Compass is betting that AI agents for home listings will send buyers straight to its own website rather than to established portals, CEO Robert Reffkin said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call this week.
Reffkin pointed to Instinct and Muse, two recently launched AI bots that can operate apps and software on a user’s behalf, as tools that are increasingly handling home searches. When users ask those agents to track new listings in a given neighborhood, he said, the results are more often than not coming from Compass.com.
A direct path to brokerage data
The company’s argument is that AI assistants will favor the source of listing information over aggregators that rely on syndication. Reffkin said Compass has already optimized its listing data architecture for agentic workflows, and that early testing shows assistants such as Instinct skipping traditional portals and going directly to brokerage websites.
He framed the shift as a matter of utility: if the tools are built to give consumers genuine value, they will seek out the listing agent, the listing brokerage and the listing website, where the best data can be found.
That prospect matters because Compass has spent the past year trying to position its website as an alternative to legacy portals, particularly Zillow, and has urged its agents to avoid the platform. Its marketing program has included phases in which homes are kept off consumer-facing websites altogether, and phases in which they appear only on Compass.com and select other sites such as Redfin.
Zillow remains the country’s dominant platform, reporting 215 unique average monthly users in the third quarter. Compass did not disclose site traffic in its results, but said traffic to its website and mobile app grew by more than 50 percent during the period.
Adoption is still taking shape
How often consumers actually delegate their home search to AI assistants is not yet clear. Instinct, developed by a small Silicon Valley startup, and Muse, Meta’s AI agent, were rolled out more broadly earlier this year. A Bank of America study published this year found that one in five prospective buyers and homeowners already use AI tools in their process, and more than half of those users rely on them to research neighborhoods and market trends.
The rise of agents that click through new listings on brokerage sites and relay them to buyers adds another dimension to the long-running contest among brokerages, portals and Multiple Listing Services over control of listing data.
A consortium of brokerages has signed on to contribute listings to Open Real Estate, which is building a listing database expected to give brokerages more say in how their listings are shared through MLSes and portals. The initiative appeared to be a response from Compass competitors, including Keller Williams and Real Remax, to its push to keep listing inventory under its umbrella.
On the call, Reffkin sounded open to the effort, describing it as a national real estate listing service that would return power to the creator of the listing. He added that Compass looks forward to seeing whether there is a way for the firm to be involved.