Marketplace founders need to anticipate regulatory shifts before they hit. A $5.2 billion real-estate verdict is decoupling buyer and seller agent commissions, reshaping the U.S. market. Staying ahead of these changes and engaging with regulators early can turn compliance into competitive advantage.
Chapters
You also mentioned that, you know, this point as far as, you know, like legal and regulatory, right? And I feel like as marketplaces, and especially, you know, being early in kind of spaces, you know, disrupting an industry, kind of bringing change, you know, maybe do you have any tips for founders, you know, building and as far as, you know, how they could think about kind of legal and regulatory?
Especially if you're in a regulated industry, but even if you're not, I think it's really important that you have a good read on where regulatory is going in your space. In the case of residential real estate, It's in the midst of a massive, massive change. You've probably read about it. I've been talking about this for 2 years. Everyone was sort of ignoring me until a month ago, and now everybody's finally aware of it. There's a class action lawsuit underway, which actually was just decided, and the plaintiffs were given $5.2 billion of damages. And it will, once all the dust settles and the other copycat lawsuits work their way through the system and the appeals work their way through the system, it will probably result in the US real estate industry structure completely changing and looking a lot more like Europe and the UK, whereby the buyer's agent's commission is decoupled from the listing agent's commission. And that has huge implications for every part of the real estate ecosystem. And for those that were paying attention, this was pretty obvious 2 years ago. It was obvious to me 2 years ago that this is where it was going to end up. I frankly wish I I mean, I'm not involved in Zillow anymore. I have tons of startup investments in and around the space, including a couple companies I've incubated. I wish, like, it's very rare, probably the only time in my career where I felt like I knew something, I knew a secret that nobody else did, but I didn't actually really benefit that much from it. So if you ever have that, you have a strong point of view about the future direction of your industry, especially if it's a contrarian point of view, Finding a way to make that advantage you is really, it's really important. So yeah, like in the, yeah, I mean, you could obviously go down a rat hole and spend tons and tons of time on the regulatory stuff. In the case of Zillow, I went to DC almost every quarter for many, many years, and we had lots of lobbyists and industry experts and stuff that advised us on things. And it was important and useful, not just for the FTC approval of the Trulia deal, but for a whole host of reasons. And I continue to just pay really close attention to regulatory, the regulatory environment in the industries that I'm in.
