price reductions in value. What are you going to think when you look at that versus a home that has been priced correctly? Would that home have benefited from a two-week-- free marketing period where you test the price out, maybe, maybe. And should they have the option of doing that or not? That's what's really at stake here. That's the question. - Yeah, I think it's fascinating. Again, from a consumer standpoint, I think there, I don't think if you're trying to buy and you're looking for homes, I don't think it's good for you that these homes exist in these pockets. If you're selling a home, well, might be a different conversation, right? I do get a chance to test out the market a little bit. Maybe I'm thinking about selling. Maybe I'm not quite there yet. And by the way, let's also be honest with ourselves. This has been going on for years and years and years anyways with pocket listings with, you know, you have a conversation with your agent at the coffee shop, they say, you know, let me talk to these five other agents to see if anybody's got anybody ready to go. - Absolutely. It's been happening anyways. It just hasn't been happening in this public landscape that we're seeing today. - Yeah. You know, you're talking about pools and bad for buyers. And I hate getting into a battle of analogies, but you know what, there's a target across the road. And I like not going to target for all of my shopping needs. I like looking around. I like going into boutique stores. I like looking online at different places. I like going to Etsy, right? I don't want everything for sale in one spot. And I understand that as, you know, this is different and it sounds ridiculous, but the reason we have different types of stores, big box stores, small stores, boutique, handmade, small batch, whatever, is because they're filling consumer needs. And they're offering different types of products at different values. So I'm not saying we should fragment, you know, where listings are just for the sake of it. But if there's a world in which listings are fragmented and they're providing a different kind of value that you can't get from having them all at one place and one box store, right? Different benefits for consumers, you know, isn't that worth experimenting and looking at? And that's what I'm curious about. I don't know what the right answer is there. But this idea that, you know, we just automatically come in and say all listings need to be at one place. That is best for consumers. Well, if you start applying that to every other aspect of society, I think you start realizing why you can't just make a dictum like that and say, oh, this has to be true everywhere all the time for everyone. Well, you know, I've used the car buying analogy a couple of times already and, you know, the same thing happens there, right? If I want to go and buy a Land Rover on, you know, through a car marketplace, well, Auto Trader might have seven available in my market and car gurus might have nine and, you know, whoever else, you know, Craigslist or whomever else in that marketplace might have something different. So, you know, and that's the reason they all exist, right? They'll kind of have different value propositions for me to see and look at different options along the way and different inventory. That's not a commoditized space. Real estate is probably the only place where you go online and it's all right there, you know, no optionality. So, yeah, because, you know, whether you want to go to Target or the boutique store or Etsy or whatever else, you do have optionality. And as we said earlier, you know, choice is a great thing for the consumer. A free marketplace is a great thing for the consumer. I mean, I would love if the federal government came out and passed a law saying all TV needed to be on one streaming service. Like, that would be wonderful, wouldn't it? It's kind of like Netflix 10 years ago when it started. It was just, it had everything in it at all the content. It would be great for me. I would love for that to happen. But it didn't, you know? So, I think the point is someone a lot smarter than me needs to make the call and it should not be one of these companies that has a clear bias. Like, they obviously want it to be one or the other. And I know that's not what is in federal court right now, but if this does, I mean, this case kind of starts bleeding in there. And if there were another court case at some point in the future, ultimately that's the right way to solve this. I mean, you can't even ask NAR to do it because NAR is a bias as well. Like, everybody has a bias, right? They want to maintain the status quo. But if you get a, you know, a federal judge or the Supreme Court who really doesn't have a bias, they're looking out for the best interest of, you know, quote unquote, the people, if they command and they make a ruling on it, that's really the best way to do it. Because other than that, we just have, you know, whoever's loudest yelling the loudest making their case. And at the end of the day, you know, you don't know what's, you know, quote unquote, better for consumers or not. Well, imagine a world, this is really going down to pretend time. But imagine a world where, you know, you listed your home for $399 on Zillow and, you know, then on realtor, you listed it for, you know, 408. And, you know, I mean, like, it sounds silly, but like, but like you can see that in other marketplaces where it's like, I'm selling the item on eBay and I'm selling the item on Etsy. I might have two different price points because I might have two different types of consumers. Right? So, or I might, you know, put it over here on Auto Trader to test it. And, you know, over here on, you know, I'm going to sell it to Carvana at a different price or whatever it is. So I don't know, like, again, it's really the only place where you have kind of fixed pricing. The pricing is controlled in one place. And when it changes the VMLS level, it changes everywhere. And, you know, so it does create an interesting experience for consumers. Yeah. Opinions aside, the reality is this is happening. And can compasses doing it? Correct. And compasses announced the intention to acquire anywhere, which will, you know, double their market share. They will keep doing it. So that's the reality we live in. If you're an agent and you don't work at compass and you don't have access to those listings. And, you know, it's a small brokerage that is not part of that network. If you're a medium, large size brokerage that has its own private network. If you're Zillow, realtor, homes.com, like this affects everybody. Yeah. And you need to kind of make a position and start figuring out how you're going to operate in this new world. Because it is, like the end of an ecosystem play, it's, you know, zero sum. There's winners and losers here. There's only so many transactions. Here's a point of the challenge is the biases that exist, right? Like everybody's got an opinion usually tied to market share and revenue, not tied always to what is truly best for consumers on either side of the table. And so it does become the challenge here. Oh, yeah. Somebody told me that a little while ago. They're like, yeah, these people love to plant the flag of consumer and kind of rally behind that. And everybody's got their same flag. And you can come up with this. You can come up with this great case. So it's great because in my mind, just kind of everything cancels each other out. And you're left with the, you're left with a broad data to look at it and to see what's going on. But I think what's beautiful about this industry is agents are, like I, you know, I called agents cockroaches a number of years ago. And I mean, it is a compliment. Like they're survivors, you know, where there's a will, there's a way. Agents are going to do whatever they want. Like, regardless of the rules, if an agent wants to list something, you know, quote unquote private or pocket listing, they're going to figure out a way to do that in that gray area. If a consumer wants to do that, they're going to figure it out. If a, you know, if an agent's going to figure out how to get access to, to quote unquote private listings, right? Because they're all people. If we're looking, if we're here in Boulder, we're looking around. There's only so many agents and they know each other. They know the market. It's just so messy and gray that I think if people want to do something, they're going to be able to, they're going to be able to figure that out at the end of the day. By the way, you say something that it's really interesting to, you know, during my early days at Zillow, I, I saw a world one day where, you know, you could disrupt the agent where you could disrupt, you know, what the local agent, what they're doing, be with all this technology and all this tech. And we really talked about, you know, tech too much, but like, I kind of saw this space one day, right? And now that I've been on the broker side of the business for the last couple of years, I will tell you that the agents are without a doubt the unsung heroes of the entire transaction in the background, whether the consumer started on the portal or not, whether they started through, you know, through rocket as a, you know, pre-approval or whatever, the agent that gets a hold of that consumer is the unsung hero, no matter what. And, you know, they figure out a way to get stuff done. They figure out a way to make it work, unseating the agents. I was, I will stand on this legend, say, it cannot be done. You can make the agent better. You can make the agent smarter. You can make consumer smarter. The agent still has to be at the center of this transaction. So, you know, anybody who continues to think that like, well, agents will be gone one day and AI is going to disrupt all this stuff. No. You will only make the agent better because they, they, they figure out how to really make this thing work at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, I'm a data guy and I love data and evidence and I, I have not seen one bit of evidence to counter what you just said. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think, you know, you go back to like the difficult transactions who solves them the agent and you go back to the transactions where somebody, you know, needed somebody to hold their hand at 11 o'clock at night. Who, who solves that? You go back to the repeat transactions, right? Right? I don't even have to go on Zillow as somebody who's bought and sold a number of homes. I don't even actually have to go on Zillow to start the process. I can just call my agent and say, hey, you know what I'm looking for? Start sending me houses, right? Right. Right. Right. So, I'm going to wrap for a number of reasons. It's a fairly low barrier to entry. There's probably more bad agents, quote, unquote, than there are great agents, like just by virtue of numbers the list goes on. But like the reality of it is is they still continue to state the center. And so when we talk about this exclusive listing stuff, it's being battled out by the big boys. But if you're a good agent who's been doing it for a long time, quietly in the corner over here, a boulder, you're like, you guys keep fighting because I've got my own notebook full of all the listings that I know are coming on the market on the market in my pocket, you don't even know matter what. - Yeah, yeah, you know, as we wrap this up, I'm thinking of something else, someone told me when you were talking about agents, right? They get a bad rap. Someone told me they kind of equated real estate agents to congressmen, right? Everybody hates real estate agents, but they love their agent. - Right. - And I think that's an interesting way to look at it, you know? People generally maybe they dislike congressmen and women, but they like theirs, right? For their district. So there's a differentiation there. It would be foolish to assume that, you know, that the low NPS score that real estate agents as a category get mean that people don't want to use them. - Correct, correct. - Yeah, there's a reason that, you know, the agent that you've used on multiple transactions, you know, has a, you know, 4.9 star rating right now in their Zilla review, and has done hundreds of transactions over the last couple of years, because they're doing something right. And, you know, again, I think there was a period of time where I probably bought into this idea of somebody could become the Amazon of real estate and someone could kind of unseat real estate agents and brokerages and all this stuff. - Yeah. - No, no. And I will live on that, I'll live on that ledge, I think for a very long time, because even with all the disruptions we're seeing right now, I still don't see a future in which anything changes. - Right. All right, so what's close up any other final thoughts you'd want to throw in? - I've covered a lot of ground. - We sure did. - I like that, I like we talked, no, I just about the US marketplace, but also the international marketplace, too. I think it's very fascinating that if you've only lived and worked in the US, and I think you see how things can operate here, but happening all across the world is the same problem for the most part, and regulated and somewhat unregulated marketplaces. Consumers are just trying to figure out how to make the largest transaction of their life work. And it doesn't matter if you're in Sweden or if you're in the UK or if you're in Australia, or Dubai or whatever, you're still, you still need that same thing. So I think it's interesting for us to be able to talk about that, kind of weave that together. And I think also, they go over time, we'll probably see these marketplaces copy each other even more and more as, you know, as we kind of see what's happening across borders. So anyways, that's just a fascinating world for me to kind of see. You know, I am probably zillobias, that a great experience there, at a great career there. I still know a number of people there. And so I struggle to think that they get unseated at any point in time, but the disruption is fascinating. And I think it'll be continued to be in. And I think it all does end up working out well for the consumer in the end, where no matter what ends up kind of happening here. So, and I just appreciate you having me on. It's been great to sit here and talk with you for a couple hours, Mike. So thank you so much. - Absolutely, no, thanks Scott. And that's a great way to sum up and wrap this up. So we'll wrap it there. I'm Mike Delperty, my guest has been Scott Bond. You've been listening to Context, Deep Dive. If you want to check out more of my podcasts, or research here, join my mailing list, you can go to micdp.com. All right, we'll catch you next time. Thanks.