Inman News

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Ask most Americans who owns the most land in the United States, and they’ll guess today’s famous billionaires. Familiar names like Bezos, Musk or Gates. The fact is, none of them crack the top 10, and the fourth-largest private landowner, Ted Turner, just died last month. But before we get there, we need to understand how the land moved from public ownership into private hands, and who could even hold land in the first place. The map was built. Now what?

“Under all is the land.” For more than a century, those words have appeared in the preamble to the Realtor Code of Ethics. As America approaches its 250th birthday, they’re worth revisiting. Because before there were listings, mortgages, title companies, brokerages or Realtors, there was land. And before there was a real estate industry, there was a question that would shape the next two and a half centuries of American history: Who owns it?

Travis Winfield knows how to use a financial weapon most veterans never fire. Only about 13 percent of eligible veterans have used their VA home loan benefit, Winfield said, despite homeownership being one of the most accessible tools available to build wealth. A 24-year Navy veteran, Winfield is the founder of Military Operated Real Estate (MORE), a certification and referral network for agents who serve military families.

Every Friday, we round up the most popular, most read, most critical stories of the week to give you a quick catchup on the big headlines you might have missed in the hustle and bustle of the workweek. Here’s this week’s Top 5 as chosen by our readers. P.S. Don’t miss The Download, our weekly column that breaks down one of the week’s top stories and equips you with what you’ll need to meet next Monday head-on.

Shilo, the artificial intelligence conversation analysis platform for real estate teams, unveiled a new proptech tool Wednesday that runs an actual spoken, AI-powered coaching session with each agent on a roster and no manager required to sit in. The product, called 1:1 Coaching, builds its own agenda from an agent’s call history, holds a live voice-to-voice conversation, summarizes what got covered and remembers it for the next session.

Matt Fischer spent over two decades building products outside real estate before taking the CEO seat at Lone Wolf Technologies this past February. Fischer succeeds Jimmy Kelly, who has remained with the company in an advisory capacity. Fischer joined Lone Wolf from Bullhorn, a Boston-based software company that builds cloud-based tools for the staffing and recruiting industries.

You did not lose that past client to a better agent. You lost them to silence, and to whoever filled it. While you went quiet, other people did not. Another agent’s drip campaign landed in your client’s inbox. A lender sent a note about their preferred agents. A bank dangled a rewards program if your client used their agent instead. Everyone holding your client’s email address is competing for the relationship you assume you already own, and the agent who shows up consistently is the one who keeps it.

Let us talk about a habit that quietly drains more real estate careers than any market shift ever has: comparing yourself to other agents. The record-breaker on your team. The name on every sign in the neighborhood. The peer whose social feed looks like one long, unbroken winning streak. If watching them leaves you feeling smaller, this one is for you. Why comparison actually slows you down Picture a swimmer in the middle of a race who keeps turning their head to watch the lane beside them.

Compass is pushing its technology stack into the brokerages it absorbed from Anywhere Real Estate, announcing Thursday that brokerage agents at @properties, Coldwell Banker Realty, Corcoran and Sotheby’s International Realty will begin gaining access this summer to Home Platform, the company’s AI-powered operating system for agents. For the newly added brands, the software carries the “Home Platform” name, the company said, with a rollout across its franchise network slated for next year.

A coalition of consumer protection, housing, civil rights and fair competition groups urged federal regulators Wednesday to investigate Compass’ deal with Midwest Real Estate Data to expand private listing networks nationwide. The move escalates watchdog scrutiny of limited-access listing channels at the same moment that Zillow, Compass and MRED have returned to federal court in Chicago.