Real Estate Data Infrastructure Gets a Makeover as RealReports Rides Post-Lawsuit Market Shift

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

15 Sep 2025

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The real estate industry’s data problem has persisted for decades, fragmented information, protectionist incumbents, and infrastructure that costs millions to access. For proptech startups trying to build innovative solutions, these barriers have been nearly insurmountable. But the commission lawsuit settlements that affected the industry throughout 2023 and 2024 have created an unexpected opportunity for one company addressing these fundamental challenges.

RealReports, an AI-powered data intelligence platform that started as a blockchain experiment, has emerged from this market disruption and positioned itself as a fixture of the new guard of proptech. The company has had a meteoric rise, announcing over 40 partnerships in 2025 alone. The company’s journey pivoting out of the crypto crash into a top MLS and brokerage solution illustrates both the persistent challenges of real estate technology adoption and the market forces reshaping how the industry approaches innovation.

From Blockchain Dreams to Market Reality

Co-founder Zach Gorman did not take a direct path to real estate data. After getting his license and spending six years building companies in the space, including a previous profitable venture, Gorman and his co-founder initially pursued blockchain applications for real estate data sovereignty.

“In its most nascent phase, RealReports was originally called Blockchain Home Registry (BHR),” Gorman explains. “There are some really interesting applications for data sovereignty in real estate, especially around things like title and deed transfer. BHR was a Web3 protocol that allowed anyone to access reliable, immutable information about any property in real-time, on-chain (property characteristics, appliances, maintenance, energy usage, ownership history, etc.). The protocol was powered by a utility token $HOME, which was earned when adding data to, and paid when consuming data from, the network.”

The timing seemed perfect, launching around 2021 when crypto interest was peaking and VC dollars were pouring in. But the approach proved fundamentally flawed and was unable to gain consumer traction. “It was a good idea, but a bad business.” Gorman admits.

The pivot away from blockchain led to a clearer focus on the underlying problem: real estate data infrastructure is broken. “Data in the real estate space is in disrepair and is highly-fragmented.” This creates cascading problems. Consumers lack access to critical information. Gorman cites his co-founder’s experience trying to buy property in The Bay Area, only to be rejected by ten insurance companies for wildfire risk after already having the property under agreement.

For practitioners, the data problem manifests as either avoidance or inefficiency. “At worst, agents are just not doing the research because they’re too busy and/or it takes too long,” Gorman notes. “At best, they are reliant on only one source for a particular piece of information, but there is no single source of truth and different providers often disagree on the same piece of data.”

For technology builders, accessing reliable data infrastructure to fuel their innovative products and services can require millions in multi-year contracts, making innovation prohibitively expensive. This is what sparked the idea for RealReports.

The Commission Lawsuit Catalyst

RealReports launched their MVP in early 2023, having assembled a large data lake of property information and commercializing it in a modern report interface that could be accessed for every home in the country. They kicked off early pilots and began building momentum through 2023 targeting agents through upstream partnerships with MLSs and brokerages. Then the Sitzer-Burnett commission lawsuit hit national headlines, and everything came to a grinding halt..

“That stopped us dead in our tracks,” Gorman recalls. “Nearly all of the MLS and brokerage partners we were in contract negotiations with said, ‘We love what you’re doing and see the value, but we aren’t going to be adding any new products for the next eight months while we figure out how the lawsuits are going to affect us.’”

But when the dust settled, the post-lawsuit landscape created a windfall. Those that were spared direct financial impact, faced new pressure to add immediate value to their members and agents.

The lawsuit settlements fundamentally changed how agents, particularly on the buy side, approach their business. With commission negotiations now required upfront with buyers, agents must articulate their value proposition more clearly than ever before.

“RealReports came into focus at the exact right time to meet this need. Our product provides the most comprehensive data about any property in the country that exists–supercharged by our AI property advisor, Aiden, to make that data accessible and actionable for agents and their clients. RealReports are a full lifecycle product for agents who use them in listing presentations, buyer strategy meetings, for research prior to showings, diligence before submitting an offer, streamlining document review, and even for generating leads.”

This alignment of market need and product capability has driven rapid partnership growth. The company’s 40+ partnerships in 2025 include major players like CRMLS, with about 100,000 members, and FMLS out of Georgia with approximately 55,000 members.

The Partnership Strategy

RealReports’ approach to partnerships reflects lessons learned about technology adoption in real estate. Rather than pursuing direct-to-consumer sales, the company focuses on enterprise relationships that provide better distribution and technical integration opportunities.

“Going upstream to the MLSs and brokerages was the best place to start,” Gorman explains. “Better distribution, you’re getting in front of more people at once in more different ways. Technical integrations allow us to be embedded in agents’ existing workflows rather than asking them to change their behavior.”

The partnership strategy also addresses a critical challenge: risk aversion among decision-makers. “Many stakeholders and executives are used to vendors that have been around for decades. They can be reluctant to adopt new products and prefer to see someone else take the leap of faith first.”

This caution stems from experience with startups that “come in guns blazing, promise the world, and then die six months later because they weren’t able to reach profitability and/or raise additional capital.” The effort required to onboard and train users on new products can take months, making sudden product disappearances incredibly disruptive and painful.

To address these concerns, RealReports has focused on building a profitable and sustainable business model. “We have spent a lot of time building thoughtfully and methodically to establish ourselves as a lean, profitable, and durable business that is not going anywhere anytime soon,” Gorman says.

The Adoption Challenge

Real estate’s technology adoption challenges are well-documented, with MLS’s and brokerages regularly reporting that less than 10% of agents use the tools their companies invest in. 

“Let’s say an MLS has 10,000 members,” Gorman estimates, “It’s highly likely that the majority have done 0-1 deals in the last 12 months. Becoming an agent has a low barrier to entry, but a high barrier to success. At this point 20% of the agents are doing 80% of the sales.”

This reality shapes RealReports’ approach. Rather than targeting broad adoption, they focus on the subset actively doing business while building features that might eventually activate dormant agents.

The company employs multiple strategies to drive adoption among active practitioners. Technical integrations embed RealReports functionality directly into agents’ workflows via MLS platforms, CRMs, etc., and automated triggers send reports when agents list new properties, creating touchpoints at relevant moments. “You also have to get your hands dirty and do things that don’t scale,” explains Gorman, “We conduct regular webinars and trainings, provide plug-and-play social media content, sponsor in-person events, conduct regular user research, and iterate relentlessly on the product based on feedback. There is no panacea to success in this space, you just have to grind and do the work.”

The strategy appears to be bearing fruit. Gorman reports that partners implementing their full playbook see anywhere from 2-4 times the adoption rates they see across their other products.

Market Implications

RealReports’ growth trajectory reflects broader shifts in real estate technology adoption. The commission lawsuit settlements precipitated renewed urgency around value demonstration that benefits companies offering clear utility to practitioners. Meanwhile, the consolidation of production among fewer agents creates opportunities for tools that help active professionals differentiate themselves.

RealReports’ evolution from blockchain experiment to data infrastructure provider also illustrates the maturation of PropTech beyond buzzword-driven solutions toward addressing fundamental industry problems.

For MLSs and brokerages evaluating technology partnerships, RealReports’ approach offers a template for sustainable adoption: deep technical integration, consistent value delivery, and focus on workflow enhancement rather than behavior change.

As the industry adapts to ever-shifting markets and increased competition, companies that solve core problems while respecting adoption challenges are positioned to capture the value that previous generations of PropTech startups promised but failed to deliver.

The data fragmentation problem that motivated RealReports’ founding hasn’t disappeared, but the market conditions for solving it have never been better. For an industry built on information, having reliable, accessible data infrastructure isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s becoming a competitive necessity.