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Crypto criminals cant hide The single largest cryptocurrency heist in history took place one day in late February, when hackers exploited system vulnerabilities in Bybit, a Dubai-based crypto exchange, siphoning off a whopping $1.5 billion in digital assets within minutes. Bybits security team immediately launched an investigation that would eventually involve the FBI and several blockchain intelligence companies. Among those involved from the beginning were the experts at TRM Labs, a San Francisco-based company of around 300 that analyzes the blockchain networks which power cryptocurrency transactions to investigateand preventfraud and financial crimes. “Literally from the first minutes, we were involved,” says Ari Redbord, the companys global head of policy, “working with Bybit and law enforcement partners like the FBI to track and trace funds.” The attack was soon attributed to a North Korean state-sponsored hacker organization commonly known as Lazarus Group. Lazarus has been blamed for a series of high-profile cybercrimes in recent years, including the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, the 2016 digital heist from the Bangladeshi central bank and, more recently, billions of dollars in digital currency thefts. TRM was among the first to attribute the Bybit attack after detecting an overlap between the blockchain resources used here and those used in Lazaruss previous thefts. Since then, the company has harnessed its expertise in tracking crypto to keep law enforcement abreast of where the stolen funds are headed, following them from blockchain to blockchain and through clever concealment mechanisms. “We were very much built for an investigation like this,” Redbord says. Today, TRM’s investigators probe cryptocurrency thefts, ransomware attacks, and phishing scams. They help investigate other crimes that involve digital currencies, from child pornography to drug trafficking. The companys free, public platform Chainabuse, launched in 2022, helps people report fraud, hacking, blackmail, and other crypto-related crimes. Clients in the cryptocurrency and finance industries harness the company’s software and data about blockchain transactions to identify funds associated with criminal activity and to flag suspicious transactions. Law enforcement agencies around the world enlist TRMs toolsand sometimes even the company’s own investigators. Demand for such investigators is growing. TRMwhich stands for Token Relationship Managementhas raised about $150 million in total funding to date, from notable backers that include the venture arms of PayPal, American Express, and Citi, as well as Goldman Sachs. The investment bank led TRMs most recent, late-stage funding round, which closed in January for an undisclosed amount, according to the research firm PitchBook. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem is likely to experience positive growth throughout 2025, according to a recent analysis by PitchBook. So too will crypto crimes: Illicit operations took $40 billion worth of crypto last year, according to Chainalysis, another blockchain security companyfar more than the roughly $10 billion in venture capital funding that flowed into the above-board crypto sector in the same span, and more even than cryptos 2022 VC funding peak of $29.8 billion. Roles like TRMs will become more urgent if the government continues to abdicate its regulatory duties. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered a Justice Department unit that targeted crypto-related crimes. Yet crypto sits at the nexus of so many of the presidents domestic interestsfentanyl, counterterrorism, border security, and fraud. For TRM and rivals like Chainalysis and Elliptic, all of which have already won millions of dollars in federal contracts, the future is bright. From NFTs to crypto fraud One paradox of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency systems is that while they’re widely thought to provide anonymity, with users exchanging funds based not on real names and physical addresses, but on so-called digital addressesunique and lengthy strings of alphanumeric characters that serve as a given accounts sole identifierthe records of those transactions are still public. A common ledger logs every payment, tying each transaction to those that came before, all the way back to the tokens minting. And once information becomes known about one transaction and the people or organizations behind the addresses involved, it becomes possible to trace those funds back and forth through time and from address to address. That allows clever observers to follow the money and deduce where funds came from, who other counterparties may be, and which transactions likely involved some of the same parties, like how investigators might piece together who used an anonymous burner phone based on the numbers they called. It’s a limitation to anonymity that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto alluded to in the groundbreaking paper describing cryptocurrency’s underpinnings. And it’s one that computer scientist Sarah Meiklejohn and colleagues at the University of California San Diego showed to be a reality in a widely cited 2013 paper that demonstrated concretely how Bitcoins could be grouped by likely common ownerand how those owners could sometimes be identified from a database of known addresses. And that database, Meiklejohn and colleagues showed, could be assembled by a determined researcher simply doing ordinary business on the blockchain and recording the addresses used by the various vendors, exchanges, and other parties they transact with. While not the first company to run with Meiklejohn’s ideas on tracking the transfer of cryptocurrenciesrival Chainalysis, for one, launched in 2014TRM offered the first-ever platform compatible with the Ethereum blockchain, widely used both for its own currency and assets like non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. At the time, “all of these blockchain intelligence companies had built their entire data architecture on the Bitcoin blockchain, Redbord says, because Bitcoin was entirely synonymous with cryptocurrency, and vice versa.” TRM began in 2018 as CEO Esteban Castao and CTO Rahul Rainas effort to capitalize on NFTs trendiness. After demoing an easy-to-use analytics tool theyd built to help understand NFT market movement to a friend with his own blockchain-based startup, Castao and Raina decided to pivot. Their creation could be its own product with wide appealthe same blockchains which track NFTs also manage cryptocurrenciesCastao says that while nobody had ever gotten excited about any of the other NFT applications we were building,” this was different. Describing their friend and his employees reactions, he says, it was the first time theyd seen on-chain activity visualized in a way they could understand.” Talking to potential customers soon revealed a critical use cae beyond basic customer analytics: understanding the flow of funds on the blockchain to avoid unwittingly participating in money laundering. A now-pivoted TRM publicly launched in 2019 with a tool it planned to sell to blockchain businesses looking to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. But a more proactive use case soon arose that suggested even bigger opportunities. A friend reached out to say hed fallen victim to a cryptocurrency hack and wanted to know if TRM could help find the missing money. With the companys tool, “we could see in clear daylight where the money was,” Castao says. “So we got in touch with the Secret Service, we got in touch with the FBI, and that was the initial pull into that market.” By the time TRM Labs emerged from Y Combinator, in 2019, fighting and preventing fraud and other crime had become its primary focus. Theyre threat hunters Many TRM senior leaders and investigators honed their expertise over years in law enforcement, working at police agencies across the world. Redbord, the global policy head, served for more than a decade as a U.S. federal prosecutor and spent two years working on money laundering and national security at the Treasury Department before joining the company. Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations, previously served as a special agent at IRS Criminal Investigations, where he was instrumental in recovering cryptocurrency stolen in the infamous 2016 hack on the Bitfinex exchange; in the time between theft and recovery, the digital coins value had ballooned to $3.6 billion, making it the largest federal government seizure in history. The laptop Janczewski used in the investigation is now in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. “They’re threat hunters,” Redbord says of TRMs investigators. “Our terror financing expert is out there communicating on password-protected Telegram channels with mujahideen, who will send him a crypto address. He’ll take that address and label it terror financing, and then we use AI and machine learning to build on that attribution.” With investigators around the globe, the company is able to track illicit funds around the clock. “Things like Bybit, you can’t have just one investigator doing that,” says TRM senior investigator Jonno Newman. Being based in Australia, in a time zone close to that of North Korea, made it easy for Newman to help out in the early days of the still-ongoing Bybit investigation. It also helped that he had previously led TRM’s investigation into an earlier hack attributed to North Korea, in 2023, where more than $100 million in cryptocurrency was reported stolen from thousands of blockchain addresses on the digital coin storage tool Atomic Wallet. Then, Newman says, the hackers began obfuscating the stolen funds origins and ultimate destination, shuffling their plunder between different virtual addresses and cryptocurrencies. They relied on so-called mixers, which hold and combine coins from multiple sources before disbursing them to new addresses, and cross-chain bridges, which let users convert funds from one cryptocurrency to another. Hackers would later use a similar playbook in moving the Bybit funds. As a result of TRMs automated fund tracker across bridges, a service it has offered since 2022an industry first, CEO Castao saysinvestigators were able to closely monitor where the Atomic Wallet funds headed, tipping off law enforcement as needed about opportunities to freeze or seize them. “It was early mornings and late nights trying to keep up with the laundering process.” says Newman of the investigation. The former head of South Australia Police’s cybercrime training and prevention unit and author of a recent children’s book about the crypto world, he says “it becomes this almost cat-and-mouse game about where they are going to go next.” TRMs products at least make the game playable. “When you’re following the money, it used to be that you would reach a dead end when the money went to a different blockchain,” Castao says. “But with TRM, tracing across blockchains is seamless.” Cautious optimism for blockchain security Not everyone believes TRMs tech can fully deliver on its promise, at least from a legal perspective. J.W. Verret, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School who has testified as an expert witness in crypto-related matters, cautions that most testimony based on blockchain forensics tools should be viewed as potentially fallible, “They are useful for developing leads at the start of an investigation,” he says, but can be overly relied on like the long history of junk forensic sciencehandwriting analysis, bitemark analysis, stuff that’s all kind of later proven to be unreliable.” For its part, Verret says, TRM Labs offers tools that are less prone than some of its competitors to false positives because the company is more careful about how it establishes associations between blockchain addresses and criminal activity. Meanwhile, last September, TRM announced the creation of the T3 Financial Crime Unit, a partnership with the organizations behind the Tron blockchain and Tether stablecoins to combat the use of those technologies for money laundering. By January, TRM said the partnership had helped freeze more than $100 million in USDTTether’s stablecoin pegged in value to the U.S. dollarfound to be tied to criminal activity. That figure has since more than doubled, with the total now including nearly $9 million linked to the massive Bybit heist. “In the seven months since launch, T3 has worked with law enforcement to freeze over $200 million linked to illicit activity ranging from terror financing to money laundering to fraud,” Castao says. “And when you think about how much crime is financially motivated, adding a $200 million expense to criminals’ balance sheet is a huge win for deterring crime.” But even as TRM jockeys for pole position in a competitive industry, cybercriminals continue to develop new methods of stealing and hiding funds through complex blockchain machinations, often by taking advantage of crypto efficiency gains that make it easier to move more money faster. That will only continue as criminals deploy AI to automate scams and potentially even money launderingand investigators use new AI and machine learning techniques, along with ever-growing lockchain datasets, to track them more efficiently and coordinate with law enforcement to stop them and seize their funds. And since blockchain ledgers last forever, crypto criminals are risking more than perhaps they realize, according to Castao. “You’re betting not only that TRM and law enforcement won’t be able to identify your illicit activity today, but that we won’t be able to do it in the future, he says. Because the record is permanent.” And thats the most powerful advantage investigators possess.
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E-Commerce
What does it mean to be a manager? In todays world, managers need to wear many hats. They have to be a mentor, mediator, communicator, coach, and numerous other roles simultaneously. But at its core, management is about matchmaking. You need to map the talents of your team to the needs of your business. That means making the most of your teams combined talents and unlocking the diversity in your team. Unfortunately, as managers struggle with limited time and resources, they overlook this critical component. All too often, managers end up assigning tasks on autopilot, matching business challenges to job titles rather than thinking creatively about how to leverage peoples hidden talents or offer growth opportunities. The shift to hybrid and remote work has also reduced opportunities for the spontaneous discovery of peoples hidden talents. This can end up shrouding peoples true strengths. Collaboration and engagement can also suffer. Fortunately, unlocking your teams strengths doesnt need to be time-consuming. Over the past three years, Ive helped dozens of teams unlock talents they didnt even know they hadand match those talents to the most pressing challenges they facedthrough this simple, three-step exercise: Step 1: Self-reflection Gather your team togetherideally in personand ask everyone to write down their talents and strengths on a flip chart. Emphasize that this isnt a competition to see who can list the most strengths, but rather about identifying the talents that people might take for granted or struggle to recognize in themselves. Sometimes, were so used to our strengths that we dont even notice them. Encourage them to think about what they find easy to do, or what people come to them for. This short 15-minute period of self-reflection lays the foundation for using the hidden talents for the benefit of the team. Step 2: Team input Next, go around the room and ask each person to read their strengths aloud. Resist the urge to discuss or critique the strengths each team member identifies. Simply ask the rest of the team, What talent or strength do you see in this person that they didnt mention themselves?, and have the person write each additional talent on their list.�And before moving over to your next team member, ask the team, whats the number-one strength of this colleague that at this moment we should use much more as a team? As you go around the room, each person will be surprised by the strengths their team sees in them. As their manager, youre likely to be surprised as well at the number of hidden, untapped talents that may surface. This step is often particularly powerful for more introverted or less confident employees, who might generally be more hesitant to talk about their strengths. Ive found that while teams always have something to add for everyone, its often the quieter members who receive the most additions from their colleagues. The step uncovers underutilized talents and lays the groundwork for deeper appreciation and trust within the team. Step 3: Match strengths to challenges The final step is to connect the strengths theyve revealed to the challenges your team currently faces. For example, I worked with a biotech company that struggled to collaborate with another department. The team had identified that Georgina was highly collaborative, and so she became the natural choice to lead cross-functional projects. Pauls talent, on the other hand, was structuring information that could be used to address the challenge of distilling insights from complex data. And Tims talent for visual storytelling could help address challenges in communicating with investors and other stakeholders. In this way, teams can collaboratively move beyond asking, Whose job is this? Instead, they can�ask, What talent could help us address this challenge? It dynamically redefines roles, making full use of often overlooked talents such as: Spotting talent: The ability to recognize potential in oneself and others. Offloading: Knowing which initiatives or activities they need to stop (or simplify). Finishing: The drive to see projects through to completion. These are not always the talents you see on a r�sum�. But when you face a challenge, knowing the specific strengths that each team member possesses can be extremely helpful. Make your matches stick By design, this 90120 minute exercise is short and simple. However, to drive lasting impact, its important to ensure that your team members continue to have opportunities to flex their talents. � For example, Michael often clashed with senior leader Frank over project approaches, stalling progress. The team recognized that Anna, who excelled in stakeholder management, could bridge the gap. Anna began mentoring Michael, helping him engage Franks input early in the process instead of letting conflicts fester. Michaels projects then moved faster. Both Michael and Frank came to appreciate Annas mentorship, and she continued to assist the team with similar stakeholder challenges. Embedding this practice into your management style can be as simple as revisiting the exercise during weekly stand-ups, monthly team meetings, or even as part of onboarding new employees. The key is to commit to ongoing self-reflection and feedback. Regularly measure progress, share successful matches, and be willing to adjust the approach as your team evolves. Being an effective manager today means stepping back from the daily firefight to invest in your people. When you act as a talent matchmaker, connecting individual strengths and organizational challenges, you unlock a powerful resource that drives both team performance and engagement.
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E-Commerce
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Donald Trump has added a fresh punching bag to his ever-widening rotation of opponents: Apple. The president has, as hes put it, a little problem with CEO Tim Cook. For Cook, this actually looks like a big problemwith no easy fix. Trump has been intermittently critical of Apple before, but this has always seemed to be adroitly smoothed over by Cook, who for years was one of Mr. Trumps most beloved chief executives, and techs leading Trump whisperer, per The New York Times. It presumably helped that he was among those who donated $1 million to Trumps second inauguration. But the presidents recent complaints about the tech giants overseas production have not only been harsher in tone than in the past, they have come with the ultimate marker of negative presidential scrutinya threatened tariff of 25% on iPhones. (Later Trump clarified that the tariff would also apply to smartphone from Samsung or any other brand made anywhere outside the U.S.) Apple doesnt disclose iPhone sales by country, but worldwide they accounted for about 55% of its total revenue in the first quarter of its current fiscal year; iPhones make up about 53% of U.S. smartphone sales, according to research firm Backlinko. Revenue for its most recent quarter was around $95 billion (up 5% over last year), with earnings of about $25 billion. Remarkably, it had only been a matter of weeks since Cook was credited with scoring Apple an exemption on a then-planned 145% tariff on iPhones assembled in China for the U.S. market. Among other things, Apple announced it would invest $500 billion in AI servers in the U.S. Meanwhile various analysts began crunching numbers on what pure-U.S. production would do to iPhone prices, and soon the hypothetical $3,000 smartphone seemed like a new third rail of American politics. But as he has done with any number of prior third rails, Trump has now evidently shrugged off alleged risk. The immediate spark may have been at least partly personal: Cook reportedly declined an invitation to join the presidents recent swing through the Middle East. (Nvidias Jensen Huang and Sam Altman of OpenAI were among the CEOs who did put in an appearance.) Trump not only publicly noted Cooks absence, but openly mused about that little problem. Specifically, he said did not like reports that Apple and its suppliers are building all over India, apparently including iPhone factories, essentially to escape China-focused tariffs while keeping production overseas. I dont want you building in India, Trump said he told Cook. Days later Trump reiterated on social media: I expect [Apple iPhones] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. Thus the squarely Apple-targeted tariffand Cooks dilemma. Up to now, he and Apple generally have tended not to return fire when the Trump administration pokes at the brand or its business practices, and has avoided tangling with the administration on hot-button issues where their priorities diverge (such as diversity). That anti-confrontational strategy might actually make Apple more attractive as a target for Trump: Pinning the make-it-in-America attack to the iPhone generates maximum exposure for the administrations priorities, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo argued recently. In short, Trump may figure the specter of a�$3,000 iPhone is a bigger problem for Apple than for his policy priorities. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.) This also comes in whats been a tough year or so for Apple generally: It lost an appeal related to its App Store pricing, saw its virtual reality headset draw a tepid response, and has been perceived to lag on AI integration. While the future of tariffs is still up in the air after a federal court ruled against them, Trump has lately become aware of the Wall Street slang TACOTrump Always Chickens Outindicating his threats tend to be empty, making it that much more likely that this time hell be stubborn. Simply capitulating does not appear to be an option for Apple: Actually moving iPhone production to the U.S. would take years and involve prohibitive costs, not to mention a sizable work force that America doesnt currently have. And who can say whether some new device or alternative technology will supplant the iPhone while this huge undertaking plays out? One plausible strategy thats been floated is for Apple to cook up a short-term assembled in America option that would involve some percentage of iPhones to be manufactured in a hybrid scenario involving some overseas production and final assembly at a U.S. facility. Similarly, analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush called an American-made iPhone “fairy tale,” but speculated Apple could propose some token percentage of production moved to the U.S. over a period of years as a bargaining tactic. These tactics might still push the phones cost upward, but it wouldnt triple it as a full-on shift to U.S. production mightand Trump could declare another victory in his campaign to de facto manage U.S. business. That said, speculating about Apple stumbling one way or another has been a popular pastime for yearsyears during which Apples market cap has climbed to above $3 trillion. While shares are down 17.5% this year, it remains the worlds third most valuable company. Its wildly popular, as a brand, and as a stock. (We dont want to harm Apple, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, assured CNBC.) Of course Apple doesnt want to be one of Trumps many targets, let alone his favorite. But it can certainly take a punch.
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E-Commerce
In September 2024, Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings took a brief interlude from taping one of Americas most iconic game shows to film another series: a YouTube show about the history of public transit, set in his local county of Snohomish, Washington.� The show, called The Transit Effect, is a seven-part series that examines why public transit matters, diving into everything from infrastructure and economic growth to access to work, school, and healthcare. Its the brainchild of Community Transit, a public transportation agency in Washingtons Snohomish County, just north of Seattle. The shows first episode is now available on YouTube and on Community Transits website, with the remaining installments slated to drop over the coming months and into 2026. Starting with the electric streetcars of the 1920s, The Transit Effect maps how American communities have been shaped by public transitand, amid todays notoriously car-centric American infrastructure, it presents a thesis for investing in more sustainable transportation options. The show is especially timely, given the Trump administration’s current crackdown on renewable energy and support for various fossil fuel industry projects. We hope viewers come away with a deeper appreciation for how much public transit shapes daily lifeeven if they never set foot on a bus, says Community Transit public information officer Monica Spain. If this series sparks someone to think, I had no idea transit did all that, or nudges them to take a ride instead of drive, thats a win. How Snohomish Countys ‘Community Transit’ snagged Ken Jennings Rory Graves is a senior marketing copywriter at Community Transit who helped develop and write The Transit Effect. She says that, when the idea for the show first came about, the team knew the series would need to be anchored by a host who was both familiar and trustworthy to a wide range of audiences. It wasn’t a new challenge for the agency: In 2024, Community Transit partnered with American travel writer Rick Steveswho has lived in Edmonds, Washington (a city inside Snohomish County) since 1967on another educational transit series. For The Transit Effect, Graves thought Jennings, another longtime Edmonds resident, could be the perfect fit. We wanted to find someone who was a trusted source of information to do that storytelling. Who better than Ken Jennings? Graves says. In 2004, Jennings won 74 consecutive games of Jeopardy!, the longest winning streak in the show’s history, before becoming its host in 2021. Beyond his impressive credentials, Jennings also has a personal connection to Community Transit: As a college student, Jennings frequently rode the agencys buses between his familys home in Edmonds and the University of Washington. Today, he lives in Seattle. After Community Transit reached out to him over email, Jennings readily agreed to host The Transit Effect. But there was a small catch. Given Jennings tight schedule, the entire seven-part series had to be filmed in just four hoursa feat that required extensive preparation and multiple dry runs to test every piece of equipment, walk through the setup, and build in redundancies, Graves says. We dont have a huge budget like Amazon or Coca-Cola for our campaigns, but Ken was happy to collaborate with us, and were thankful for that. [Image: courtesy Community Transit] Exploring how public transit shaped America as we know it To give viewers a peek behind the curtain at the history of public transit, The Transit Effect is organized into sub-10-minute episodes by themes. Episode 1, for example, details how ’20s era streetcars, electric trolleys, and subway systems determined how major American cities expanded; episode 3 dives into the environmental impact of public transit compared to travel by car; and episode 6 explains how public transit can serve as a vital lever of accessibility for kids, the elderly, those with disabilities, and those without access to a vehicle.� Throughout the series, Jennings refers to local examples to help illustrate this historylike in episode 1, which notes how the expansion of the Link light rail, a train system in the Seattle area that opened in 2009, has roots that extend back by more than 100 years. Everyones talking about Link light rail expansion, but did you know our region had electric mass transit more than a century ago? Graves says. The old Interurban Trolley once ran along the same route we now know as the Interurban Trail. We often treat electric transit like its brand new, but its actually part of our history. Whats fascinating is how long cleaner, electric options have existedand how car-centric planning pushed them aside. Another surprising tidbit explored in the show is how public transit shaped the musical world. The series highlights how New York Citys subway system helped make Harlem a cultural epicenter for Black Americans in the ’20s and ’30s, attracting the musicians that would ultimately bring the Harlem Renaissance to life. Its wild to think that something as everyday as a transit system could set off a domino effect that helped launch the careers of artists whose legacies have helped define modern music, Graves says. Through these stories, Spain says, Community Transit hopes to help viewers understand how public transportation shapes communities and removes barriers to opportunity, and to encourage community members to invest in their local public transit systems. More than anything, we want people to see transit not just as a service, but as a powerful force for good in our region, Spain says.
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E-Commerce
Potential buyers in California have seen the daunting challenge of owning a home become even more difficult. Due to higher mortgage rates and increased home values, a recent report from the California Association of Realtors found that buyers needed an income of $218,000 to afford a median home, a figure thats jumped 82% since 2019. A Canadian startup seeks to make those figures a little more favorable, especially for working class and first-time buyers. Zown, which opened for operations in California in the fall, offers buyers what it calls down payment assistance. The model works like this: By using automation and salaried showing agents to help facilitate deals, it can reduce commissions that usually account for 2.5% or more of a homes purchase price to about 1%, offering the difference as a rebate to buyers to use toward a down payment or to cover closing costs. Zown was launched by Canadian entrepreneur Rishard Rameez, who documented his own struggles with housing affordability on a viral Reddit thread. He found the process laborious and expensive and, in 2021, started working on a way to simplify the transaction. He developed a model that uses automation and a team of salaried brokers to cut commission fees and pass those savings along to buyers. He said Zown is able to give back roughly $10,000 to $15,000 per buyer for down payment assistance, an amount that equaled what an average person could save in a year or two. Since launching the product in Toronto in 2024, Zown has helped more than 250 buyers purchase homes, and offered more than $3 million toward down payments. That assistance can often mean the difference between potential buyers who can comfortably make a purchase or ones who are stretching substantially to buy their home. Michelle Boyd is chief strategy officer for the Terner Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and studies housing startups and fintech innovations. She says the Zown model makes sense for first-time buyers and those doing more straightforward deals. (But those buying older homes or fixer-uppers would perhaps benefit from an experienced agents help.) I think there is a real opportunity to take some of that value that real estate agent is providing and give that back to the home, or that person who’s trying to purchase it, she said. Its maybe not going to totally change someone’s ability to buy a home, but its not nothing. Downpayment assistance programs, many run by cities and localities to help buyers in their area achieve homeownership, have been rising sharply in recent years due to the nations worsening housing crisis. Down Payment Resources, a group tracking this trend, found that more than 2,500 such programs exist across the country, providing an average of $18,000 in benefits to buyers. The number of programs has increased 55% year over year. Zowns salary model can also offer more stability in a profession that depends on irregular sales and commissions. The national average take-home pay for a realtor is just under $59,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The buyer-first model Lisa Touney has been running the California expansion of Zown in 2024, and has closed three deals in Corona and Newport Beach; one deal saved a buyer $30,000. A broker-owner with three decades of experience, Touney worked with one of the Zown co-owners and decided to help them launch in California. Touney has a license to work in multiple states, and the Golden State offers a great proving ground, due to its significant affordability crisis. Touney likes the salary-based model of Zown, which takes away the pressure of making sales, and offers an attractive, innovative way to help lower the cost of housing. Currently, Touney is working with two other agents, and says they can expect to make over a six-figure income with the Zown model. (The firm said a full-time Zown agent in California can expect to earn solid mid-to-high five figures annually under Zowns productivity-based pay model.”) Rameez hopes Zown can facilitate 1,000 sales in its first full year in California. Diana Zaya, an expert on real estate brokerage models, says she doesn’t find the Zown model as innovative as is being touted: realtors have long sacrificed some of their commission to make a deal pencil out. In this case, its more systematized. She believes the push to lower costs is good and can really make a difference for buyers, but also worries, long-term, that taking away commissions could lead to a devaluing of realtor pay and a reduction in quality, since she believes the model relies on low margins. Rameez added that, This isn’t a race to the bottom; it’s a modern, trustfirst model where real value is measured by service and lasting relationships, not by a flat percentage. Zown is the latest in a number of startups seeking to make homebuying more accessible. Boyd said a number of such startups have gone under in recent years, as the combination of lower price appreciation and a higher interest rate spike hurt their plan to profit off of rising values.
Category:
E-Commerce
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