There’s Still No Amazon for Housing, But Fintech’s Working on It

February 14, 2022 — Patrick Clark - Bloomberg
It’s hard to imagine a better scenario for real estate technology than the one that played out in 2021. Low interest rates and pent-up demand ignited the hottest housing market on record, while the pandemic gave buyers and sellers new reasons to conduct business virtually. And yet the year will be better remembered for the way some of the biggest names in the industry struggled. The highest-profile flop was Zillow Group Inc., the online listings giant that pulled the plug on its nascent instant homebuying operation in the face of mounting losses. Compass Inc., the tech-driven real estate brokerage, saw its shares plummet 50% as part of a broader selloff in property-related technology stocks. Better, an online mortgage company, fired 9% of its staff. The bumpy year underscored a problem that’s been holding back the adoption of technology in real estate for the past two decades. Each sale of a home involves hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, and no two properties are exactly alike. Silicon Valley-backed companies have gone a long way in making searching for homes and advertising them simpler and faster. But it’s a difficult process to move fully online and involves a lot of people such as agents, appraisers, brokers, and contractors, as well as entrenched interests. For example, Zillow’s house buying business—billed as a way for customers to get out of their homes quickly and speed the moving process—faltered in part because the company couldn’t find enough contractors to fix up those homes to resell them. Read the full story...
Reprinted courtesy of Patrick Clark, Bloomberg