Bitcoin’s trajectory is becoming a central theme in the first family’s business interests, with Eric Trump explaining why he believes the market is setting up for a dramatic surge. His comments, made in a YouTube interview with Grant Cardone, offered a rare look into how American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC) approaches the crypto industry and why the Trumps consider BTC one of the most important financial opportunities of the decade.
Eric Trump Thinks Parabolic Rally Is Coming For Bitcoin
Eric Trump made it clear that ABTC operates on the conviction that Bitcoin is gearing up for a powerful upward acceleration. American Bitcoin is a publicly traded BTC mining and accumulation company co-founded by Eric Trump in partnership with Hut 8 Corp.
According to Eric Trump, the company is structured to maximize its BTC holdings ahead of that move rather than dilute resources on heavy management costs or constant liquidations. In his words, the comparison with other miners is straightforward because ABTC wants to hold the asset it believes will appreciate sharply instead of turning mined Bitcoin into daily operating cash.
His reasoning is a departure from the traditional mining business model, which typically sells a significant share of its Bitcoin to cover operational costs. Trump insists that ABTC is deliberately positioning itself differently because “we want to be buying the asset that we believe is going to appreciate.”
Eric Trump said BTC’s surge is not limited to ordinary crypto investors but is also driven by the quiet entry of sovereign funds, family offices, and major institutions. He also contrasted Bitcoin with real estate, noting that he now spends more time in crypto because it grows in ways traditional property cannot.
Real estate is slow and tied to limited cash flow, while Bitcoin scales globally and appreciates far faster. That difference is one of the reasons he expects BTC to reach around $500,000 in the long term, a prediction he offered without hesitation.
ABTC’s Unique Model: Building BTC Per Share
Ashet Genoot, CEO of Hut 8 Corp., expanded on the company’s internal philosophy by explaining how ABTC measures value differently from other publicly traded firms. Instead of focusing on earnings per share, he said their model centers on “Bitcoin per share,” which is a metric that reflects how much BTC each shareholder indirectly controls through the company.
Genoot explained that the question they ask every day is simple: how do we grow the amount of Bitcoin per share? He described their system as a constant pursuit of increasing BTC reserves through multiple channels, whether mining coins at scale or buying them whenever conditions favor accumulation.
The goal is for every ABTC shareholder to benefit from a rising quantity of BTC over time, turning the company into a long-term accumulator rather than a miner that immediately sells its output to cover expenses.
According to regulatory filings, ABTC operates tens of thousands of ASIC miners under Hut 8’s infrastructure and has accumulated more than 4,000 BTC as of late 2025.
Zillow has dropped its climate risk score program just one year after it started, according to a report by TechCrunch. It has removed climate risk scores from over one million listings after real estate agents complained that the data was misleading and leading to lost sales.
In their place, listings now feature a small link to data sourced from climate risk startup First Street, which is the organization that provided the original assessment. The startup isn't too happy about this move, with spokesperson Matthew Eby telling TechCrunch that "the risk doesn't go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability." First Street's climate scores still appear on listings from Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com.
The California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) is pleased with Zillow's decision, as this real estate database is used primarily by industry professionals. CRMLS CEO Art Carter told The New York Times that "displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property."
Carter also questioned the validity of First Street's data, saying that areas that haven't flooded in 40 or 50 years were not likely to flood in the next five. First Street responded by saying "our models are built on transparent, peer-reviewed science and are continuously validated against real-world outcomes."
Zillow
Zillow's climate risk score labels have been controversial since the company launched the program in 2024, particularly among real estate agents. One agent told The Boston Globe last year that they were "putting thoughts in people’s minds about my listing that normally wouldn’t be there." More than 80 percent of prospective buyers consider climate risks when shopping for a new home so, yeah, those thoughts are already in there.
First Street maintains that its climate risk scores are extremely useful for consumers, noting that its maps correctly identified risk for over 90 percent of the homes that burned during the Los Angeles wildfires. The company says its internal maps have been "significantly outperforming CalFire's official state hazard maps."
Engadget has reached out to Zillow to ask about its reasoning here. We will update this post when we hear back.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/zillow-removes-climate-risk-scores-after-agents-complain-about-sales-164405763.html?src=rss
Home search leader Zillow has changed the way that it shares climate risk information — directing visitors to the website of data partner First Street rather than surfacing it on Zillow home detail pages.
“This update ensures consumers continue to have access to important information to help them consider factors such as insurance, repair costs and long-term homeownership planning, and reflects our long-standing commitment to empowering consumers with transparent information,” a Zillow spokesperson shared with Real Estate News over email when asked about the move.
What’s less clear is the role one of the nation’s largest MLSs played in the change.
The New York Times story highlighted complaints from real estate agents along with the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) and its CEO Art Carter about perceived discrepancies and inconsistencies in the climate risk data, and implied that Zillow’s change was done under pressure from CRMLS.
In a statement shared with Real Estate News, a Zillow spokesperson said that the change was made to comply with different MLS requirements but did not highlight CRMLS specifically. Zillow’s change in the way it displays climate risk data has been applied to all listings on the site, not just homes in California or those within CRMLS’ jurisdiction.
“Zillow remains committed to providing consumers with information that helps them make informed real estate decisions. We updated our climate risk product experience to adhere to varying MLS requirements and maintain a consistent experience for all consumers,” the spokesperson said.
However, other leading portals are still showing climate data in home listings. “You can still find property level climate risk scores on Redfin,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather wrote in a social media post that linked to the New York Times story.
CRMLS’s role and response
“There was no change in the rules,” a CRMLS spokesperson said over email when asked if there was a specific update in MLS standards and practices that would have led to Zillow’s move.
So why now? If Zillow has implied that the change was made in order to remain in compliance with MLS practices, what exactly was CRMLS’s role in the change to home search site’s display of climate data? The dispute between Zillow and CRMLS could also be viewed as another example of the ongoing fight among major industry stakeholders over the control of listings and listing data.
In October, CRMLS and Compass engaged in a feud over the MLS’s end user licensing agreement, which Compass CEO Robert Reffkin argued forced “over 100,000 agents to accept a 10-page agreement giving CRMLS the right to sell the agents’ content and contribution.” Carter said the MLS serves its users by managing the data they provide “as a set, not as a bunch of individual fragments” and the agreement reflects that.
The impact of skyrocketing insurance rates
As organized real estate and home search sites debate the accuracy of climate data and the merits of displaying it on property listings, one issue that isn’t being disputed is the rising cost of home insurance. Zillow’s move to point consumers off the site to explore climate risks comes at a time when more homeowners are seeing major increases in their insurance premiums and others are actually seeing the steep costs of insurance eat into their home value.
While speaking at a November event for ResiClub, Cotality Chief Data and Analytics Officer John Rogers said the average annual change in homeowners insurance premiums was 14% for both 2023 and 2024 and is expected to be 10% in 2025. Rogers also forecasted an 8% rise in premiums for 2026 and in 2027.
But California home owners and buyers are being hit particularly hard. According to the California Association of Realtors’ latest State of the Market annual report and survey, over a quarter of member agents signaled that their buyers were having difficulty obtaining insurance. And the number of buyers losing out on a home because of issues with home insurance has been increasing. Last year, over 14% of member agents reported that at least one sale fell through because buyers could not secure homeowners insurance while the number rose to over 16% in 2025.
A conversation with the new Redfin chatbot for home shoppers. (Screenshot via Redfin)
Real estate brokerage platform Redfin released a conversational chatbot to help house hunters search for homes using natural language.
The tool lets users describe what they want and refine results through back-and-forth dialogue. Unlike real estate platforms that offer only one-off natural-language queries, Redfin says its chatbot can ask clarifying questions, respond to feedback, and surface more tailored recommendations.
“We relied on search filters to define queries for years, but people share more about their preferences when it’s a conversation,” Ariel Dos Santos, Redfin senior vice president of product and design, said in a statement.
Seattle-based Redfin, acquired by Rocket Companies in July, built the system with Sierra, the AI customer experience platform recently valued at $10 billion.
Redfin and other real estate companies are racing to deploy conversational AI tools. Last month, fellow Seattle real estate giant Zillow unveiled the first real estate app within ChatGPT.
Redfin’s new conversational interface aims to mirror how buyers talk to a real agent — but with the advantage of scanning every listing on Redfin nationwide. Home shoppers can tell the chatbot what they’re looking for, react to suggested listings (“more like this, but with an extra bedroom”), or adjust search criteria as new ideas arise. The feature also supports multiple languages.
As buyers interact with the chatbot, it “learns from real user conversations” to deliver increasingly relevant options over time, according to the company.
Early testing suggests that the feature is well-received. Users of the conversational search technology viewed nearly twice as many homes as those using filtered searches. They were also 47% more inclined to ask for a tour or other Redfin services, the company reported.
The tool is available on Redfin.com and mobile web, and will come to Redfin’s iOS app in December.
Last year the company launched its “Ask Redfin” generative AI assistant designed for homebuyer questions about a specific listing.
Arrived co-founders, from left: COO Alejandro Chouza, CEO Ryan Frazier, and CTO Kenny Cason. (Arrived Photo)
Arrived, a Seattle-based tech startup that turns rental homes into a mainstream asset class for everyday investors, raised $27 million in new funding to support its new “stock market for real estate” platform.
Neo led the latest round, which included Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Core, and other backers. Total funding is north of $60 million.
Arrived (formerly Arrived Homes) lets people buy fractional shares of single-family rental homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. It’s pitched as an alternative way to gain exposure to real estate without taking on a full mortgage or managing a property.
The company identifies and acquires rental properties, then handles financing, renovations, property management and tenant relationships. Investors can buy shares in individual homes or pooled funds through the Arrived website. They earn quarterly dividends from rent plus a share of any appreciation when the property is sold after a multi-year holding period.
Since launching in 2019, nearly 900,000 registered investors have invested more than $340 million on the Arrived platform. The company says it has distributed more than $55 million and funded more than 550 properties across 65 markets in the U.S.
This week the company officially announced its new Secondary Market — a peer-to-peer marketplace where investors can buy and sell shares of rental homes directly from one another.
The market, which debuted earlier this year, saw investors place more than 57,000 buy and sell orders in its first three weeks of availability.
“We believe real estate investing is going to move online,” Ryan Frazier, co-founder and CEO of Arrived, said in a statement. “Our vision is a future where real estate investing feels just like investing in public companies — where anyone can buy and sell shares of properties in minutes, not months.”
(Arrived Image)
Arrived earns revenue through multiple fee streams tied to the acquisition and ongoing management of rental-property investments. The model includes:
A one-time sourcing/acquisition fee charged when it buys a property and raises investor capital.
An ongoing assets under management (AUM) fee, paid quarterly or annually based on property value or investor equity.
Real estate agent rebate income from the acquisition side, received from the seller’s agent when Arrived buys a property.
Earlier this year Arrived launched a “Seattle City Fund,” part of new product designed to give investors targeted exposure to a single metro area’s housing market without having to pick individual properties.
Arrived is part of a wave of tech companies applying fintech, crowdfunding, and fractional-ownership models to residential real estate. Competitors include Landa and Lofty, which describes itself as a “NASDAQ for real estate.”
The model isn’t without controversy. Critics argue that turning more single-family homes into investment products can worsen affordability by adding investor demand to already tight markets.
Arrived raised a $25 million Series A round in 2022. The company declined to share an updated valuation.
Arrived leadership includes Frazier (formerly with Simply Measured and Sprout Social); CTO Kenny Cason (Simply Measured); and COO Alejandro Chouza (Oyo and Uber).
Other investors include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff; and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Zillow continues to be an overachiever, at least with its financial performance.
The home search giant’s revenue has consistently beat expectations for the past two years, and Q3 was no different: Revenue was $676 million for the third quarter, up 16% year-over-year and above the company’s previous guidance, driven by the strength of its rentals and mortgage divisions.
Rentals revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $174 million, while mortgage revenue increased 36% to $53 million, according to Zillow’s shareholder letter. The company’s main revenue stream, residential, rose 7% to $435 million.
Zillow also turned a profit, netting $10 million during the quarter and sustaining its run of profitability for a third consecutive quarter.
What Zillow had to say
While Zillow’s financials were strong, it was also mired in litigation during the quarter, something CEO Jeremy Wacksman touched on during the earnings call.
On lawsuits: Wacksman briefly addressed some of the company’s litigation issues, particularly the lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission over Zillow’s rental agreement with Redfin.
The FTC alleges that Zillow and Redfin illegally conspired to eliminate competition in the rental listings market with a syndication agreement. Attorney generals from five states filed a similar lawsuit a day later.
Wacksman noted that they’ve had the agreement in place for about six months and have seen the benefits for both consumers and property managers.
“So to us it’s obviously pro-consumer and pro-property manager, which makes it pro-competitive,” Wacksman said. “We look forward to making that case as the process plays out.”
Wacksman said he doesn’t foresee any big impact to Zillow’s business.
“We do see maybe more noise around hidden listings and the potential to push more hidden listings onto sellers and to buyers and to harm consumers,” Wacksman said, adding that much of the industry is on board with Zillow’s private listing ban.
Consumers “don’t want to put the internet back in the box, and we expect that behavior to continue, because agents are trying to do right by their sellers and sell their homes,” Wacksman added.
Key numbers
Revenue: $676 million, up 16% year-over-year. Residential increased 7% to $435 million; mortgage revenue was up 36% to $53 million; and rentals revenue climbed 41% to $174 million.
Cash and investments: $1.4 billion at the end of September, up from $1.2 billion at the end of June.
Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization): $165 million in Q3, up from $127 million a year earlier.
Net income/loss: A gain of $10 million in Q3, up from $2 million the previous quarter, an improvement over its $20 million loss a year ago.
Traffic and visits: Traffic across all Zillow Group websites and apps totaled 250 million average monthly unique users in Q3, up 7% year-over-year, the company said. Total visits were 2.5 billion in Q3, up 4% year-over-year.
Q4 outlook: For the fourth quarter, Zillow estimates revenue will be in the $645 million to $655 million range, which would represent high single-digit year-over-year growth.
Notable moves
Zillow was busy dealing with litigation during the third quarter:
The company also had positive news to share during the quarter, noting in September that more than 50 brokerages had adopted Zillow Showcase. Newly named partners include The Agency, LPT Realty and Century 21 Masters in California.
“At The Agency, we’re always looking for ways to give our agents every advantage in showcasing their listings,” said Mauricio Umansky, CEO and founder of The Agency, adding that the partnership “allows us to maximize exposure, put homes in the best light and reach more potential buyers.”
The company also hired a new chief economist in the third quarter. Mischa Fisher, who most recently taught data science at Northwestern University, has experience analyzing housing, labor and consumer spending data. She replaces former chief economist Skylar Olsen.
Editor’s note: Story updated with details from the company’s earnings call.
Soon after Zillow announced it was the first real estate company to launch an app in ChatGPT, some in the industry responded with alarm.
The core concern was whether the integration violates licensing rules, but the conversations touched on broader issues: How should listing data be used and controlled? How should the industry be thinking about data standards in the context of emerging AI technologies?
‘At the forefront of generative AI adoption’
In its Oct. 6 announcement, Zillow said ChatGPT users could now add the Zillow app to the popular AI chatbot and explore listings using natural language search. The app — within ChatGPT — can then display property info with links back to the original listings on Zillow.
The integration was designed to bring “simplicity to the home journey within ChatGPT,” said David Beitel, Zillow’s chief technology officer. The partnership, he added, “puts Zillow at the forefront of generative AI adoption.”
‘What is reasonable control’ of data?
Almost immediately, some people wondered whether Zillow was following the terms of its IDX data licensing agreements with multiple listing services.
“Zillow’s ChatGPT integration raises the question: what is reasonable control of the display of MLS data?” Leah Ingalsbe, executive vice president of MLS and technology at the Greater Springfield Board of Realtors, wrote on LinkedIn.
“Granted, licensing agreements differ from one MLS to another, but this development offers plenty of food for thought on emerging technologies that were nonexistent when many of our terms of use were penned,” Ingalsbe wrote.
She did not respond to a request for further comment.
No ‘permission to share’
A Texas real estate agent was more definitive in his stance. Danny Frank, an agent at JLA Realty and a former chair of the Houston Association of Realtors, wrote a blog post expressing his concerns, and in an interview with Real Estate News, said he believes Zillow is in violation of IDX rules.
“The brokers give permission to HAR, and they do not have my permission to share that [listing data] with another third party site, unless everyone has equal access to that,” Frank said. “Right now, only Zillow has access to that [ChatGPT integration], and they’re using that to their benefit.”
Frank has also filed a complaint with HAR, which told Real Estate News, “We are reviewing the matter and will take appropriate action if any issues are identified.”
Who’s displaying the listings?
The National Association of Realtors’ IDX policy requires all displays of IDX listings to “be under the actual and apparent control of the participant [broker].”
Victor Lund, founding partner and co-CEO of real estate consulting firm WAV Group, has asserted that Zillow is violating this requirement, because its license allows the display of MLS data on Zillow.com and its mobile apps, not on another domain.
Lund contends that, “From the consumer’s perspective, they’re using ChatGPT … and simply invoking Zillow as a tool inside that environment.”
While NAR has not taken a stance on the Zillow integration, the association released a statement on Oct. 21 advising MLSs to consider “whether MLS data is being transmitted to an unauthorized party, if the displaying Participant maintains ‘control’ over their display, and if the display fulfills the disclosure and display requirements outlined in local IDX rules” when assessing compliance.
NAR also clarified that “the display of MLS data on mobile apps is permitted under the existing IDX policy.”
Zillow outlines its compliance measures
The company went through “a painstaking process” to make sure it was following MLS rules, according to Errol Samuelson, Zillow’s chief industry development officer, during a recent Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered podcast.
They also worked with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to ensure IDX data would not be used to train the AI model. “It was a deep collaboration, and they’ve been very respectful of the different industry rules and data privacy and federal laws and so on,” said Josh Weisberg, SVP of AI at Zillow, during the podcast.
Zillow addressed some of the other industry concerns in its FAQ.
Regarding third-party display of data, the FAQ explains that after a user enters a prompt within the app, ChatGPT relays it to Zillow, which “sends a response that is displayed in the Zillow App, but that data does not go to ChatGPT” — in other words, the chatbot itself is not displaying MLS data.
As for the “participant control” requirement, the FAQ says “the Zillow App was built by Zillow to be IDX-compliant and is operated by, and controlled by Zillow, just as on the Zillow website and mobile app.”
Real Estate News reached out to Zillow multiple times for further comment and Zillow declined to speak on the record.
Opening a back door to data?
Web browsers like Google display links to Zillow listings, but they don’t create a downloadable spreadsheet of listing data. Will Zillow’s ChatGPT integration provide such a list? Yes.
Real Estate News tested this out by asking the integrated app for listings in a certain market and price range, which it displayed. After prompting the app with a series of additional questions, the app said it could “pull all the data the widget actually loaded” — meaning the data from the Zillow integration or “connector” itself.
Ultimately, it captured data for 100 listings in a downloadable file. (See the exact prompts and responses at the end of this story.)
Lund believes this could open the door for third parties to capture listing data “and [use] it for commercial purposes” or “track and monitor listings” using an external system.
MLSs taking a closer look — but not saying much
Real Estate News repeated listing searches for several markets and sent the ChatGPT-created spreadsheets to the relevant MLSs. Some declined to comment on the record (Bright MLS, California Regional MLS) or did not respond to requests for comment (Miami Realtors MLS, BeachesMLS, UtahRealEstate.com, GSBOR).
Others, including Stellar MLS, Georgia MLS and NTREIS, said they were “discussing internally” or “still investigating” whether the Zillow-ChatGPT integration complies with IDX policies.
But a spokesperson for North Carolina’s Canopy MLS said “the Zillow app remains compliant with our IDX rules at this time,” though they declined to comment further.
Lund said he was “not surprised” MLSs weren’t talking publicly about the integration. “They’re in the middle of trying to understand it,” he said. “This is all brand-new information.”
Another reason MLSs might be keeping quiet?
“We’re in a very litigious time in our industry, more than I’ve ever seen it,” said Russ Cofano, co-founder and principal of Alloy Advisors and a licensed attorney.
“I think people are going to be very cautious about taking approaches that could result in litigation, and doing their due diligence before they try to make any decisions that could create problems for other companies, whether it’s Zillow or anybody else,” Cofano said.
Cofano wouldn’t share a personal opinion on compliance, but he noted that “there may be some unintended consequences from this type of integration, and those things should be addressed so that we don’t have easy ways for people to misuse MLS data.”
A path forward?
Still, Cofano said he hoped the new app would spur MLSs to reach out to Zillow — not just to gauge compliance, but to learn from their innovation.
“If really this industry is about serving consumers, then we should be applauding Zillow … for trying to do something that exposes authorized listing data to more people in the way that we all know is coming, which is AI search and discovery,” Cofano said.
The industry gets “wrapped around the axle on this ownership of data issue, and sometimes … forget what the objective here is, and that is not to own the data, but to facilitate buyers looking at sellers’ homes for sale and doing transactions.”
A peek inside the Zillow-ChatGPT app
Here’s what happened when we tried the Zillow-ChatGPT app for ourselves — and asked it for the data.
Using an individual, paid ChatGPT account on a web browser, Real Estate News added the Zillow app to the account and asked, “Zillow, please show me for-sale listings in Orlando, Florida, priced between $0 and $400K.” ChatGPT displayed a map with red, pinned listings and their prices.
When asked, “Can you get the data used to display the widget I’m seeing? All of it?” ChatGPT replied, “I can pull all the data the widget actually loaded (that’s the first page of results—up to ~100 listings with full details like address, price, beds/baths, sqft, lot size, lat/long, home type/status, and the Zillow URL).”
ChatGPT then said it could export those 100 listings and said it would “need to run multiple paged fetches” in order to capture every matching property. It then offered to deliver those first 100 listings as CSV and JSON files. When told to “go ahead,” it delivered those downloadable files, providing data for those 100 listings.
When asked, “Where did you get the data for these files?” the reply was “From the Zillow connector powering the embedded map/widget you used here. When you asked for Orlando, FL homes $0–$400k, I called the Zillow tool behind the scenes; it returned the first page of listing payloads (what the widget loaded to render those cards). I saved that exact response as the raw JSON and a flattened CSV.”
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