WASHINGTON - A class-action lawsuit is focusing fresh attention on a long-festering consumer issue in real estate: alleged steering of home buyers to affiliated title, settlement and mortgage companies by large realty brokers — sometimes costing consumers hundreds of dollars compared with fees and services offered by non-affiliated competitors.

Two buyers in Minnesota filed suit Feb. 21 against Coldwell Banker Burnet Realty, one of the largest realty firms in the state, charging that it breached its fiduciary duties under state law when it steered the buyers to its own title and settlement affiliate, Burnet Title, despite knowing that the affiliate’s fees were significantly higher than those available from non-affiliated firms.

What does it take to sell a billion dollars worth of real estate? Steve Kantor’s new book, “Billion Dollar Agent — Lessons Learned,” contains a revealing series of interviews with elite agents who have sold a billion dollars worth of real estate or are en route to do so. What’s particularly intriguing is how forthcoming the agents were in terms of how they built their businesses, what their ratios were of referrals to new business, and most importantly, what they actually did to achieve this level of success.

Widgets — a funky name for technology applications that are easily integrated into a Web site to perform specific tasks — are making a splash in online real estate.

San Francisco-based vFlyer this week released a couple of widgets for real estate sites that put agents’ property listings in a small display box for site visitors to see. The display is a scrolling gallery of homes for sale that agents can embed on their Web sites, their blogs, and any social networking sites they use like MySpace, Xanga or the real estate-specific ActiveRain.

Kyiv’s commercial and residential property markets are hot topics.Commercial property here is the stuff of conferences, and there is one roughly every three months dedicated to just that topic. This isn’t a surprise; the expertise gained in Prague, Warsaw and Moscow is to a greater or lesser degree applicable here, and Kyiv is following a variation on a lucrative theme. Ukraine’s better commercial property consultants have picked up the know-how to interface with investors from all over the world. There are professionals operating on the market; what they do can be measured, and thus comprehended.