Editor’s note: This piece is part of Lawfare’s collection “9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,” examininghow 9/11 remains—or doesn’t—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks. Read the full collection here.
A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S.
Eric Wu, who built and ran Opendoor before stepping away in 2022, has had his new company, NavigateAI, out of stealth since May — building AI copilots that give construction workers real-time, hands-free guidance through smartphones and Meta's AI glasses, backed by $25 million from Elad Gil, Khosla Ventures, and Lennar to tackle a labor shortage severe enough that data center projects alone now need 4,000 to 5,000 workers apiece.
An artist’s conception shows one of Cowboy Space’s data centers in Earth orbit. (Cowboy Space via LinkedIn)
California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.
“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.
The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.
Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.
The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.
Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.
“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.
Economists, policymakers and journalists have been puzzling over why so many workers between 25 and 54 have been leaving the labor force over the past two years.
An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.
The housing markets in San Francisco, left, and Seattle have been diverging for the past year. Prices started falling in Seattle on an annual basis about a year ago, while prices in San Francisco have been rising since November. (BigStock, GeekWire File Photos)
While a fresh wave of AI-generated wealth is pouring fuel on San Francisco’s housing market, Seattle’s real estate scene is getting left out in the cold, stuck in a slump driven by ongoing local tech layoffs, soaring costs, and persistent worker anxiety.
A new report published Wednesday by Seattle-based Redfin illustrates just how dramatically the housing markets in the West Coast’s top two tech hubs have split.
In July, San Francisco’s median home-sale price jumped 6% year-over-year to $1.6 million as home sales rose 8.5%, fueled by an 18.4% drop in active listings—the largest inventory contraction in the country.
By contrast, Seattle’s median sale price dropped 3.6% to $809,479 as home sales fell 9.1% and active listings surged 16.7%, the nation’s steepest inventory increase, leaving local sellers outnumbering buyers by 65%. Redfin detailed the drop in pending sales in the city in an earlier report.
San Francisco’s resurgence is fueled by a concentrated wave of AI wealth. Driven by big salaries, six-figure signing bonuses, and anticipation of massive IPOs for Bay Area giants OpenAI and Anthropic, affluent buyers are aggressively bidding up homes, frequently paying hundreds of thousands over asking price.
The frenzy mirrors findings from The New York Times, which reported in May that cash-flush AI startup employees and secondary stock sales are fueling hyper-concentrated bidding wars across the Bay Area.
In Seattle, the dynamic is reversed. While local tech giants pour billions into AI infrastructure, corporate belt-tightening and lingering layoff fears at companies like Amazon and Microsoft have squelched buyer confidence, leaving prospective buyers cautious, job mobility low, and listings piling up.
Click to enlarge. (Redfin Graphic)
Ground-level real estate agents in the Seattle area are feeling that buyer hesitation firsthand.
“Layoffs in the tech world are dampening homebuying demand in the entire area,” said Sheryl Wingate, a Redfin Premier agent, noting that return-to-office policies are further squeezing demand in outlying suburbs as tech workers avoid long commutes amidst job uncertainty.
Seattle-area real estate isn’t just feeling the squeeze from the heavyweights. Job cuts have hit nearly every tier of the regional tech ecosystem this year, sweeping through engineering hubs for Meta, Google, and Salesforce, consumer brands like Zillow, T-Mobile, and Starbucks, corporate divisions at Expedia and TikTok, and startups including Qualtrics and Amperity.
The chill is hitting the region’s high-end neighborhoods hardest. According to Bloomberg, pending luxury home sales in the Seattle area plummeted 15%, driven by a double hit of tech-sector layoffs and Washington state’s higher taxes on top earners. Once-frenzied markets in Eastside suburbs like Bellevue and Sammamish have stalled, with homes priced over $2 million sitting for an average of 44 days as affluent tech buyers pull back.
By comparison, high-end buyers in San Francisco are doubling their budgets as AI confidence surges. Redfin noted that luxury pending sales in the Bay Area jumped 46% year-over-year, with local agents reporting tech clients doubling their price points — in some cases expanding from $2 million budgets to nearly $4 million — and placing offers as much as $900,000 over asking price.
The shift is also severing a key migration pipeline that long fueled Seattle’s housing boom. While high-earning Bay Area transplants historically moved north to stretch their tech compensation, Redfin migration data shows the net inflow of home shoppers moving from San Francisco to Seattle plummeted to just 369 people in the first quarter — down from over 5,100 five years ago.
Looking ahead, Redfin economists expect these diverging trends to play out across other tech hubs as artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market.
“AI is reorganizing the tech labor market, with San Francisco and Seattle representing two sides of that transition,” said Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, adding that while AI creates rapid wealth in some markets, it drives corporate restructuring and caution in others.
For years, the conversation around real estate tokenization has revolved around one question:
Which blockchain should we use?
Ethereum. Polygon. Avalanche. A private blockchain. A permissioned network.
It is an understandable question.
But it may no longer be the most important one.
The real estate industry is beginning to discover something more complicated: putting a property on a blockchain is not the same as building a functioning tokenized real estate market.
A token can be created.
A smart contract can be deployed.
Ownership can be represented digitally.
And yet the business can still face the problems that have historically made real estate difficult to invest in, manage, transfer, and scale.
Investors still need to be verified.
Legal ownership still needs to be established.
Capital still needs to move.
Income still needs to be distributed.
Compliance still needs to be managed.
Investors still need information.
And when someone wants to exit, another investor still needs to be willing and able to buy.
That is why the next phase of real estate tokenization may be less about blockchain selection and more about something far more difficult:
Building the infrastructure that connects a token to the real-world financial system around it.
The opportunity is significant. Deloitte estimates that tokenized real estate could grow from less than $0.3 trillion in 2024 to $4 trillion by 2035. But the same forecast also makes an important point: the opportunity extends beyond token creation into asset servicing, distribution, custody, and the broader infrastructure required to support tokenized markets.
The technology may be ready.
The harder question is whether the infrastructure is.
The Token Is Only the Visible Part
A tokenized property often looks simple from the outside.
A real-world asset is divided into digital units.
Investors purchase those units.
Ownership is recorded.
The token can potentially be transferred.
But behind that apparently simple process sits an entire operational system.
Consider what has to happen before a tokenized real estate investment reaches an investor.
The property must be evaluated.
The legal structure must be established.
Investor rights must be defined.
The offering structure must be determined.
Investors may need to complete identity and eligibility checks.
Capital has to be received and reconciled.
Tokens have to be issued.
Ownership records need to be maintained.
Income distributions may need to be calculated.
Reporting needs to continue after the investment is made.
The investor may eventually want to transfer or sell the position.
None of those problems disappear simply because a blockchain is involved.
This is the central mistake many businesses make when they first approach tokenization.
They see a technology problem.
What they actually have is an infrastructure problem.
Real Estate Is Already a Complex System
Real estate is not a single asset moving through a single workflow.
It sits at the intersection of multiple systems.
There is:
Property ownership
Legal documentation
Financial reporting
Investor management
Asset management
Banking
Payments
Compliance
Taxation
Custody
Market infrastructure
Traditional real estate has developed separate processes and intermediaries for many of these functions over decades.
Tokenization introduces another layer.
The challenge is not simply replacing every existing system with blockchain.
It is determining where blockchain improves the process — and where traditional infrastructure still performs an essential role.
That distinction matters.
A successful tokenized real estate platform may need to connect the digital and physical worlds rather than trying to force the physical world entirely onto a blockchain.
The real competitive advantage may therefore come from integration.
The Legal Asset Still Exists Off-Chain
A blockchain can record that a wallet owns a token.
But what exactly does that token represent?
That question sits at the center of real estate tokenization.
Does the token represent:
Direct ownership?
A share in a special-purpose vehicle?
An interest in a real estate fund?
Debt backed by a property?
A contractual right to future income?
Another form of financial interest?
The answer changes everything.
It can influence the legal structure, investor rights, compliance requirements, transfer rules, and operational model.
This is why tokenization cannot begin with smart-contract development alone.
The asset model has to be understood first.
Only then can the technology accurately represent the economic and legal structure surrounding the investment.
The blockchain may record ownership of the digital representation.
But the platform has to connect that representation to enforceable rights in the real world.
That connection is infrastructure.
Investor Onboarding Is More Important Than Most Tokenization Discussions Suggest
A tokenization platform can have excellent smart contracts and still fail to deliver a usable investment experience.
Imagine asking a traditional real estate investor to:
Download a browser extension.
Create a wallet.
Secure a seed phrase.
Buy cryptocurrency.
Move the cryptocurrency to another wallet.
Pay transaction fees.
Then figure out how to invest.
For many investors, that is not an investment journey.
It is friction.
The next generation of tokenized real estate platforms will likely need to reduce that complexity rather than transfer it to the investor.
That can mean building infrastructure around:
Digital identity
KYC and AML workflows
Investor eligibility
Accreditation checks where required
Fiat payment options
Wallet creation
Custody
Account recovery
Transaction records
The technology should support the investment experience.
The investor should not have to become a blockchain expert just to participate.
This is where the infrastructure conversation becomes particularly important.
The best blockchain infrastructure may be the infrastructure the investor barely notices.
Tokenization Does Not Automatically Create Liquidity
This is perhaps the most important misconception in the industry.
Tokenization is frequently associated with liquidity.
But making an asset transferable does not automatically create buyers.
A property interest could theoretically be represented by millions of digital tokens.
That does not mean millions of investors want to trade them.
Liquidity requires more than technology.
It requires:
Investors
Market access
Price discovery
Transaction mechanisms
Regulatory permissions
Settlement processes
Sufficient participation
Deloitte notes that secondary market trading and distribution services are among the infrastructure considerations that organizations should evaluate when approaching tokenized real estate.
That changes the question businesses should ask.
Instead of:
“How do we tokenize this property?”
They should also ask:
“Who will buy, hold, and potentially trade the asset once it is tokenized?”
That is not a smart-contract question.
It is a market-infrastructure question.
Distribution May Be More Important Than Token Creation
A beautifully designed token with no investor distribution strategy is still a difficult business model.
Real estate businesses therefore need to think about how investors actually enter the ecosystem.
Where will they discover opportunities?
How will they be onboarded?
How will they evaluate assets?
How will they fund investments?
What information will they receive after investing?
How will they manage a portfolio containing multiple assets?
These questions point toward a very different product.
Not simply a tokenization engine.
An investor platform.
This platform may need to support the entire journey:
A property, a fund interest, debt, equity, or another economic right?
Who is the investor?
Retail investors, accredited investors, institutions, or a specific investor group?
How does the investor enter?
Through direct distribution, an investment platform, a partner network, or another channel?
How does money move?
Through fiat payments, stablecoins, banking partners, or a combination?
How is ownership managed?
Through wallets, custodial accounts, or another model?
How are returns distributed?
Automatically, periodically, through fiat, digitally, or through another mechanism?
What happens when an investor wants to exit?
Is there a secondary market, a redemption mechanism, a scheduled liquidity event, or another pathway?
These are not details to solve after the token is launched.
They are the foundation of the platform.
The Real Innovation May Be Operational
Blockchain technology often receives attention because it is visible.
A token is easy to demonstrate.
A blockchain transaction is easy to show.
But some of the most valuable improvements may happen behind the scenes.
Smart contracts could potentially automate parts of the fund lifecycle, including subscriptions, capital calls, redemptions, and escrow processes. Deloitte has highlighted the potential for blockchain and smart contracts to improve efficiency across commercial real estate fund operations by reducing transaction costs and shortening settlement processes.
That means tokenization can potentially become valuable even when investors are not actively trading tokens.
The infrastructure may improve:
Administration
Reporting
Record keeping
Settlement
Distributions
Reconciliation
The investor sees a better experience.
The operator sees a more efficient process.
The blockchain becomes the infrastructure layer connecting the system.
That may ultimately be more important than the token itself.
The Winning Platforms Will Connect Old Finance and New Technology
The future of tokenized real estate is unlikely to be entirely decentralized.
Real estate businesses still need:
Legal entities
Banks
Property managers
Fund administrators
Compliance providers
Accountants
Custodians
Auditors
The goal should not necessarily be to remove every intermediary.
The goal should be to identify where infrastructure can become more efficient.
That is a much more realistic path toward adoption.
The strongest platforms may therefore operate as bridges.
They connect:
Real Estate + Investors + Financial Systems + Compliance + Blockchain
This is also why integration capability could become one of the most important competitive advantages.
A tokenization platform that cannot communicate with existing business systems may create as many problems as it solves.
Infrastructure Determines Whether Tokenization Can Scale
Tokenization works well in demonstrations.
Scaling it is harder.
One property can be tokenized through a carefully designed process.
What happens when there are:
100 properties?
10,000 investors?
Multiple jurisdictions?
Different investor classes?
Different payment methods?
Different compliance requirements?
Secondary transactions?
Recurring distributions?
That is when infrastructure becomes critical.
Scalable platforms need to think about:
Automation
System reliability
Security
User permissions
Data management
API integrations
Multi-asset support
Compliance workflows
Reporting
Operational monitoring
The challenge is no longer simply launching a token.
It is operating a financial platform.
And that is a fundamentally different level of complexity.
Blockchain Is Becoming the Expected Layer, Not the Differentiator
There was a time when simply putting an asset on a blockchain was innovative.
That period is ending.
As the market matures, blockchain infrastructure may become increasingly expected.
The differentiator will shift toward:
How easy is the platform to use?
How efficiently can investors be onboarded?
How clearly are ownership rights represented?
How easily can operators manage assets?
How well does the platform integrate with existing systems?
How are compliance and reporting handled?
How does the platform support the full investment lifecycle?
These are infrastructure questions.
And businesses that solve them effectively may have a stronger opportunity than those focused only on token issuance.
The Next Real Estate Tokenization Race Will Be an Infrastructure Race
Deloitte’s forecast of up to $4 trillion in tokenized real estate by 2035 is significant, but the path toward that scale will require more than blockchain adoption. It will require infrastructure capable of supporting issuance, servicing, custody, distribution, and investor participation across increasingly complex real estate markets.
That creates a major opportunity for businesses.
The next generation of real estate tokenization companies may not compete based solely on:
Which blockchain they use.
They may compete based on:
How effectively they make tokenized real estate work.
The businesses that understand this distinction early will approach development differently.
They will not begin by building a token.
They will begin by mapping an ecosystem.
How Softean Builds Infrastructure for Scalable Real Estate Tokenization Platforms
Real estate tokenization requires more than token creation. A scalable platform needs to connect asset onboarding, smart contracts, investor management, identity verification, compliance workflows, payments, reporting, distributions, and the broader infrastructure that supports the complete investment lifecycle.
As a Real Estate Tokenization Platform Development Company, Softean helps businesses design and build customized tokenization platforms based on their asset model, investor requirements, operational workflows, and long-term business objectives.
From tokenization architecture and smart-contract development to investor portals, wallet integration, compliance workflows, administrative systems, and platform scalability, the focus is on building infrastructure that can support real-world real estate operations.
Because the future of tokenized real estate will not be defined simply by how many properties are represented on a blockchain.
It will be defined by how effectively the infrastructure around those assets connects investors, operators, technology, and real-world financial systems.
And that is the platform businesses need to start building now.
The Future Isn’t a Tokenized Building. It’s a Connected Investment System.
The idea of turning a building into digital tokens is easy to explain.
The harder — and more valuable — idea is building everything around those tokens.
Investor onboarding.
Identity.
Payments.
Compliance.
Ownership.
Custody.
Asset servicing.
Reporting.
Distributions.
Market access.
Liquidity.
That is the real infrastructure challenge.
And it is why real estate tokenization is increasingly becoming less of a blockchain problem.
Blockchain technology can provide the foundation.
But the platform determines whether that foundation becomes useful.
The companies that win the next phase of tokenized real estate may therefore be the ones that stop asking:
“How do we put real estate on a blockchain?”
And start asking:
“How do we build a complete investment infrastructure where tokenization makes the entire system work better?”
Compass and the Washington state-based Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) have settled their year-plus-long lawsuit, Compass announced on Monday.
A new marketing option
Compass and NWMLS have agreed to a settlement through the creation of a new listing status that will allow Compass agents to pre-market their properties without risk of being fined by the MLS. The new status, which will become effective Sept. 4, is called “First Look” and will be treated similarly to a coming-soon listing, according to a press release.
When requested by the seller, the status allows showings for brokers and their clients, open houses and offers to be made on a property without incurring public price changes or days on market for up to 21 days while preparing for an “Active” status launch.
NWMLS clarified that days in the “First Look” status and any pre-launch price adjustments will be available internally to members of the NWMLS database but will not be published publicly. The MLS also said sellers can choose whether a “First Look” is published on IDX websites “or choose to engage in more tailored public marketing.”
What Compass had to say
Compass International Holdings Chairman and CEO Robert Reffkin said the brokerage’s goal in launching its lawsuit against NWMLS “has been fully realized.”
“We brought this lawsuit on a fundamental principle: homeowners deserve the absolute right to control how their properties are marketed, and real estate brokers should never face fines from NWMLS simply for following their client’s lawful instructions which in Washington State is their Statutory Duty,” Reffkin said in a statement.
Compass “proudly invested millions” in the lawsuit, Reffkin added, “and it was worth it.”
“MLSs are a group of direct competitors that are telling their competitors how they can and can not compete, which is the textbook definition of an antitrust violation,” Reffkin continued. “MLSs exist to distribute listings, when the homeseller wants to use it, not to let brokerage competitors collectively dictate how other brokers compete in marketing services or how homesellers market their homes.”
What NWMLS had to say
In a news release, NWMLS said the “First Look” status was created in response to member feedback — specifically amid shifting consumer expectations.
“We are giving sellers the flexibility they desire when preparing a home for market, while steadfastly protecting buyers from private networks,” NWMLS President and CEO Justin Haag said in a statement. “Simply put, First Look modernizes the pre-launch preparation process, while ensuring an open marketplace and fair competition, in full compliance with Washington State’s open-market laws.”
The MLS’s announcement also noted that the new status enables NWMLS to resolve litigation with Compass “while reaffirming its commitment to an open and comprehensive marketplace, data integrity, and consumer protection across the Pacific Northwest.”
Redfin weighs in
In a blog post published on Monday, Redfin also praised NWMLS’s move to create the new listing status.
“This is exactly the kind of innovation sellers, agents and major industry players — including Redfin — have been calling for, and we salute NWMLS for pioneering a pro-consumer, pro-competition solution,” said the post authored by Joe Rath, head of industry relations at Redfin parent Rocket Companies.
Back in April, Rath authored a separate open letter published on the company’s website that implored NWMLS to change its pre-marketing policies, arguing in favor of “homeseller choice,” a phrase used often by Reffkin. Redfin and Compass partnered in February to allow the brokerage’s “Private Exclusive” and “Coming Soon” listings to be published on Redfin.
In his Monday post, Rath also reiterated an argument Redfin made earlier this year that providing sellers with more pre-marketing options could ultimately give for-sale inventory a boost.
How the lawsuit began
Compass sued NWMLS last April, alleging that the MLS engaged in anticompetitive business practices, obstruction of seller choice and retaliation through a temporary suspension of Compass’ IDX feed. At the time, Compass claimed that it spent months trying to negotiate rule changes with NWMLS to allow for the brokerage’s office exclusives, but NWMLS “simply refused.”
Then, in April of this year, NWMLS filed a counterclaim against Compass, alleging that the brokerage’s 3-phased marketing strategy violates the Washington Consumer Protection Act because it is a “deceptive scheme” designed to conceal data from the public at large. NWMLS also argued that its own MLS rules were reaffirmed through a new state law seeking to restrict private listings.
Other settlement details
In addition to the new listing status, several other terms were agreed to as part of the settlement.
By Oct. 15, NWMLS has agreed to require all portals and real estate websites that use the MLS’s data to clearly and prominently display the name and contact information of real estate brokers on a listing, and immediately next to any contact broker buttons so that buyers have clear and direct access to the listing broker.
By that same date, NWMLS must also stop placing its watermarks on listing photographs to “[ensure] that NWMLS does not take credit for the work of real estate professionals.”
NWMLS is further obligated to apply its rules across all brokerages in the state of Washington to ensure they receive equal treatment, and it will be prohibited from taking legal action against Compass or its real estate professionals “under the guise of ‘enforcing state law,'” Compass said. The point references the new Washington state law that took effect in mid-June, which seeks to limit the use of private marketing practices in real estate. The language of the law, however, is vague, and therefore how much it may curb private listings in practice is uncertain.
By Nov. 15, NWMLS must also “give broker platforms the data fields and supplements that are relevant for brokers to do their jobs (eg, Legal, Firpta, 22k, 22j, Prelim, Surveys/maps, Resale cert), unless legally prohibited,” Compass said, so that brokers don’t have to access multiple systems to complete their work functions.
Zillow and Redfin settled an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission and five states Monday, just as a trial was set to begin, agreeing to undo part of a $100 million partnership that the government said effectively paid Redfin to stop competing in apartment rental advertising.
The companies, both based in Seattle, have been rivals in online real estate and related services for the better part of two decades, expanding into rentals to build their businesses beyond the market for single-family homes. The FTC alleged the deal combined two of the three largest online apartment listing services against one main competitor, CoStar’s Apartments.com.
The proposed settlement requires Redfin, now owned by Rocket Cos., to relaunch its apartment advertising operation within six months — hiring a general manager, a sales force and a trained customer support team, while committing to spend millions of dollars to grow the business.
Redfin faces fines if it misses deadlines, and must report regularly to the FTC on its progress.
Zillow’s apartment listings will still appear on Redfin.com, Rent.com and ApartmentGuide, and Redfin will keep syndicating them, so Zillow is holding onto the audience it gained in the 2025 deal. The companies say the syndication will run through at least 2030.
What ends is the exclusive nature of the partnership: As part of the FTC settlement, Redfin is no longer barred from selling its own advertising alongside those listings, or from doing business on its own with the property managers shifted to Zillow under their original deal.
Zillow also must help Redfin rebuild. Under the order, which runs 10 years, Zillow is required to give Redfin employee information so it can recruit Zillow workers, waive any noncompete or anti-poaching agreements blocking those hires, and let apartment advertisers locked into Zillow contracts renegotiate without penalty for nine months after Redfin relaunches.
The companies will also pay the states $2 million in costs and fees, according to Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, who co-led the five-state coalition.
Zillow said the partnership “will continue unchanged,” and framed the standalone advertising products both companies plan to launch in 2027 as added flexibility for property managers.
“This resolution is a win for renters and multifamily housing providers,” said Michael Sherman, general manager and senior vice president of Zillow Rentals, in a statement. He said the partnership has brought “more leads and leases to property managers and more options to renters,” and that the standalone products will let Zillow “do even more to support the marketplace.”
The FTC offered its own take: “Today’s settlement unwinds an agreement under which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to stop competing and hand off all its customers to Zillow,” said Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “This kind of payment to a competitor to exit a market and stop competing violates the antitrust laws.”
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson called it “a complete victory for the American people” in a thread on X early Monday. He added, “This anticompetitive agreement is now history under our proposed settlement.”
Guarnera said the settlement “delivers better, quicker, more certain results” than the agency would have been able to achieve if it had gone to trial and prevailed.
“Today’s settlement will restore competition by paving the way for Redfin to re-enter the market as a stronger competitor,” Brown said in a statement. “Most importantly, consumers will have more choices and won’t be subjected to illegally manipulated prices.”
The FTC and state cases were consolidated last year. Zillow and Redfin moved to dismiss in January, and U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga denied that motion in May, according to Real Estate News. However, the FTC’s case had met resistance in July, when Trenga denied its request to declare the deal presumptively unlawful, finding genuine disputes of material fact.
Redfin called the outcome “a significant win for Redfin and consumers across the country.”
“This agreement allows us to maintain our rental partnership with Zillow through at least 2030, while building and investing in a standalone rentals business of our own,” a spokesperson said, adding that renters “will continue to have access to the rental inventory they rely on today.”
The proposed settlement, announced Monday morning, requires court approval.
Updated with details from Washington AG Nick Brown.
According to plaintiffs, Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, Compass has bought so many brokerage firms over the past decade-plus that it maintains a monopoly, controlling “over 80 percent of the rental unit listings available for renters in Manhattan based on 2025 data.”
With that monopoly, Compass can “literally dictate pricing for as much as 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental units,” renters argued. And now, Compass is allegedly trying to manipulate prices on other platforms, as well.
Seattle remains a beacon for tech talent, ranking No. 2 in CBRE’s annual report. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)
The Seattle region outranked New York, Austin, Boston and other tech hubs, trailing only the Bay Area, in an annual tech talent scorecard from commercial real estate firm CBRE that weighs factors such as tech worker concentration, wages, education levels and real estate costs.
You may have seen headlines this week that New York overtook the Bay Area for the first time in the CBRE rankings. That was based on a subset of the data: a straight head count in each market. New York’s 394,300 tech workers topped the Bay Area’s 375,730. Seattle ranks seventh on that specific list, with 213,010 tech workers across the region.
But in the broader scorecard, Seattle held onto the No. 2 spot (which it also occupied last year), thanks to the density of its tech workforce, one of the largest concentrations of AI talent in North America, and the second-highest tech wages on the continent.
CBRE’s 2026 Tech Talent Scorecard ranks 50 North American markets on 13 weighted metrics. Seattle placed second with a score of 74.37 behind the Bay Area at 81.9. (CBRE Graphic, Click to Enlarge, and see full report here.)
The market-by-market workforce figures in the report run through 2025, so this year’s layoffs aren’t reflected in the rankings. CBRE does flag the trend nationally: the tech industry accounted for a record 31% of all U.S. job cuts through June, up from 13% for all of last year.
Some of the Seattle region’s specific strengths:
The AI workforce is deep. Seattle is home to 41,591 workers with AI skills, third most in North America, behind the Bay Area and New York. One in five of the region’s tech workers now has AI skills — a higher share than anywhere except the Bay Area.
Tech is a bigger part of the economy here. Tech jobs make up 10.2% of all employment in the metro area, among the top five markets and nearly double the 5.5% average across the 50 markets studied in the CBRE report.
Wages are in a tier of their own. Seattle’s average wage for tech workers at tech companies was $190,050 in 2024, second to the Bay Area’s $211,048, and nearly $50,000 above third-place Boston.
The workforce grew while the Bay Area’s shrank. Seattle added 24,590 tech jobs from 2022 to 2025, a 13.1% increase and the fifth-largest gain of any market. The Bay Area lost 23,900 jobs over the same time period.
However, the report also points to warning signs:
Many offices are sitting empty. The Seattle metro area’s office vacancy rate hit 28.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — the highest of the 50 markets in the report. That’s despite 1.9 million square feet leased by AI companies across the region since 2023, according to CBRE.
Costs are near the top. Seattle is the third-most-expensive place to run a 500-person tech company, at $73.9 million a year in wages and office rent, behind the Bay Area at $90.6 million and slightly behind New York, which edged Seattle by about $24,000.
Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area are the only two markets CBRE rates “exceptional” for software engineering talent. They’re also the two most expensive. (CBRE Graphic, Click to Enlarge, and see full report here.)
Young workers are going elsewhere. Seattle’s 20-something population fell between 2019 and 2024, even as its share of 30-somethings grew to the highest of any market in the report. The region is drawing mid-career but not entry-level talent, which risks creating a thinner pipeline over time.
One counterweight to the pipeline concern: the University of Washington ranks fifth among U.S. universities for its AI program, according to CBRE’s analysis of U.S. News & World Report rankings — the only school outside the Bay Area, Boston and Pittsburgh in the top five.
Access the full CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report here.
The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year.
This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines.
Members of the BuyWander team, including co-founders Brock Kowalchuk and Jordan Allen, celebrate with the company’s 10,000th customer in Spokane, Wash. in 2025. (BuyWander Photo)
BuyWander, the Spokane, Wash.-born startup building an auction marketplace for returned and overstocked retail goods, has moved its headquarters to the Seattle area and grown to 325 employees as it expands its warehouse network across the country.
The company said Tuesday that it has added four executives to its leadership team, including two former Amazon employees, as it pushes into new markets including Denver and Chicago.
BuyWander is now based in Kent, Wash., where it has 45 employees. The company said it moved its corporate headquarters from Spokane to the Seattle area this month, putting its leadership team closer to the region’s large retail and e-commerce ecosystem.
GeekWire last wrote about BuyWander in April 2025, when the startup employed 22 people and was on the verge of opening a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in Kent after raising $2 million in seed funding.
Founded in 2023 by Jordan Allen and Brock Kowalchuk, BuyWander’s marketplace sells returned and overstocked merchandise from retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart and Home Depot. Products start at a $1 opening bid in seven-day online auctions, with buyers picking up purchases at local BuyWander warehouses rather than having them shipped.
Current items for sale on the marketplace include: window air conditioning units; steel gate fencing; carbon fiber rear trunk spoilers; Jeep Wrangler seat covers; countertop microwave ovens, pop-up canopy tents and dozens of other products.
The model is aimed at giving returned merchandise another route to consumers rather than leaving it in warehouses or sending it to landfills. BuyWander’s technology is designed to scan, sort and identify inventory before putting it up for auction.
The BuyWander warehouse in Kent, Washington. (BuyWander photo)
The sector is filled with rivals, including companies such as Mac.bid, B-Stock, Liquidation.com and ReturnPro, which focuses more on solutions for retailers.
Allen previously founded Stay Alfred, a Spokane-based short-term rental company that shut down in 2020, amid the pandemic, after expanding to more than 30 cities.
“Auction commerce is having a real moment, and it’s exciting to build the team to meet it,” Allen said in a statement Tuesday.
The four new executives are:
Laura Sasser, chief operating officer, who spent nearly 20 years at liquidation and inventory-management company Channel Control Merchants and most recently was senior vice president of operations at FullSpeed Automotive where she oversaw facilities, inventory management, and loss prevention.
Daniel Kiepfer, vice president of data and AI, who previously led data and analytics at Seattle online jewelry retailer Blue Nile and held roles at Microsoft, RealSelf and McKinsey.
Abu Marcose, senior director of warehouse technology, who spent 12 years at Amazon, most recently as a senior software development manager on Amazon’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team.
Roger Ling, director of marketing, who previously led integrated marketing at DoorDash and held go-to-market and product marketing roles at Amazon, including work on Prime Big Deal Days and Amazon Business.
Marcose’s hiring is particularly notable for BuyWander’s push to build technology around its warehouse operations. At Amazon, he worked on capacity planning, network optimization and generative and agentic AI systems used in fulfillment operations.
Ling’s experience also fits BuyWander’s retail focus, bringing experience in both Amazon’s e-commerce operation and DoorDash’s consumer marketplace.
Sasser’s experience will help the two-year-old startup expand into new markets, helping customers find deals in new geographies.
“My focus now is building the operational backbone that lets it scale across every new market we enter,” she said in a statement.
BuyWander said it currently operates eight warehouses, with Denver and Chicago among its newest locations, and plans to continue expanding nationally over the next year. The bulk of its employee base works in stocking, intake and customer service.
The company is backed by Triple Impact Capital, Animal Capital, Data Tech Fund, Vinay Menda, Quiet Capital, Maria Routimine, Eric Klein, James Dorman and Tom Simpson.
Bitcoin can be understood through an analogy with real estate.16 Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), has compared investing in bitcoin to buying real estate in downtown Manhattan during the early stages of its development. As population, commerce, and cultural activity concentrated in the city, demand for limited land surged, dramatically increasing property values. Many of the world’s wealthiest families built their fortunes by owning scarce real estate. When something limited is in high demand, its value rises. As the saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain goes, “Buy land—they’re not making it anymore.”
Scarcity plays a central role in determining value, which is why real estate in densely populated areas is more expensive than in sparsely populated ones. Real estate has utility value—it can be used for living or production—but its price is largely driven by the limited supply of land in prime locations. There are only so many properties that can be built in Manhattan, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, or Venice. What ultimately makes these locations valuable is what occurs on top of them: the people, the capital, the creativity, the energy. As a city flourishes, whether through rising population, growing business activity, or cultural relevance, demand for that scarce land surges.
The value of land does not rise in a vacuum; it rises because it captures an expanding layer of economic activity that cannot be easily replicated or relocated. This dynamic is further amplified by fiat monetary expansion, which channels ever more liquidity into real estate, raising nominal prices well above what utility and income-generating capacity alone would support. Market mechanisms such as speculation and the widespread expectation of rising prices reinforce this scarcity and deepen that perception.
Bitcoin operates under a similar logic. Just like prime real estate, it gains value as more people, capital, economic activity, and trust accumulate around it. At the same time, the economic network built on top of it—financial infrastructure, global adoption, liquidity, and digital connectivity—can continue expanding globally through digital networks without corresponding expansion of the underlying monetary base. Adoption on the internet occurs globally and continuously—much faster than in the physical world, where economic expansion is constrained by geography.
But there is a crucial difference. In real estate, prices are shaped by development potential, location-specific utility, and relative scarcity, which is frequently intensified by regulations and policy decisions. Government interventions such as tax incentives for investors, zoning laws, and restricted building permits can artificially limit supply, pushing prices higher. These dynamics are further amplified by speculative behavior and the widespread expectation of continued price increases, making scarcity appear more absolute than it is. Bitcoin’s scarcity, by contrast, is absolute: its supply is fixed at twenty-one million, beyond the reach of policy decisions or political interference. Real estate’s manufactured constraints highlight the importance of distinguishing between natural and engineered scarcity in asset evaluation.
Owning bitcoin is comparable to owning a plot in a growing, borderless economy not tied to any government or geography. As more people and businesses adopt bitcoin, the value of that digital “plot” increases. The difference is mobility—this digital plot is not tied to any location and can be transferred globally within minutes. Unlike land, bitcoin enables the rapid, low-friction transfer of value anywhere in the world, subject only to network conditions and liquidity constraints.
Holding bitcoin provides a new way to participate in the global economy. While bitcoin operates on a global network, its effects are local. By enabling individuals to hold and transfer value without centralized permission, it allows participation in economic systems that are less dependent on institutions able to impose restrictions, exclude participants, or change rules unilaterally.
Bitcoin’s accounting model reinforces the real estate comparison. In a traditional bank account, value is recorded as a balance held by an institution. In Bitcoin, ownership is defined by direct control over individually defined units—unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs)—recorded on the network.
You can think of each bitcoin as a square of land that remains under your control until it is spent. Once spent, that square disappears, and new squares are created for the recipient. Each UTXO can be independently transferred or combined in future transactions. The result is a continuously evolving map of property claims secured by cryptography rather than institutional authority.
The analogy has limits. Bitcoin differs from real estate used to generate income. It generates no operating cash flow and is best understood as a scarce digital asset whose value lies in absolute scarcity and optionality rather than income. But like real estate, bitcoin functions as a long-term savings vehicle and increasingly as collateral, capable of supporting credit formation and broader economic activity while absorbing monetary demand. This makes real estate a useful framework for understanding bitcoin’s evolving role within capital markets and monetary systems.
An undisclosed pharma company signed a 21-year lease for the former Seagen property in Everett. Photo via Breakthrough Properties.
A bio-manufacturing facility in Everett, Wash., which was built by Seattle biotech giant Seagen but never opened under its Pfizer ownership, is getting a new lease on life.
Breakthrough Properties, a life sciences real estate company, said Friday that it has acquired the 270,000-square-foot facility at 215 Shuksan Way for $78 million and leased the entire campus for 21 years to an unnamed global biopharmaceutical company.
Seagen invested approximately $350 million to build out the facility, which was designed for drug manufacturing, quality-control labs, warehousing and distribution. But the company never moved in after drug maker Pfizer acquired Seagen for $43 billion in 2023.
“Pfizer regularly evaluates our manufacturing network to ensure capacity is effectively utilized based on projected product demands,” the company said in a statement to GeekWire in 2024. “After careful evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to wind down construction of the site.”
The facility sits about 25 miles north of Seattle along the I-5 corridor and is Breakthrough Properties’ first investment in the Puget Sound region.
The deal comes as pharmaceutical companies increase investment in U.S. manufacturing capacity. Breakthrough said major drugmakers have announced more than $600 billion in recent commitments to expand domestic production and strengthen supply chains.
The Everett facility was part of Seagen’s broader manufacturing expansion before the company was acquired by Pfizer for $43 billion. GeekWire previously reported on Seagen’s plans for the 270,000-square-foot Everett facility.
Breakthrough Properties is a joint venture between global real estate company Tishman Speyer and biotech investment firm Bellco Capital. A spokesperson for the company, which owns and develops life sciences properties in the U.S. and Europe, declined to provide details on the new tenant or the move-in date.
Washington AG Nick Brown filed the lawsuit against Kalshi in March. (Photo courtesy of the Washington Attorney General’s Office)
A judge in Seattle ordered Kalshi to shut down large parts of its prediction market in Washington state by Sept. 2 — less than three weeks from now — and denied the New York-based company’s attempt to pause the order while it appeals the ruling.
The order by King County Superior Court Judge John McHale, issued Wednesday, requires Kalshi to geofence Washington users out of markets for sports, elections, politics, entertainment, culture, tech and science, and “mentions,” contracts on whether public figures will say specific words.
Kalshi can continue offering markets on commodities, climate, economics, and finance in the state. Users will also be allowed to close out positions they already hold in the prohibited categories.
The order sets a $120,000-a-day penalty if Kalshi misses the Sept. 2 deadline, although Kalshi can also submit an affidavit explaining any delay and let the court determine the final penalty.
That penalty would match what Nevada regulators are separately seeking from Kalshi in a June contempt motion for allegedly failing to comply with a similar injunction there.
In his ruling, McHale wrote that Kalshi “willfully ignored” a Washington State Gambling Commission notice from December 2025 stating that event-based contracts are not authorized in the state. He also concluded that “the public interests at stake and potential harm to consumers” outweigh harm to Kalshi from the injunction.
Kalshi disputed the premise of the ruling on Thursday, reiterating its position that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission “has exclusive jurisdiction” over the exchange.
“We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision and are considering all legal options,” spokesperson Jacki McGavick said in a statement responding to the ruling.
Attorney General Nick Brown, who brought the suit, said in a statement that Kalshi “has gotten rich promoting wagers on sports, elections, natural disasters, events related to the Iran War, and more.”
However, Kalshi said its platform does not offer markets on wildfires, war, death, or terrorism. Kalshi has disputed reporting that has grouped its platform with rival Polymarket, which has drawn scrutiny for wildfire and other markets Kalshi says it doesn’t allow.
Kalshi had asked both McHale and the state Court of Appeals to pause the injunction pending appeal, and lost at both levels: a Court of Appeals commissioner denied an emergency stay request Monday, and McHale entered his own denial Wednesday with his larger order.
Kalshi’s remaining state-court options include asking a full Court of Appeals panel to review the commissioner’s ruling, or seeking emergency review at the Washington Supreme Court.
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