Who gets paid when banks, insurers, and government-sponsored enterprises use listing data? That is the question every MLS leader should be asking right now, and REdistribute just gave a clearer answer.
The question every broker should be asking is not "which AI tool should my agents use?" It is "how do I get my agents to use the tools I already pay for?" Jefe is LoKation's answer.
On Monday, AGNT Inc. (eXp Realty and NextHome), HomeServices of America, Keller Williams Realty and Real REMAX Group announced Open Real Estate, a broker-owned national listing data-sharing initiative targeted for Q1 2027. If the pitch sounds familiar, it should. The industry has heard a version of it before, under a different name: UpstreamRE. The goal of this initiative along with BLX, Ocusell and historically, UpstreamRE, is the same - to better orchestrate brokerage level listing management. More of the details of this pain point is outlined below.
Tyler Morton runs REMAX Victory + Affiliates, just under 200 agents across Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. When we talked at the RISMedia CEO & Leadership Exchange, he described an AI strategy I have not heard from any other broker in America. He did not buy an AI platform. He built one.
The question brokers keep asking me. In my work advising MLSs and brokerages on data strategy, the question I hear more than any other right now is some version of: how do I keep my listings out of AI? I have written about the liability brokers carry when their agents use unsanctioned AI tools. Here is the same liability running in the other direction. Your listing data is already inside everyone else's AI, and you still carry the liability for it.
OpenAI's DevDay announcement this week was easy to get excited about. ChatGPT Space: shared workspaces where people, files, and AI agents work in the same place, with living documents everyone can edit and always-on agents that keep working in the background. It is a compelling vision.
Ten years. Nearly 60,000 homes. $26.6 billion in sales. Those are not Ben Caballero’s career totals. Those are his numbers for the last decade alone. It is hard to describe what Ben, founder and CEO of HomesUSA.com, has accomplished without sounding like you are exaggerating. His numbers feel less like real estate production and more like a math problem someone made up. But every sale is real, every listing is tied to Ben as the individual sell-side agent, and every transaction is audited and verified through the Multiple Listing Services where he works. From 2016 through 2025, Ben individually sold [...]
What happens when three founders of modern artificial intelligence sit down together and discover they don’t agree on where it is taking us? That was the extraordinary moment at Ai4 when Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Andrew Ng shared the stage for a conversation that ranged from runaway AI agents and job destruction to education, regulation, open models and whether AI’s biggest impact could ultimately be curing disease or eliminating illiteracy. These weren’t three AI commentators speculating from the sidelines. Hinton helped lay the foundations for modern neural networks and received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work [...]
What happens when artificial intelligence becomes smart enough to do more than answer questions, but still lacks the judgment to know when it is making a terrible decision? That was one of the most memorable themes from Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, during his Ai4 keynote conversation last week. Patel compared today’s AI agents to teenagers: highly intelligent, fearless about consequences and occasionally capable of remarkably poor judgment. It was funny because it was instantly relatable, but it was also one of the clearest explanations I have heard of the risk facing companies as AI moves [...]
Don’t miss: Inside AI Episode 4: Drew Fabrikant, CEO and Founder of Scout, explains what real estate should be preparing for next About 18 months ago, Drew Fabrikant told me something I thought was completely insane. He predicted that his bot would eventually talk to my bot. They would have conversations, exchange information and then report back to us about what they had discussed. I told him it was never going to happen. I was wrong. Fabrikant is the founder and CEO of Scout, an AI-powered platform that helps real estate professionals find the right people, identify signals that they [...]
The biggest AI mistake real estate companies are making has nothing to do with choosing the wrong technology. It happens earlier, when leaders decide they need AI before deciding what they actually need AI to do. That mistake becomes far more amplified with agentic AI: technology that can take actions on a user’s behalf. Give a person the wrong permission, and the damage may be limited by how quickly that person can act. Give an AI system the same permission, and it can move at lightning speed, touch thousands of records and multiply the risk before anyone realizes what happened. [...]
MLS of Choice acknowledged a truth that MLSs need to compete more aggressively today: brokerage operations do not always fit neatly into legacy MLS boundaries. Brokers operate across markets today, and a handful are national. Agents hold licenses in multiple states. Consumers move, invest, retire, relocate, and buy second homes across the country. Technology platforms are not dependent on a local office, a local association boundary, or a local physical presence.
