Nilay Patel

The reason I'm pushing here is I think I understand a broad dynamic in this industry, which was there was a pretty big settlement in a lawsuit about realtor fees and broker fees.

And now those fees are up for negotiation.

And so you can see the big agencies are actually trying to close their little markets, right?

They have a lot of listings that they can just sell in between themselves.

They can sort of pre-negotiate those fees.

You can –

disagree with that reaction, but it's sort of a rational economic reaction to, okay, we're not going to negotiate broker fees the way we were.

We're just going to create a little closed ecosystem.

That's right up against you saying actually the ecosystem has to be maximally transparent because you're not actually doing the listings, right?

Like you're not the seller's agent in many cases.

You're not the buyer's agent in many cases.

I know that there's some amount of referral there.

So they're trying to protect their cost of actually sort of managing the inventory.

How do you reconcile that, right?

If that industry was destabilized by a legal settlement and they're trying to find a new equilibrium and you're saying, actually, we're not going to let you make changes.

How do you reconcile that?

Yeah, I'm reminded of a quote we get often from the various Amazon adjacent executives who come on the show that other people's margin is their opportunity.

Is that how you see it as you think about expanding the business?

Yeah.

One thing that's interesting to me, and I'm sure you've thought about this, you've mentioned the seller a lot, like maximizing the value to the seller, which...