In this week’s Inman Tech Roundup, DeCaro Auctions brings fractional bidding to luxury real estate. BOXABL builds out its own developer arm. EXp International’s AI side project turns into a platform it wants to sell to competitors. And new survey data shows brokerage leaders’ AI anxiety hasn’t eased in three years. It’s just split along gender lines.
Here’s what you need to know:
A new way to auction and co-own luxury homes
DeCaro Auctions, a global leader in the marketing and sale of luxury real estate, recently rolled out a new fractional auction format that lets sellers offer a luxury home as a whole property, split it among eight deeded co-owners or sell select fractions while retaining a share, all within a single bidding event.
The dual-track structure is designed to widen the buyer pool for high-end properties by lowering the entry point without abandoning the competitive-bidding model DeCaro built its business on.
Buyers can bid on multiple fractions (co-ownership), and DeCaro says that added competition should sharpen price discovery compared with a traditional auction limited to buyers who can afford the whole asset.
“For sellers, this creates a powerful new path to market,” said Matthew Rollins, chief marketing officer of DeCaro Auctions. “Instead of searching solely for one buyer prepared to acquire the entire property, we present multiple co-ownership options to a much broader audience, generating greater active competition for world-class real estate.”
The format is rolling out across DeCaro’s luxury resort markets of Aspen, Colorado; Vail, Colorado; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Palm Beach, Florida; the Hamptons in New York; Napa, California; Los Cabos, New Mexico; and dozens of others.
Each property’s co-ownership terms, usage rights and expenses are disclosed before bidding opens, and DeCaro is offering full co-brokerage compensation to sellers’ existing agents. Bidder qualification follows the firm’s existing vetting process of ID verification, proof of funds and registration.
What this means for agents
For real estate agents working luxury listings, this is another lever to pitch sellers sitting on properties that have sat too long at full-price ask. A fractional, co-ownership track can surface demand a traditional auction can’t reach without touching the list price.
It also means agents in DeCaro’s target markets may want to get comfortable explaining co-ownership structures to clients, since the model puts them in the room for a transaction type most haven’t had to navigate before.
BOXABL brings general contracting in-house
BOXABL is vertically integrating its modular home business by hiring its own California-licensed general contractor, so the company can bid directly on site work and full-scale developments instead of handing installation off to third parties.
The shift builds on BOXABL’s earlier turnkey option, where it managed outside contractors on customers’ behalf. Now the Nasdaq-listed manufacturer (BXBL) owns the project end-to-end, including permitting, site prep, foundation work and installation, alongside the Casita units it builds in Las Vegas.
“BOXABL is looking to expand into the market of home building by being able to contract directly with service providers that already exist and still deliver the high-quality product that we have in the past, but at even lower costs,” said Galiano Tiramani, BOXABL founder and co-CEO.
The developer arm targets two buyer types. Individual homeowners get a bundled path from permitting to move-in. Developers, municipalities and institutional buyers can hire BOXABL directly for multi-unit projects or invite it into competitive RFPs.
BOXABL says it plans to license additional contractors state by state as demand grows.
In July, Boxabl began trading on the Nasdaq after completing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company that valued the company at $3.5 billion, as Inman previously reported.
What this means for agents
BOXABL’s move is another sign that modular product is maturing from a novelty into a real inventory source where a buyer can now get unit and site work bundled through a single vendor. This simplifies the pitch for infill lots, ADUs and workforce-housing deals.
It’s also worth watching as a competitive-bid option for agents working with municipalities or developers on multi-unit projects, since BOXABL is explicitly positioning itself to go head-to-head with traditional GCs on cost and speed.
EXp’s AI side project turns into a platform
EXp Realty has turned an internal artificial intelligence vibe-coding challenge into Nexus, an all-in-one operating platform now running CRM, transactions, listings, e-signature, marketing and recruiting for eXp agents across dozens of countries. The company plans to eventually license it to competing brokerages.
The project traces back to a challenge from eXp founder Glenn Sanford roughly a year ago.
“Nexus actually comes from a project we did about a year ago in Montreal,” said Felix Bravo, managing director of eXp International. “Glenn challenged all of us to vibe-code our ideal system for a real estate agent. What I built looked like Frankenstein and didn’t work at all, but it was the origin story of Nexus.”
EXp says Nexus can cut a market’s software costs by 60 percent to 70 percent by consolidating per-country subscriptions into one platform.
The rollout has three phases: pilot-market launch, multi-country adoption, then opening Nexus to non-eXp brokerages via tiered subscription pricing. EXp is also exposing Nexus’s APIs so agents can pull their own data into third-party tools.
Nexus is currently in beta following an alpha phase in Latin America, built on a single codebase adapted to each country’s currency and regulatory requirements.
In a press release, Bravo also said the company plans to keep building on Nexus indefinitely, in keeping with what he described as “an internal philosophy of never treating a platform as finished.”
What this means for agents
For eXp agents, Nexus means 1 login replacing the patchwork of separate CRM, transaction and marketing tools most agents juggle. The AI-native, all-in-one system is similar to what many brokerages are seeking, including FirstTeam Real Estate, which recently partnered with Purlin to create its own system.
For agents outside of eXp, it’s worth watching as a preview of what brokerage-built AI platforms could look like on the market. If the licensing phase lands, competing brokerages’ agents could end up choosing between their own systems and a platform originally built to make eXp agents faster.
AI anxiety splits along gender lines in real estate
Three years into real estate’s AI push, brokerage leaders are almost exactly as worried about AI risk and liability as when Delta Media started tracking it.
The average AI “worry score” hit 6.38 out of 10 in 2026. That’s slightly down from 6.50 in 2024, after dipping to 5.80 in 2025, per Delta Media’s third annual AI survey.
The 2026 data, the first to ask about agentic AI, shows sharp gender splits. Roughly 71 percent of women leaders cited regulatory compliance as a concern versus 39.1 percent of men.
Nearly 66 percent of female real estate leaders flagged data privacy versus 48.4 percent of men. Men were nearly twice as likely to worry about cost and ROI uncertainty.
“One reason AI worry may be rebounding is that the decisions are getting bigger,” said Michael Minard, CEO and owner of Delta Media Group. “Brokerages are moving beyond simple AI tools toward agentic AI, automation and systems that can take action. As AI becomes more powerful and more autonomous, choosing the right AI partner becomes a risk-management decision, not just a technology decision.”
Brokerage size matters, too (no pun intended). Compliance dominates concern at small firms (75 percent), while larger firms split worry more evenly across data privacy, integrations and cost.
What this means for agents
The split suggests the AI conversation at the leadership level isn’t monolithic. A broker worried about compliance exposure will vet and roll out tools very differently than one focused on ROI. So agents at different firms may see very different guardrails (or lack thereof) on the same category of tool.
It’s also a signal that as brokerages move from AI features toward agentic systems that can act on an agent’s behalf, agents should expect more scrutiny and more policy around what those tools can do autonomously.
