by Jim Dalrymple II | Jun 13, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
The real estate brokerages want to pause a commission case known as Gibson while they wrap up a different lawsuit. But the Gibson homeseller plaintiffs don’t want their case put on ice.
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The ongoing saga of the commission lawsuit settlements involving eXp and Weichert continued this week, as the homesellers behind one of the industry’s biggest antitrust cases worked to keep their fight with the companies alive.
The fight boils down to the homesellers’ claims that eXp World Holdings and Weichert Real Estate Affiliates engaged in a “reverse auction” when settling their antitrust litigation. In other words, the homesellers — in this case, those who filed a major suit known as Gibson — believe the two brokerages shopped around among similar class action lawsuits to find the best deal.
EXp and Weichert both settled in a case known as Hooper, but the Gibson plaintiffs want to force the companies back to the negotiating table in their own case. The parties have been going back and forth over the issue for months, though the Hooper judge granted the settlements preliminary approval last month.
After winning preliminary approval, eXp and Weichert on May 29 filed a motion to stay — or, pause — Gibson proceedings. The motion states that if the settlements win final approval later this year, that will “extinguish” the Gibson plaintiffs’ claims against the companies. Put another way, the brokerages want to put their part in the Gibson litigation on ice indefinitely.
But the news this week is that on Thursday, the Gibson plaintiffs filed their own document in court pushing back on the brokerages’ motion to stay. The document criticizes what it describes as “inadequate reverse-auction settlements” and notes that a previous motion to stay the case was denied. The document also states that the judge in the Hooper case has not yet considered the Gibson homesellers’ arguments.
Inman has reached out to the brokerages and will update this story with any comments they provide.
Among other things, the new document also claims that the companies “misstate the legal standards regarding a stay,” and that the Gibson homesellers “would suffer significant prejudice if all proceedings were stayed.”
It remains to be seen how the judge in the Gibson case will respond to both the brokerages’ motion to stay and the homesellers’ argument against the stay.
But either way, the settlements have proven to be among the most contentious in the industry. Following the Sitzer | Burnett jury verdict in 2023, the National Association of Realtors and various large companies moved within a matter of months to settle. And while various appeals in the cases are ongoing, the most headline-grabbing litigation involving those companies is now in the rearview mirror.
In the case of eXp and Weichert, however, legal wrangling over the settlements shows no sign of stopping.
Read the Gibson plaintiffs’ latest filing here:
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by Jim Dalrymple II | Jun 10, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
States with the highest foreclosure rates in May included Delaware, Florida, Illinois and Indiana. ATTOM’s CEO described the situation as “a mixed picture.”
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Amid ongoing challenges in the real estate market, a new report shows that foreclosures ticked down month over month in May, but were up 9 percent compared to the same time last year.
The report, from data firm ATTOM, shows that in May, there were 35,498 properties in the U.S. with foreclosure filings. That amounts to one in every 4,009 housing units with a filing. The report notes that these numbers are down 1 percent compared to April but up 9 percent compared to May of 2024.
Rob Barber, ATTOM’s CEO, described the situation in May as “a mixed picture with fewer starts but a continued rise in completed foreclosures.”
“This suggests that while fewer new defaults are being initiated, lenders may still be working through a backlog of existing cases,” Barber added in the report. “We’ll be watching closely in the months ahead to see how these trends evolve.”
The states with the worst foreclosure rates include Delaware, where one in every 2,313 housing units had a foreclosure filing in May; Florida, at one in every 2,536 housing units; Illinois, at one in every 2,668 housing units; Nevada, at one in every 2,747 housing units; and Indiana, at one in every 2,983 housing units.
The three metro areas with populations over 500,000 and the worst foreclosure rates were all in Florida: Lakeland (one in every 1,506 housing units); Cape Coral (one in every 1,674 housing units); and Jacksonville (one in every 1,888 housing units).
The report also reveals that lenders repossessed 3,844 properties via completed foreclosures in May. That’s up 7 percent compared to April, and up 34 percent relative to the same time last year.
The year-over-year rise in foreclosures comes as the real estate market struggles with years of sluggishness. After a particularly active period during the COVID-19 pandemic, mortgage rates jumped in 2022 and have remained elevated ever since. Higher rates have subsequently translated into slower sales and lower inventory.
However, while foreclosure rates have ticked up during this period of sluggishness and remain elevated compared to the early days of the pandemic, ATTOM data shows that they remain well below rates during the Great Recession.
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by Jim Dalrymple II | Jun 10, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
The company handling notifications has sent out more than 100 million emails notifying homesellers about the settlements — and is charging more than $32 million for its services.
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Over a year after major real estate entities settled antitrust commission litigation, more than 2.5 million people have submitted claims to collect money in the cases.
That’s according to a new quarterly report from JND Legal Administration, the law firm overseeing administrative tasks related to major settlements in cases such as Gibson, Sitzer | Burnett, and others. Among other things, the report — filed in court Monday — reveals that up through this month JND has sent out 100 million emails and 38 million postcards to notify potential homesellers of the settlements.
Additionally, JND began staffing a contact center last July to handle inquiries about the settlements, and since that time has received “over 25,000 calls and 30,000 emails.”
This flurry of reaching out to, and fielding inquiries from, consumers led to the 2.5 million claims, which were submitted both online and via a paper form.
The report further outlines how much JND is making for this work. In total, between January of last year and May of this year the firm has invoiced $32,777,091.15. Of that sum, $5,919,220.72 remains outstanding.
The report includes a chart showing exactly how much JND charged for specific campaigns. For example, JND carried out a mail campaign related to the Gibson settlement beginning in July 2024. This led to nine different invoices, sent between last July and February, the largest of which was for about $6.3 million. That $6.3 million invoice has been paid, though smaller sums totaling about $7,000 remain unpaid.
Antitrust commission lawsuits dominated the real estate industry in recent years, gaining particular attention after a jury sided with homesellers who claimed the National Association of Realtors and major franchisors conspired to inflate consumer costs. The verdict, in the case known as Sitzer | Burnett, led to a series of similar lawsuits that eventually included virtually every major real estate company.
Settlements began pouring in after the jury verdict, and NAR settled in March 2024. The trade organization’s settlement included an agreement to change some rules, as well as the promise to pay $418 million.
Other major settlements included HomeServices of America, which agreed to pay $250 million, Anywhere, at $83.5 million, Keller Williams, at $70 million, Compass, at $57.5 million, and RE/MAX, at $55 million. These settlements alone, along with NAR’s, total more than $900 million. With various additional settlements, the total amount of money available is more than $1 billion, though how much individual consumers get to collect will depend on the total number of claims, as well as the costs of administering the settlements.
Tanya Monestier — a law professor at the University of Buffalo who has objected to the settlements — has argued that the plaintiffs attorneys in the cases could collect $333 million, but that homesellers themselves may only get $20 or $25.
Read JND’s full report on the settlement administration here:
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by Jim Dalrymple II | Jun 10, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
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There’s Star Trek‘s Data. And HAL 9000 from 2001: A Spacey Odyssey. Scarlett Johansson memorably voiced Samantha, an artificial intelligence assistant, in Her. And the Maschinenmensch from 1927’s Metropolis is one of the most enduring images in cinema, even if most people today haven’t actually seen the movie.
Humans have been inventing machines since time immemorial, but we are perhaps most fascinated by those machines built in our own image. A car or a copy machine or a coffee maker is an object, but an android with a voice or a face? That’s a protagonist.
Recent years have seen an explosion of AI technology. Thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, smart and interactive bots that would’ve seemed like science fiction half a decade ago are now commonplace. They’re so common, in fact, that when a panelist at last month’s Inman on Tour Miami asked a room filled with real estate professionals who has used AI, virtually every hand went up.
But the proliferation of this technology has turned an abstract philosophical question into a practical one for numerous companies, including many operating in real estate: How human should our AI assistants actually be?
To answer this question, Inman reached out to multiple real estate technology companies that have built their own AI tools. And while company leaders subscribe to different philosophies, one thing was clear: AI technology is becoming more and more human. In fact, it’s becoming so real-seeming that increasingly, consumers are simply treating it like a person.
Blurring lines between humans and machines
Jindou Lee used to work in video game development, but today he’s the CEO of HappyCo, a company that develops property management technology. Last year, the company unveiled its JoyAI. The tool takes requests from tenants, then helps coordinate maintenance.
Lee has spent considerable time thinking about the humanity of the bot his company has built. And he told Inman that user interactions with JoyAI suggest a certain blurriness, where users sometimes don’t appear to know if they’re engaging with a piece of technology or an actual human being.
Jindou Lee.
“There are so many times where, you know, a resident would thank our AI bot,” he said. “They didn’t know if they were talking to a human or not.”
In response, HappyCo has designed some transparency into its tech. If a person asks JoyAI if it’s a human or a bot, it has the ability to answer honestly and reveal to users that it is, in fact, a digital assistant. But while Lee said that people do appreciate connections to actual humans, and no one wants to feel like they’re talking just to a computer, JoyAI users have tended to accept the machine.
“If it solves the problem, we found that people don’t really care,” he said. “If you’re a resident, you put in a ticket, you just want it to be fixed.”
A few years ago, when chatbots were more rudimentary, that might not have been the case. But today, as the technology advances, Lee expects more and more people to accept interactions with AI. And the line between humans and bots may not always be so clear.
“I think those lines,” he said, “will continue to blur.”
What’s in a name
As Kathleen Lappe and her team at DirectOffer developed their own voice assistant AI — which functions as a concierge in both the real estate and hospitality spaces — they wanted to find a name for the tech. Lappe recently told Inman the team discovered that the names Noah and Olivia were the two most common English names at the time, so they settled on the latter.
“We felt OLIVIA rolled off the mouth,” Lappe said, “And then we built an acronym after OLIVIA, so it just hit the right spot.”
OLIVIA’s avatar as featured on DirectOffer’s website. Credit: DirectOffer
In choosing OLIVIA — which also presents itself with a human face and is described internally as “her” — DirectOffer was following in the footsteps of many other companies that have consistently chosen female names for their artificial intelligence. Amazon, for example, has Alexa. Apple’s phones all come with Siri. And once upon a time, Microsoft built a bot named Cortana.
This preference for female names is common in real estate as well. Aside from OLIVIA, there’s DealMachine’s Alma, lead nurturing bot Gabbi.AI, and voice-based AI rent collector Colleen. There are exceptions, too, but the trend toward female names for AI assistants is clear.
In the case of OLIVIA, Lappe said that users simply tended to respond better to female names.
Kathleen Lappe
“In general, women don’t have a problem with women giving instructions to them,” Lappe said. “And men are more comfortable with women guiding them.”
Lee made a similar point, saying that in his company’s research, “People responded better to female names than male names” — hence “JoyAI.”
The trend toward female names for virtual assistants is so common that researchers have actually looked into the topic. A 2019 report from UNESCO, for example, argued that feminized voices are a relatively recent phenomenon and that they raise questions about potential gender biases in technology. But perhaps most critically, the report suggests that the naming and gendering of AI is further blurring the lines between real and simulated people.
“As emotive voice technology improves,” the report states, “the ability to distinguish between human and machine voices will decrease and, in time, probably disappear entirely.”
In a similar vein, a 2021 paper looked at this question and acknowledged that past investigations suggested female-voiced bots are common because they’re perceived as being warmer. But the researchers actually suggested there’s something deeper going on.
“We argue that people prefer female bots because they are perceived as more human than male bots,” the researchers found.
In other words, it’s not so much that people like women’s voices more. It’s that those voices are nudging them further into the gray zone between machine and human.
To anthropomorphize or not
While the bots generally seem to be racing toward personhood, not every company is trying to make them seem human. Michael Martin, CEO of real estate virtual assistant company Sidekick, said his company has taken a very different approach and intentionally chooses not to anthropomorphize their tech. Sidekick’s assistants are simply and fittingly called “Sidekicks.”
Michael Martin
“It reinforces this kind of false humanity of an AI that I think stokes fears of human replacement,” Martin told Inman of naming bots. “Which I think in real estate is particularly pronounced in many cases. I think it’s really important, as AI becomes more ubiquitous, that the human-computer interaction always remains clear.”
Martin has followed other companies’ moves to anthropomorphize AI and speculated that such choices are done to make the tools more relatable. But his vision for the future of the technology is something different. It’s a vision in which artificial intelligence becomes “more of a substrate” embedded in some other machine — say, a car or a fridge — than a friendly aide with a name or face. In this future, a bot might not actually need a name at all.
In the end, it may not be entirely an either-or between Martin’s vision and what other companies like DirectOffer are creating. But either way, it’s clear that going forward, technology will be increasingly able to do something that we’ve long associated with living beings: Act on its own.
“There’s a world very soon,” Martin said, “where two agents working together on a deal, that experience is better because both of them have a Sidekick, and those Sidekicks can interact without the agent needing to.”
Correction: DirectOffer’s OLIVIA is a voice assistant AI. This post originally mischaracterized it as a chatbot.
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by Jim Dalrymple II | Jun 6, 2025 | Industry, News Feed
Shares in the iBuyer have traded for as little as $0.58 on the Nasdaq in recent days — well below the $1 threshold companies must meet to avoid delisting.
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IBuyer Opendoor on Friday announced that it is planning a reverse stock split — a measure designed to avoid getting kicked out of the Nasdaq for having a too-low share price.
The company announced the move in a statement and filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the board of directors is recommending the reverse stock split. Chief Financial Officer Selim Freiha said in the statement that the “proposal is intended to support long-term shareholder value and give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.”
“We’re grateful for the continued support of our shareholders, and remain focused on building a durable, technology-driven platform that powers life’s progress, one move at a time,” Freiha added.
The statement notes that the split could range from between 1-for-10 shares to 1-for-50 shares, “with the exact ratio within such range to be determined by the board in its discretion.”
The move comes amid a challenging period for Opendoor that has seen its share price fall from a high of more than $34 in 2021 to a current price of just under $0.70 on the Nasdaq. Earlier this week, shares dipped below $0.60 — to $0.58. Higher mortgage rates, lower home sales, and minimal home appreciation — all trends that have been ongoing for several years now — have been particularly hard on iBuyers, which make money if they buy, renovate, and sell homes at a profit.
Companies are required to maintain a share price of at least $1 in order to remain listed on the Nasdaq. Opendoor shares were consistently trading below that threshold by early April, and the company received a warning from Nasdaq about the situation earlier this month. The warning gave Opendoor 180 days to get back into compliance — or in other words to raise its share price back above $1.
Opendoor shareholders now have to approve the reverse stock split. However, the company’s statement notes that even with shareholder approval, the board “will not effect the reverse stock split if the board does not deem it to be in the best interests of the Company and its stockholders.”
In pursuing a reverse stock split, Opendoor follows in the footsteps of its smaller iBuying rival Offerpad, which carried out a 1-for-15 reverse stock split in 2023. Offerpad shares had fallen below the $1 threshold in late 2022. And like Opendoor today, Offerpad back then opted for the reverse split to avoid getting booted from the market.
In Offerpad’s case, the move worked — for a while. Shares hovered between $8 and $10 for the final half of 2023 and into 2024, but have since been in a state of steady decline. As of Friday afternoon, they were trading for just over $1, though they have dipped below that threshold several times recently.
Offerpad had a market cap of just over $31 million as of Friday afternoon. Opendoor’s market cap was about $493 million.
In response to harder times, Opendoor has leaned into more asset light revenue streams, including a seller marketplace and a referral program for agents. Such moves helped Opendoor trim losses in Q1, though revenue was also down during the first three months of the year.
In its statement Friday, Opendoor ultimately said that the board’s decision to pursue the reverse stock split “will be based on a number of factors, including market conditions, the historical, then‑existing and expected trading price of our common stock,” and the “continued listing requirements of the Nasdaq Global Select Market.”
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