After touting a growing bottom line and cost synergies amid a difficult market in the company's third-quarter earnings call this week, Reffkin seemed most excited about the opportunity presented by AI agents accessing its listing inventory.
"Instinct and Muse are just fantastic," he said, referring to two recently-launched AI bots that can operate apps and software on behalf of users.
More and more often, users are turning to AI agents to help with their home search process — and when that happens, the bots are turning to Compass.com, he said.
"If you go in and you say, 'Hey, I live in Brooklyn Heights, let me know whenever there's a new listing that comes up,' we're starting to see that it's more often than not bringing you to one of our listings," Reffkin said.
The agents trawling the company's website present an opportunity because humans largely tend to hunt for homes on Zillow, despite Compass' best efforts.
In the last year, Reffkin has sought to position Compass and its website as an alternative to legacy portals like Zillow, pushing agents to avoid the platform. The firm's three-phase marketing program involves keeping homes off of any consumer-facing website in one phase, and publishing them only on Compass.com, and select other sites, like Redfin, in another.
But Zillow, which has consistently been the top platform in the country, still reported 215 unique average monthly users in the third quarter. Compass did not report site traffic in its third-quarter results, but said that traffic to its website and mobile app grew by over 50 percent in the period.
But Reffkin said Compass' website is better primed for attention from bots, compared to portals that rely on syndication.
"We believe these tools will care about providing genuine utility to the consumer, and that means going to the source of the data, to the listing agent, to the listing brokerage, to the listing website, where they can find the best data," he said. "With our listing data architecture already optimized for agentic workflows, our early testing is showing AI assistants like Instinct, bypassing traditional portals and going directly to brokerage websites."
It's not clear how often users are turning to their invisible little helpers for their home searches. Instinct, an agent developed by a tiny Silicon Valley startup, and Muse, Meta's AI agent, rolled out more broadly earlier this year.
One study from Bank of America published this year said one in five prospective buyers and homeowners are already using AI tools as part of their process, with over half of those users relying on these tools to research neighborhoods and market trends.
The idea of AI agents doing the dirty work of clicking through new listings on brokerage websites and spitting them back to buyers adds another twist to the ongoing fight squaring brokerages, portals and Multiple Listing Services in a struggle over who controls listings.
A consortium of brokerages has signed on to contribute listings to Open Real Estate, which is building out a listing database that will then presumably give brokerages more control over how their listings are shared through MLSes and portals.
The debut of the data-sharing initiative seemed to be a response from Compass' competitors, including Keller Williams and Real Remax, to its push for listings inventory under its umbrella. But on the call, Reffkin appeared amenable to the idea , calling it "a national real estate listing service that will return the power back to the creator of the listing."
"We're looking forward to seeing if there's a way for us to be involved," he added.
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