Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And today I'm welcoming back Brad Hargreaves, who is the founder and chairman of Common, which offers convenient, friendly, shared homes. And he previously co-founded General Assembly, which he sold for, I think, a gazillion dollars last time I read some good people over there.

He also sits on several boards, including Loftium Playcrafting at the table.

He writes a wonderful newsletters and has a podcast called Thesis Driven, where he gets great guests.

But he really dives deep into real estate, which is what we're here to talk about today.

There is a lot happening in the

real estate market. And also for the audience, at the back end of this episode, we have a really

interesting interview with Alicia Gordon, who did a poll of black mothers, basically asking,

you know, black single mothers, like, what do they want out of our education and political

system? So we will get there when we get there. But

Brad, we had you on almost exactly a year ago to talk about SVB. How have you been, brother?

Doing great. Thanks so much for having me here. Well, one year later, deposits are safe so we can

move on to other topics. It's wild to think that's been a year. You wrote, like a couple weeks ago, I think it was in February, about this National Association of Realtors Legal Melee. For our audience, there has been quite a lot of action here. And I'll give a quick summary before we take a step back. The National Association of Realtors is an organization that sets the guidelines for home

sales for decades now, agreed to settle a series of lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages

and eliminating its rules on commissions. Among other things, this is a big deal. But before we

talk about the implications of that, what is this organization? Simply put, they're a trade association for the real estate brokers of America.

There's about 1.6 million real estate agents that hold real estate licenses in the United States,

and the vast majority of them are represented by the National Association of Realtors,

or more accurately by a local chapter of the National Association of Realtors.

The NAR also does one very important thing, which is really important to this settlement.

They run what's called a multiple listing service or an MLS, which is there's a bunch of

different MLSs for different markets in the United States. And the MLS is the source of truth

for real estate listings and more relevantly for realtor commissions. So that gets really important as we get into this topic.

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