Mike Russo, Head of Product Innovation at Auction.com, has been named a 2026 HousingWire Tech Trendsetter. The award honors the most impactful and innovative technology leaders serving the housing economy.
“I may be the recipient, but this award also belongs to our product and engineering teams, the unsung heroes working tirelessly for our clients,” said Russo.
Russo is changing how bank-owned properties sell at auction and how mortgage servicers manage homes headed toward foreclosure. Over the past year, he led the team behind several product launches, including a short sale portal that gives servicers a real-time view of a homeowner’s sale and the rollout of an AI agent for buyers.
Russo has spent more than 20 years at the intersection of real estate, technology, and innovation. He was co-owner and chief operating officer of Concierge Auctions, which Sotheby’s and Anywhere Real Estate acquired in 2021. He later launched SparkOffer, a tech-enabled auction and offer platform trusted to handle individual bids over $100 million, before Auction.com acquired it.
Giving Servicers and Buyers Faster Answers
Over the past year, Russo led development of the SmartSale® short sale portal, which compiles agent emails, call logs, listing data, and local market data into a single view. This gives servicers working with SmartSale a faster, more current read on whether a short sale is progressing or stalling.
Russo also led the rollout of an AI agent inside Auction.com’s property-browsing experience. About 60% of its usage happens outside business hours. Monthly active users have grown more than 4,600% since the agent’s February 2026 launch. Agent users return the following week at a rate of 33.6%, compared with 5% for non-users, and they register for auctions at four to six times the rate of buyers who don’t use it, generating 6.4 times more registration activity per month.
Rebuilding Max Bid
Max Bid lets buyers set a confidential ceiling and have the platform bid on their behalf. Russo’s redesign removed limits on when a Max Bid can be placed, making it available across the full life of a bank-owned auction when it rolled out platform-wide in February 2026. By August 2026, Max Bid usage had risen more than 700% compared with before the redesign, and more than 27% of registrants had placed a Max Bid in the prior 30 days. From February 18 through August 13, 2026, bank-owned auctions with at least one Max Bid achieved a net-sale rate more than four times higher than auctions with none. In August 2026, 66% of Max Bid purchasers had never previously closed a transaction with Auction.com.