Already own one? Give one to a colleague, staff member, or friend and make their day.
Heck, give away all three! It’s for a great cause.
September 30. Supporting Wounded Warrior Project.
#331 #authors #realestate #WoundedWarriorProject
“A Product Manager is passionate about building products that customers love, working with cross-functional teams to design, build and roll-out products that deliver the company’s vision and strategy. You must possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy; a big-picture vision, and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must enjoy spending time in the market to understand their problems and find innovative solutions for the broader market.”
To find out about this job or more please visit the Giant Steps Job Board
Homes.com names new president after 2-year leadership gap
“Our model and his are the same: you win by putting the property and agent first, not by selling agent’s leads to multiple agents. I am confident Felix is the right leader to get Homes.com to number one in the U.S.”
Yikes! “Number one in the U.S.”, Andy Florance put a quota in a press release with a brand new executive’s name on it, in public, on day one. Felix Kusch hasn’t found the break room yet and he already owns the Zillow problem.
Looks like he’s legit. He ran Immoweb, the number one portal in Belgium, and Immowelt, the number two portal in Germany. M&A at Axel Springer, board seats at Meilleurs Agents and Lamudi (BTW I have no idea what those companies do). But, hear me out, the guy has run a number one and a number two, so he knows exactly what the gap between them costs. European portals run on the same model Homes.com has been selling here since 2024, promote the property and route the inquiry to the listing agent (“Dein Objekt, dein Kontakt!”). Florance went and found the guy who has actually won this exact fight.
But he’s going to find that organized real estate hits different in the US.
He’s also inheriting a smaller sandbox than the headlines suggest. Residential segment revenue was $444 million last quarter. Homes.com was $28.5 million of it, and the profit everybody cheered came from what CFO Chris Lown called “actions to reduce personnel costs.” The upside is real, though. After the cuts, Homes.com is finally a business nobody has to defend every ninety days.
Number two(?) at a profit is a fine business. but Andy just told everybody that isn’t the job.
Three authors. Three books. One day to make it count.
September 30. Supporting Wounded Warrior Project.
#331 #authors #realestate #WoundedWarriorProject
Three authors.
Three books.
Three very different takes on real estate: CMA, strategy and AI.
But there’s still one number left to explain.
9.30.2026
#331 #realestate #realestatebooks #AI #CMA #strategy
Three authors. Three different corners of real estate. One idea we decided to try together.
That’s your next clue.
09.30.26
#331 #realestate #authors #staytuned
My friends at Lone Wolf have asked me to participate in a webinar later this month about “The state of CMA”. I’ll be joined by my friend Kyle Hunter. We will go over some of the results of our joint survey, Best Practices for CMAs and Listings Presentations, Giant Steps did with Lone Wolf.
Here’s the link to register: Webinar: The State of CMA: 2026 Insights
If you run an MLS and want to promote some good information for your members please share the link!
We will be discussing a few things:
Things might get spicy!
Join us on Thursday, September 17 at 2:30pm Eastern
From Victor at WAV Group
A Gale, Not a Breeze: Remembering Gail Liniger
“Alongside her husband Dave, Gail built a company from a single Denver office in 1973 into a global network of nearly 145,000 agents across more than 120 countries and territories. She joined the fledgling operation as its first employee in 1971, was promoted to vice president within the year, rose to executive vice president in 1978 and president in 1979, and in 1991 took the reins as CEO, a post she held for close to three decades while leading RE/MAX’s expansion far beyond North America.”
I did a lot of work with RE/MAX back in the early/mid 2000s. Saw her at a couple events, never got to officially meet her, but was always told she was first class.
Jeff Bosch Named Next CEO of ARMLS
“The ARMLS Board of Directors has named Jeff Bosch as the organization’s next Chief Executive Officer. Bosch will assume the role in November, as Matt Consalvo will retire after 14 years as CEO.”
Congratulations Jeff!
“I introduced her to my loved one, and while they were dancing, my friend stole my sweetheart from me.”
The Tennessee Waltz is the saddest song ever written about handing something precious to a friend. It’s also a pretty good history of this industry and Zillow. We introduced our listings to a friendly portal, the music played, and you know how the song ends.
Which is why it matters that Tennessee, of all places, just rewrote the ending.
Realtracs and Zillow Enter New Licensing Agreement
“Zillow will notify Realtracs at the same time an agent receives a notification that they have reached the threshold for listing suppression under Zillow’s Listing Access Standards. This provides greater transparency into those situations and gives Realtracs the information needed to work directly with brokers and agents to ensure healthy cooperation.”
So the Nashville standoff ends with a signature. Realtracs called out Zillow’s Listing Access Standards back in May, set a deadline, extended it twice, and after ten weeks of negotiating we get a “modernized license agreement.” Compare that to Chicago, where MRED pulled the feed, a federal judge ordered it turned back on, and the lawyers are still billing. Realtracs walks away with a contract. MRED walks away with a court date.
Both sides get to declare “victory” here. Zillow told Real Estate News its Listing Access Standards “remain in full effect across the Nashville region” and were “not modified as part of this agreement.” Stuart White gets defined use rights, AI and LLM guardrails on broker-created content, better listing activity reporting, and my favorite part, the pull quote above. Until now Zillow could bench an agent’s listings and the MLS would find out from an angry phone call. Now Realtracs gets the notification the moment the agent does.
But the real story is the paper itself. Back in April, Realtracs tore up its Participation Agreement and put “the broker owns the listing” in writing. This looks like chapter two of the same strategy: stand up a Data Licensing Platform, Homes.com was the first, now Zillow. The line at the bottom of the press release, “as additional technology providers renew their agreements,” is doing a lot of work. Every vendor pulling a Realtracs feed should expect the same paperwork.
Saul Klein wrote last month that the real AI question is “who controls the terms under which AI gains access to listing data.” Realtracs just gave its answer: we do, and here’s the license.
Will AI guardrails in a license agreement actually stop a foundation model from ingesting listings? Probably about as well as robots.txt did. But enforcement starts with terms, and you can’t enforce terms you never wrote down. In the post-settlement world the license agreement is the new rulebook.
Realtracs is still dancing with Zillow. It’s just done lending out its sweetheart without a word in writing.
