The Foreclosure Gold Rush Nobody's Talking About

By Tim, Julie, Dan, Chris, Kacie and Orlando · June 26, 2026

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The feeds were full of fear this week. Rates stubbornly high. A brokerage getting acquired by a company that liquidated every one of its stores just three years ago. Foreclosures up 14%. And yet the agents having their best year ever weren't reacting to any of it. They were running plays.

That's the energy this week's episode set from the first sentence, and it delivered on it. Four segments. Three concrete opportunities. And a reality check on the foreclosure headline that almost every agent is getting backward.

On June 17th, Bed Bath & Beyond — yes, the one that liquidated every store in 2023 — signed a deal to acquire Fathom Realty, a top-20 brokerage with 15,000 agents, for approximately $53 million in stock. The vision from CEO Marcus Lemonis (of The Profit and Camping World fame): one brand to buy, finance, furnish, and fix your house — a complete home ecosystem under a single umbrella.

The team's reaction was genuinely thoughtful:

Dan found it interesting but couldn't shake the math — Fathom is almost certainly losing money at its current scale in this market, making it a likely loss leader for whatever else Marcus builds around it. The data-synergy angle was intriguing though: what if purchasing patterns (buying diapers, buying moving boxes) could trigger a referral to a Fathom agent? The idea has legs.

Chris had the clearest take:

He pointed out that virtually every large brokerage has tried to launch its own mortgage company — and almost none of them have pulled it off at scale. Building a true home services ecosystem is much, much harder than announcing one. That said, if anyone can execute it, Marcus Lemonis can — his track record at Camping World is built on exactly this kind of conglomerate logic.

Julie brought up the timing question nobody's talking about: home goods purchasing typically happens after someone buys a home, not before. The customer acquisition funnel runs the wrong direction if you're trying to use Bed Bath & Beyond buyers to find listing leads. On the flip side, AI tracking — following someone's purchasing signals to predict a move — might flip that logic entirely. Target already does this: someone buying diapers gets marketed to for baby-adjacent products. Apply that to real estate and the model starts making more sense.

Tim's biggest takeaway: The fact that serious money is being placed on real estate right now — whether it's Bed Bath & Beyond, the MLSs fighting Zillow, or Google entering home search — signals that the people with big wallets believe a real estate recovery is coming. They wouldn't be placing new bets otherwise.

Verdict: Chewy — the concept is smart, execution is everything, and Marcus Lemonis is worth watching.

This segment tackled one of the most consequential questions in real estate right now: when a buyer or seller asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini "Who's the best agent in [your city]?" — how do you become the name that comes up?

The team introduced the term that's replacing SEO in serious marketing conversations: AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. The honest admission up front was that nobody has a complete decoder ring for it yet. The platforms are updating constantly. What worked last month on Reddit may not apply next month. But several consistent principles emerged from the team's real-world testing.

Go to any major LLM right now. Ask it who the top agents are in your specific market. Then — and this is the smart part — ask it to show you the source data for how it arrived at that answer. Whatever sources it cites, go create content on those platforms. Whether it's Reddit threads, local blogs, neighborhood guides, or review sites — you now know where the LLM is looking. Build content there.

Pivot completely from SEO to AEO. Ask any LLM directly: "Here's my business, here's how I've positioned myself — what do I need to do to show up when someone asks for the best agent in [your market]?" It will research you and give you a specific to-do list. Then do the list. Then ask again next month, because the algorithm will have shifted and you'll need to update your strategy.

The simplest daily habit: just ask the AI what it's doing to make its decisions. Ask it regularly. Let it tell you how to be found by it. You don't need a "decoder ring" — you need a standing weekly appointment with the tools themselves.

This was the most practically actionable segment of the episode, and it produced one of the most important real talk moments the show has had.

The premise: most agents treat a listing as a single transaction — take it, sell it, cash one check. Top producers treat every listing as a platform. One property that generates a month of content. Buyer leads. Future seller leads. Neighborhood authority. Same listing, ten times the output.

They're on track to close approximately 300 deals this year. Here's their listing-as-media-company workflow:

1. Neighborhood pages for every market they serve.
They've built roughly 300 of them — long-form pages on their website covering what buyers want to know about each neighborhood: price ranges, school districts, walkability, recent sales stories. All AI-generated, all published as sub-pages on Keri's main domain. The LLMs like these pages. They're one of the signals that helps the team show up in AI-recommended agent searches.

2. Video in the neighborhoods.
Agents go on location and shoot video in the neighborhoods those pages cover. The video and the page reinforce each other.

3. Case study storytelling around interesting transactions.
One of Dan's best examples: a home with a $900K VA loan balance at 3% on a property worth $1.3M. By marketing the assumable loan explicitly, they commanded $200K over list price. Then they used AI to identify all other VA loan homeowners in the area and build content around that story — telling those owners that if they're not marketing their assumable rate as a feature, they're leaving serious money on the table. That's one transaction that generated neighborhood authority, a marketing narrative, and a pipeline of future listings.

4. Claude with the Chrome extension for content syndication.
Tim shared a workflow he's been using: once your content is created, you can connect Claude to your Chrome browser (ask Claude for the Chrome tool, grant permissions when prompted), and it will interact directly with your Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms open in your browser — posting, scheduling, and syndicating content without you having to manually copy-paste anything.

This segment produced one of the more honest conversations in PowerHouse Talk history. The prompt: in a world where content is increasingly AI-generated and searchable by outcome rather than by agent name, how relevant is the "agent as brand" movement?

Dan delivered the line of the episode: Most agents who've built massive personal brands are using them to attract other agents — to join their team, buy their coaching, join their downline. They're not using personal brand to attract buyers and sellers. And if you try to copy what they're doing, you're playing a completely different game than the one you actually need to win.

He gave a specific example: an agent on the west coast of Florida has half a million social media followers and is widely held up as a model of personal branding success. She sold three or four homes last year. Most of her revenue comes from brand deals and influencer arrangements — not from closing real estate transactions.

Julie added the backstory problem: She had a coaching client following a Russian-speaking agent on TikTok, assuming all that agent's success came from social media. When the client finally had coffee with the agent and asked directly, the answer was simple — all of the business came from a Russian and Ukrainian credit union, because she spoke the language. Not a word of it was related to TikTok.

Tim's framing: There is the social media story that gets told on stage, and then there is what's actually happening. He's sat in the audience at hundreds of real estate events and watched successful agents describe elaborate digital funnels — when he knows from coaching them that their business comes from proactive lead generation, their church, their PTA, their center of influence. They're almost embarrassed to say so. But that's the actual mousetrap.

The practical conclusion: Create content around your listings and your neighborhoods. That's what buyers and sellers are actually searching for. You still need to look good on camera and be someone worth talking to — that's your personal brand floor. But beyond that, the property and the market are the story.

US foreclosure filings are up 14% year-over-year. The doom crowd is already yelling about 2008. They're wrong. And agents who understand why are about to help a lot of people — and earn a lot of listings.

Here's the reality:

That last point is what Tim hammered home: statistically, when an owner misses a payment and a foreclosure filing is initiated, most of them never call their bank. They don't know what to do. They assume the house will be force-sold and they'll get some fraction of their equity back — not realizing that by the time the bank marks everything up, legal fees pile in, and the auction process runs its course, there often isn't any equity left for the owner at all.

Julie had a coaching client in Vegas close exactly this kind of deal just last week: a seller in pre-foreclosure with so much equity that after the sale, they paid cash to downsize.

The only other people going after pre-foreclosure leads are wholesalers. And wholesalers almost exclusively mail letters. Letters that rarely get opened. Tim's point: there is essentially no real competition in this lead category. You're not up against the top agents in your market. You're up against a piece of mail.

Dan connected this to what he learned from Pace Morby a few weeks ago: if you know creative financing — subject-to deals, contract for deed, rent-to-own — you can create solutions for distressed sellers that don't require a traditional sale. For a seller who needs to get out but can't wait 60 days of market time, a creative financing structure can make the difference between a loss and a dignified exit.

The prompt for your market this week: Go to your MLS and run a search for pre-foreclosure filings in your area. Each one of those is a real person who almost certainly doesn't know they have options — and the agent who shows up and explains those options earns loyalty that lasts decades. Clients you rescued from foreclosure are some of the most loyal people you will ever have in your life.

One segment that deserves its own spotlight: the $35 trillion generational wealth transfer is already underway, and most agents are sitting on a database full of people who are directly in the path of it.

Boomers hold approximately $35 trillion in real estate equity across the US. That wealth is transferring — to kids, to estates, to buyers with inheritance cash — right now. The agents with the deepest relationships in their database, the ones who've stayed in contact consistently, are the ones who get the call when grandma needs to downsize, when the estate needs to be liquidated, when the inheritance check arrives and someone wants to buy their first home.

Tim's practical action: go through your database this week and flag everyone over 65. Not to prospect them — to serve them. Call them. Check in. Ask what's changed in their life. You'll be surprised what you find. And you'll be in a position to help when the moment comes, rather than reading about the transaction in the MLS after someone else listed it.

Tim closed the show with a grounding moment for the audience — and three concrete plays, not three abstract ideas:

Play 1 — AEO Audit
Go to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Ask each one: "Who are the top residential real estate agents in [your specific neighborhood or city]?" See if you appear. Ask each one why. Ask what sources it used. Build content on those sources. Run this again in 30 days.

Play 2 — Listing as Media Company
Take your next active listing and commit to 8 pieces of content minimum: a neighborhood page, a coming-soon video, a market context video, a feature walkthrough, a just-listed social post, a case study after it closes, a buyer testimonial, and an AEO-optimized blog post about that neighborhood. Use Claude's Chrome extension to auto-post across your active platforms.

Play 3 — Pre-Foreclosure Outreach
Pull your local pre-foreclosure list from your MLS or a data service. Call — don't mail. Lead with equity:

▶️ Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/3HmdtMnsAJ4?si=feksJK8p1e2BsJ2J

— Tim, Julie, Dan, Chris, Kacie and Orlando
Hosts, Power House Talk

whylibertas.com/harris
whylibertas.com/dan
whylibertas.com/heller
whylibertas.com/kacie-anderson
whylibertas.com/orlando-montiel

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