This week’s Inman Tech Roundup covers the risks and tools landing on agents’ desks, not just investors’.
A Nashville real estate team learned that 79 of its parked domains were sending email it never wrote. Tether RE launched a wearable safety device for agents heading into solo showings. Inside Real Estate is bringing Cotality’s equity and ownership data into BoldTrail’s AI tools. And new Q3 funding data shows where proptech’s money is going, and where it isn’t.
Here’s what you need to know:
7 proptech deals dominated Q3 2026
Proptech companies raised roughly $2.21 billion in the third quarter of 2026, but most of that capital landed in only a few places, according to new CRETI data.
The seven largest deals accounted for about $1.28 billion or 58 percent of the quarter’s total. EliseAI led with a $350 million Series F, bringing its total funding to roughly $742 million. Kahua’s $250 million private-equity investment and Invenergy’s $215 million raise came next. Buildots, TerraFirma, ICON and Habitat rounded out the top seven, each raising $104 million to $130 million.
Construction tech dominated the quarter, with TerraFirma, ICON, Buildots and Kahua all landing nine-figure rounds. The stage of some deals also stood out. TerraFirma and Habitat both raised more than $100 million in Series A rounds.
“Those are unusually large commitments for companies at that financing stage,” CRETI’s report says.
CRETI noted that the $2.21 billion figure combines venture, private equity and debt financing, so it isn’t a pure venture tally. The firm also warned that mid-market companies without early momentum or proven scale may struggle to raise money as investors cluster around category leaders.
What this means for agents
For real estate agents, the takeaway is where the money isn’t going. None of the quarter’s seven biggest deals went to agent- or brokerage-facing tools, as investors favored construction, infrastructure and property operations platforms like EliseAI’s leasing automation.
If that pattern holds, agent-facing startups could face a harder fundraising environment, which makes vendor staying power worth asking about before you build your business around a new tool.
Tether RE launches wearable agent safety device
Real estate agent safety company Tether RE has launched Tether Guardian, a wearable that connects the wearer to a live monitoring professional at the press of a button or when it detects a fall.
The Twin Falls, Idaho-based company built its business on 24-hour live monitoring through its app, and it’s pitching the wearable as an add-on, not a replacement. Brokerages can keep devices on hand for agents heading to showings, open houses and vacant listings. The device offers GPS location, hands-free two-way talk and up to 45 days of battery life. Tether RE says its UL-listed monitoring center responds in an average of 9.4 seconds.
Vanessa Martin
“Tether Guardian is not a replacement for the Tether RE app. It is an additional tool,” said Vanessa Martin, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Tether RE. “Agents keep everything they rely on in the app, and now brokers have a simple wearable they can hand an agent heading out to a showing. The same goes for any business with people who work alone. If something feels wrong, a real person is on the line in seconds.”
Tether RE is also marketing the device beyond real estate, to employers with lone workers and to seniors who live alone. Washington, Illinois, New Jersey and several cities now require panic buttons for some isolated employees. Real estate agents, however, are typically independent contractors, so those rules usually don’t cover them.
Tether RE’s app is already offered as a paid member benefit through Realtor associations, which the company says makes it free to roughly 86,000 Realtors.
What this means for agents
For agents, the practical upshot is that safety at solo showings remains largely their own responsibility (or their brokerage’s), because the lone-worker laws driving demand for devices like this generally don’t apply to independent contractors.
A broker-supplied wearable could fill that gap for agents who don’t want to fumble with a phone app in a tense moment. But cost and who pays for it will determine whether it reaches beyond the 86,000 Realtors who already get Tether’s app through their associations.
This October, Inman turns its focus to AI and its rapid rise in real estate. During Artificial Intelligence Month, we’re digging into the startups shaking things up and the established players folding AI into their offerings.
The wire fraud risk hiding in brokerages’ parked domains
Of the 364 web domains owned by The Ashton Real Estate Group at REMAX Advantage in Nashville, 79 were sending email that the team never wrote. That’s according to a case study from email security firm SH Consulting, which the team hired to monitor the domains.
The domains were farm sites, old brands and defensive registrations that the team believed were dormant. After SH Consulting connected them to DMARC monitoring in July, reports showed a slow stream of unauthenticated email claiming to come from those domains. The messages originated in more than a dozen countries, led by China and Russia, and the firm says the traffic pattern points to botnets. None of the domains had a policy telling mailbox providers to reject spoofed mail.
The fix was a standard set of DNS records telling providers that the domains send nothing. In the five weeks before enforcement, mailbox providers filed 235 reports of unauthorized mail. In the five weeks after, they filed 43, and all of that mail was rejected.
Unverified domains like these are an easy tool for the impersonation scams behind real estate wire fraud.
What this means for agents
The lesson isn’t limited to mega-teams. Any agent who has bought farm-area or vanity domains over the years may have the same exposure. And a spoofed message from a real domain carrying your name is much more convincing to a client than an obvious lookalike.
The fix is cheap: Lockdown records take minutes to publish, and DMARC reports are free to receive. So agents should list every domain they own and have their IT provider or web host lock down any that don’t send email.
Inside Real Estate adds Cotality to Streams
Inside Real Estate has struck a deal with Cotality to bring the data giant’s property intelligence into Streams, the AI platform behind its BoldTrail tools.
The integration adds Cotality’s buyer and seller propensity scores, repair-informed home values, equity and mortgage indicators and ownership history to Streams workflows. For example, when a buyer saves a home on an agent’s website, Streams will flag the lead along with the property’s value, the owner’s equity and how long they’ve owned it.
Joe Skousen
The deal also extends Streams Studio, the no-code agentic AI platform Inside Real Estate launched in July. In Studio, teams pick an outcome, such as winning more listings, and the platform builds a workflow around the relevant Cotality data.
“Agents do not wake up wanting more data,” said Joe Skousen, CEO of Inside Real Estate. “They want more listings, stronger conversations and a faster path from opportunity to action. Streams Studio lets a team start there, then brings the right data and tools together around the work.”
Cotality’s data is available now to select teams and brokerages building on Streams Studio, with broader access coming in the months ahead.
What this means for agents
For real estate agents on BoldTrail, the deal could mean showing up to a lead call already knowing the homeowner’s equity and how long they’ve owned the home. This kind of prep usually requires a separate data subscription.
Access is limited to select teams for now, though, and propensity scores are still predictions, so agents should treat them as a way to rank who to call first, not a guarantee that a homeowner is ready to sell.
