Why isn’t there an Amazon for real estate?
Buying a home has never been simple, but on top of all the traditional hurdles, house hunters face extra challenges today. Between high mortgage rates, an inventory shortage and information overload online, it’s no wonder that home sales just hit a 13-year low.
In a world where you can practically run your whole life from your phone, it raises the question: Why isn’t there an app for that?
James Rodriguez, who covers housing for Insider, recently wrote about the quest for an Amazon of real estate. He joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about the regulatory challenges that make a one-stop shopping experience for housing a complicated problem to tackle. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: So look, I’m exaggerating here only a little bit, but you can basically refinance your mortgage at an ATM if you figure out which buttons to push. And I guess my question is why have we not been able to disintermediate the homebuying process yet?
James Rodriguez: You know, I think that’s a question that a lot of people have been asking specifically over the past 20 years. You’d think back to when companies like Zillow and Trulia came around. And they revolutionized one big part of the homebuying process, which is the search process. And in the decades since that innovation, you’ve had companies claiming that they can revolutionize the rest of the buying process as well. And they’ve raised billions of dollars promising to make it simpler, less complicated, less frustrating, you’d have it all one place. And that really hasn’t happened yet. And actually, what it boils down to is homebuying is such a complicated transaction. It’s regulated by this dense web of not only national laws, but state and local laws as well. And so that’s been tough to overcome.
Ryssdal: What I hear you saying is, it’s not so much a technology problem, right? The technology exists, but it’s a human behavior thing, right?
Rodriguez: Exactly. So I think that what people are working on now is bringing the transaction in one place to create something like a housing superapp, or an Amazon of real estate, to guide consumers through every step of the process. Not necessarily cut out steps of the process, but make it easy to navigate.
Ryssdal: So Zillow, you mentioned, is working on this, you know, housing superapp thing. First of all, what do we know about it?
Rodriguez: You know, the truth is not a lot. They’ve been teasing it for the past couple of years, but the details have been pretty scant to this point. What you kind of imagine, though, is something that kind of funnels the consumer through every step. And that’s kind of what they’ve been pitching to analysts, is this kind of one-stop shop where, yes, consumers still have choice in terms of where they get a mortgage from or where they get title insurance from. But guiding consumers through every step of the process, I think, is kind of the name of the game and what companies are chasing right now.
Ryssdal: Four words for you, though: real estate agent lobby, right? I mean, they’re not going to be in favor of this for a second.
Rodriguez: Yeah. And that’s the thing, too, is what we actually saw during the pandemic is when homebuying gets more difficult, people actually do rely on agents more. You had more buyers using agents in 2023, with 88% of buyers, than they did in 2019, when you had 82% of buyers using agents. And so that’s another challenge as well: How do you replicate that purely through an online app? And I think what some companies are saying is, we don’t want to get rid of the agent. We want to work with the agent and incorporate them in this process. And you have brokerages as well that are chasing this kind of superapp or end-to-end system as well.
Ryssdal: Just to bring the news into this, though, there was that case out in Kansas City [Missouri] about the National Association of Realtors and Realtor fees and all of this. And I’d be really thrilled to get rid of losing 6% on my sale, you know?
Rodriguez: Well, and that’s the really interesting thing too right now as you have these two massive multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuits. The verdict came down last week, $1.8 billion in favor of these plaintiffs, who are this huge class of home sellers who say that they basically got ripped off by being forced to pay not only their agent, but also the buyer’s agent as well, which is typically how home sales work. And so it’s actually a really kind of seismic decision that I think will have a lot of ripple effects. You’ve already seen more lawsuits being filed. There’s a lot more to come on that front.
Ryssdal: So getting this back to the idea of an app and trying to do as much as can be done online, on the theory that technology will eventually win out because that’s kind of the way society seems to be developing … 10 years? Fifteen years? Twenty years until I can buy a house soup to nuts on my phone?
Rodriguez: You know, it’s tough to roll out kind of a nationwide app right now. There are companies that will do kind of a one-stop shop for you right now. I think that the big question is, how willing are consumers to submit so much power in this whole process to just one entity? And what’s tough is creating kind of this one-stop shop that’s actually taking over or providing a really meaningful solution to a big range of people.
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