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Rob Hahn is the prognosticator of the real estate industry. A few weeks back on Brokerage Insider, he discussed how teams are the biggest threat to the brokerage industry. This week Rob discussed the big news that Zillow decided to become a real estate brokerage AND that they will stop accepting feeds and instead just get IDX data from MLSs. Listen to what Rob thinks.

TRANSCRIPTION

Or in the explode virtual conference on Thursday, September 24th. We look forward to returning to our regular schedule program soon, but until then, enjoy this session. In this episode, I interview Rob Hahn, managing partner of 7DS and Associates and prognosticator of the real estate industry.

Eric Stegemann: And so, you know, Rob, I actually wrote up a whole bunch of questions before yesterday morning to talk to you about. Sure. And I kind of threw them in the trash can and started after the Zellers news. Yeah, after the big announcement. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and I mentioned this morning when we talked to David Gulper, and I'll just reiterate it for anybody that was not in the track this morning, but to announce that they are starting a brokerage officially, even though they had real estate licenses for a while, their official start markets are in Tucson, Phoenix and Atlanta. And so they're going to start up a brokerage, but particularly two things of note. Number one is they're going to focus their brokerage on just their home buying process. And number two is they're moving away from fees where they accept fees and going straight to index data directly from all of your analysis. So let's talk about Zillow homes for just a second. They are going to have salary based agents. Right. And, you know, on a scale of one to 10, considering last time one of our big topics when we talked on the last show of Brokerage Insider, so we talked about it and you said Zillow is not the biggest threat to brokerages. Let me first ask you, do you think that's changed at all? Like if you had to give a scale of one to 10, where did you think they were before yesterday and where do you think they are now? I'd say probably before yesterday.

Rob Hahn: They're probably three. And today there are three. I don't I don't think anything has changed, you know, and I think I made this point in my latest post about this, you know, that I just put up yesterday as a reaction. People are like Zillow is a competitor and yadda, yadda. I'm like, look, unless you've got a couple billion dollars of investor money and they don't care about losing it for 10 years, you're not a competitor. Like, that's not you know, that's not what their business is. And I guess the way I look at it is I mean, for because this is a brokerage group like do you think open doors, a competitor. Because this is the same thing, right? They have billions of dollars, they're going to go in and pay cash for a house they're using, they're in house employee agents to do it. So if you don't think they're open doors a competitor, then you probably shouldn't think that those competitors, if you did think they're open those competitors, I guess I'd like to know how, like, do you have billions of dollars? And again, their brokers who have started Ibai are at odds. Right. And I'm like, look, that's great. But do those investors expect a return for their money? If the answer is yes, you're not a competitor because neither Zillow nor Open...