In this commentary, the speaker shares personal frustration buying a home in an unfamiliar city and critiques the real‑estate market’s lack of transparency. They argue that Zillow’s litigation against Compass is tied to consumer‑transparency concerns and suggest that the fight could expand. The speaker warns that private listings—often used for special‑case buyers—harm sellers by suppressing price, and predicts that these practices will soon trigger class‑action lawsuits similar to the Burnett‑Sitzer case. They explain how lawyers could calculate damages by comparing actual sale prices to potential market values, emphasizing that while the affected seller class is not yet large enough, it is poised to grow into a billion‑dollar federal case.
Chapters
I'm buying a house right now. And I tell agents all the time when I do keynotes, you don't understand what it's like to buy a house. Go try to buy one in a city you don't know and experience the shit show that it still is today. Right? So I do believe that Zillow in this fight is actually fighting also, also for consumer transparency. And, and so I think that's something to watch. Are they going to, how far will they take this fight? With Compass. I mean, they're in litigation with them. To the last two answers is this, and this is unfortunately where I think it will go though. I think class action litigation is coming. I think that consumers are going to be harmed through private listings. It's a very easy case to win. I don't give a shit what, you know, disclosure you have. There's a lot of incentivizing these consumers to do this going on right now. A jury ain't gonna like it in court. Look how we lost in litigation for Burnett-Sitzer. And it's not hard to show that I still cannot hear a rational conversation as to why you would ever push a private listing unless a consumer came to you and said, I'm getting divorced, or I'm a public figure, or whatever. I need a solution. There should never be a, you should try this conversation. And so all the studies show that you're going to lose money. And all that's going to do is create a class of sellers that were harmed. The lawyers are going to figure this out. They're going to go, well, here's what you said, here's what they sold it for, is what it could have sold for, there's the damages. It's federal courts, trouble, class action, and we're in a billion-dollar case all over again. That is a reality, but the problem is the class isn't big enough yet.
