Jonathan Miller: Bed Bath & Beyond…Brokerage?
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by Jonathan Miller
Special Contributor
I made the trek to Bed Bath & Beyond with family in tow many times until its demise in 2023. It was a national big‑box retailer, the anchor of many shopping malls in my local area, with nearly 1,600 stores nationwide. The chain specialized in housewares, furniture, and seemingly random gadgets for kitchen and baths, crammed with small appliances, decorative items, and blankets, a one‑stop shop for the home. I once bought a combination record player, cassette deck, and radio that let me record from records. I didn’t know I needed one until I saw it on display at the perpetually cluttered store, and hardly used it. And my goodness, their coupons were ubiquitous and generous.
Whenever I walked out of these stores holding a new possession I didn’t know I needed, I usually wondered why anyone would go into the retail department store business. When BB&B’s run ended, they were purchased by Overstock.com for $21.5 million in an auction sale. After the liquidation, its intellectual property and brand assets were acquired and the brand was relaunched as an online retailer; coverage describes this as a “new” Bed Bath & Beyond that is legally distinct from the legacy chain but trades on the brand’s recognition.
BBB Buys Fathom Holdings
As an online “everything home” retailer, BBB bought a real estate brokerage firm that I’ve never heard of, Fathom. How about calling the new firm BBBB?
Fathom was founded in 2010 as a national cloud-based, residential brokerage now with about 15,000 agents across 43 states. They use proprietary software to handle back-office brokerage functions instead of a traditional brick-and-mortar branch network. They also offer mortgage, title, and insurance services as part of their suite of offerings. They are in the same space as eXp and REAL, who also don’t have the brick-and-mortar overhead of traditional brokerages.
This Isn’t Such an Odd Acquisition
A home retailer buying a cloud brokerage is not unusual, as acquirers are trying to own the entire customer journey, diversify revenue, and capture scale in a market where growth is hard to achieve. We’ve been seeing different forms of this for years.
The spike in interest rates over the past four years hasn’t made it easy. Capital wants to see retailers own the channel for future growth instead of just buying it outright. We saw a little bit of this with the Redfin, Rocket Mortgage deal last year.
Bed Bath & Beyond’s deal for Fathom is part of their “Everything Home” strategy:
- buy it (the house)
- finance it
- insure it
- furnish it
- service it
Again, this move is really more of the same old thing when you look across the homebuying space.
Opendoor and Zillow teaming up is often described as housing “super apps” that aim to digitize the entire homebuying process and own the consumer relationship from the first click through closing.
ICE (not THAT one) positions its post‑Black Knight plan as an “integrated, end‑to‑end ecosystem” for the real estate and housing finance lifecycle, from lead generation to origination, closing, servicing, and secondary markets.
In 2019, Amazon formed a partnership with Anywhere, known as Turnkey, as an early attempt to tie agents, incentives, and post‑closing home services into a single effort.
Because the brokerage industry is a low-margin business, many larger firms have tried for years to align with ancillary services such as title, escrow, relocation, insurance, and other offerings.
Compass One is marketed as “the client‑facing version” of Compass’s end‑to‑end platform, providing consumers with a single interface to track tasks, documents, timelines, and communications throughout their entire homeowner journey.
Channel Management in the Brokerage Profession Is Tough
The challenge to all of these efforts is very tribal.
Agents often do not see a direct, personal upside to using these ancillary services offered by the broker that outweighs the perceived risk of referring a client away from their trusted existing lender, attorney, or network of inspectors. Because selling and prospecting are the agent’s primary “day job,” anything that adds learning time, coordination, or transaction management burden tends to get deferred, even if it might pay off in theory.
Agents often view mandated or strongly pushed internal referrals as increasing reputational risk while limiting their ability to curate reliable partners for different price points, product types, or client profiles.
Real estate agents are independent warriors in the homebuying space, and many view giving up their share of the commission in a split arrangement with disdain. As a result, the adoption rate of ancillary services offered by their brokerage firms tends to be very low. The thinking goes, “I’m already giving up X% of my commission to my brokerage firm, why should I help line their pockets even further using their services?
Final Thoughts
The industry’s push toward vertically integrated homeownership platforms shows no sign of slowing, but the real bet is on controlling distribution and adding ancillary services rather than brokerage margins. By plugging a low‑overhead cloud brokerage and embedded mortgage/title services into a high-traffic retail brand, BBB is trying to turn shopping behavior into earlier, cheaper lead capture while nudging consumers into a bundled journey for buying, financing, insuring, and furnishing their homes.
The industry has been trying to figure out the end-to-end home-buying process for several decades. Perhaps starting without a brick-and-mortar footprint will give Bed Bath & Beyond an advantage. I still can’t fathom agents buying in.
Jonathan Miller is a housing analyst and professor at Columbia University. He is a syndicated columnist of “Housing Notes.”
