Weekly Transmission

A collection of 69 posts

Weekly Transmission

The Fantasied Beginnings of a Secret Real Estate Tech Society (Transmission #324)

[Editor’s note: This Camino-inspired transmission blends both humans and machines (ChatGPT) to imagine how GEM might have begun had this “secret real estate tech society” (as some call it) been hatched hundreds of years ago, rather than in 2017. This is fiction.] Audio file: Want to listen to this,

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All-in-One, or All-for-What? (Transmission #323)

In the real estate portal arms race, everyone’s chasing the same prize: owning the entire consumer journey. From a consumer’s first dream of home ownership to eventually financing, closing, and even servicing it, portals want to own the entire transaction. Zillow’s bundled ecosystem of listings aims to

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Putting the Clamps on the Platform Land Grab (Transmission #321)

Airbnb recently updated its Off-Platform and Fee Transparency Policy. The two big buckets are off-platform payments (such as external damage deposits) and the more strategically interesting one—off-platform bookings. With a take rate between 5-15%, Airbnb knows that hosts moving guests off platform risks disintermediation. I’ve been thinking about

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Being Held Accountable by AI (Transmission #320)

No-code product building solutions aren’t “new,” per say. Replit was founded back in 2016—nine years ago. I intuitively knew building products without actual coding is possible. But I hadn’t done the work to know for certain. I’ve had off-and-on conversations about this topic over the previous

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Forget Everything You Know About Home Search—AI Already Has (Transmission #319)

AI will serve as a catalyst to home search iteration, not a fundamentally new value proposition. The ListAssist acquisition by Inside Real Estate is further validation. It is interesting that Howard Hanna, an owner and board member of MoxiWorks, is ListAssist’s largest client. I suspect ListAssist’s Howard Hanna

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Imagine an MLS without Agents Actually Seeing the Software (Transmission #319)

The MLS has always functioned like a giant filing cabinet—you have to login, sift through everything, and manually find information using queries. Facilitating that with software, the core MLS software space has remained largely unchanged for decades. CoreLogic’s Matrix, FBS’ Flexmls, ICE’s (formerly BlackKnight) Paragon MLS, and

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Stewing A Financial Juggernaut in a Brokerage Box (Transmission #317)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

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Electrifying the Mobile Life (Transmission #316)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

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Inspired by the Akiya (Newsletter #314)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

Weekly Transmission

State of the GEM 2025 (Transmission #315)

💡Editor's Note: The below essay was originally published for members of the GEM Diamond, Geek Estate's executive level networking group. This is the 5th year publishing our "State of the Union" (historical links at the bottom of this article) and we spend hours compiling

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Building the Real Estate App Store (Newsletter #313)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

Weekly Transmission Featured

Looking Forward to 2025: A Data Promise in a Machine World (Newsletter #312)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

Weekly Transmission

2024 in the Rearview: Trends That Hit the Mark, and Missed (Transmission #311)

As always, links surrounded by the ❇️ emoji indicate exclusive GEM Diamond content. If you would like to have access to all links, please consider GEM Diamond membership. In a wild wild year, the topic that dwarfed them all was the commission lawsuits and the NAR settlement. To miss it would

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Weekly Transmission

Funding Future Homeowners (Transmission #310)

As always, links surrounded by the ❇️ emoji indicate exclusive GEM Diamond content. If you would like to have access to all links, please consider GEM Diamond membership. It’s safe to say that many parents want more ways to help their children build wealth. Many end up helping their offspring

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Riding the 100% Adoption Bicycle (Transmission #309)

As always, links surrounded by the ❇️ emoji indicate exclusive GEM Diamond content. If you would like to have access to all links, please consider GEM Diamond membership. [Adapted from Approaching 100% Adoption in Proptech.] WRITTEN BY: RIVERS PEARCE The puzzle of technology adoption has been wrestled with for years. Agents

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Rooming Up the Ownership Equation (Transmission #308)

As always, links surrounded by the ❇️ emoji indicate exclusive GEM Diamond content. If you would like to have access to all links, please consider GEM Diamond membership. We all know living with others brings down the cost of housing. Enter every sorority, fraternity, and college dorm ever as proof. To

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Organizing the Coming Skyward Chaos (Transmission #307)

The future is one with many, many machines and devices navigating the airspace above us every minute of every day. With a range of 60 miles, Eva Air is building a full scale prototype of its eVOTL for passengers. Archer’s Midnight electric air taxis are coming. Draganfly is bringing

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Lien No Longer, Incentivizing the Long (Transmission #306)

Reaching and converting sellers is an expensive, competitive proposition, with everyone in the industry already spending big dollars against them. So, why not convert the sellers of tomorrow, today? That prospect got harder with now that California has “won a legal victory against MV Realty, a company known for its

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Paving The Yellow Brick Road to Funding (Transmission #305)

Fundraising is hard. The markets suck. Investors are risk averse. Proptech isn’t a shining sector.  All that’s true, I get it. It’s Blueprint week, and virtually every proptech VC will be on the ground in Las Vegas by Wednesday. Many, many founders have opened rounds in the

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Artificial Portal Wars (Transmission #304)

With every company on the planet seemingly infusing AI into everything, it’s no surprise we’re seeing natural language models infiltrate real estate search. Zillow entered the ring in 2023, and this week, the upgraded experience references “additional criteria when searching for homes using natural language, including commute time,

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An Irreplaceable Value Proposition (Transmission #303)

There is a long history of technology companies aiming to reduce agent commissions, or displace them entirely. Now that the changes from the NAR settlement have gone into effect, a fresh wave of ambitious entrepreneurs are attacking the commission pie. Shay pitched itself as the "the first self-representation platform

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Weekly Transmission

Fairness and Efficiency in Agent Compensation (Transmission #302)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

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Weekly Transmission

The Proptech Space Race (Transmission #301, Part I)

💡CRYSTAL TRANSMISSION: Thought-provoking long-form articles covering a wide spectrum from innovative shipping container co-living spaces to the battle for listing acquisition in the first iBuyer world war to the implications of floating cities seen from beaches far and wide. Curious? Additional examples. Proptech's Leader has Been Crashing Our

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Weekly Transmission

A Block Approach to Ownifying Houses (Transmission #299)

WRITTEN BY: BRAD HARGREAVES This week, Brad Hargreaves explores Ownify's "bricks" fractional ownership model as one of the promising approaches in the landscape of players working to unstick the housing market. Last week, Pierre Calzadilla suggested that driving agent adoption after partnerships requires detailed contracts, pre-launches

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Weekly Transmission

Aggregation of Value (Transmission #294)

Aggregation of value can prove immensely useful in business and partner development, as I realized early in my career at Zillow. I detail how value aggregation playing out in the evolving brokerage landscape, and provide a few ideas for how revenue tech leaders should use the strategy in their GTM