The Property Search Problem

You don’t know what you don’t know. The old adage still holds true because after all, most of us discover things through the internet nowadays.

The same holds true for real estate. Rewritten as you can’t buy what you can’t find.

I moved recently in New York and this problem re-presents itself every annual renegotiation slash subsequent exodus from tiny box apartment to another.

Why is real estate such a nightmare?

Everything from finding a roommate, a room, an apartment or even any property is a hassle and gatekept by multiple middlemen parties all circling to get their cut. Commissions, paid ads on marketplaces such as Zillow, Zoopla or Streeteasy as well as just fraudulent postings advertising spacious pied-a-terre’s but in actuality offering little more than a four by four box, the list goes on and on.

For a massive, super saturated perpetual marketplace where there are always buyers and sellers, we have an incredibly inefficient marketplace to the point where most people end up defaulting to poorly maintained Facebook groups.

“Gorgeous view, lots of sunlight exposure with cozy feel. $2500/month not including utilities”

A unified marketplace seems to be a 2010’s startup problem yet strictly speaking as an end-user, it doesn’t feel like anyone has cracked it.

The problem lies in information asymmetry. National super sites (cough Zillow) will only regurgitate from the MLS or scrape weblinks from listing professionals. This perpetuates the cycle of gatekeeping.

Real Estate by nature is hyper local. Metrics that realtors have dubbed with fancy terms such as curb appeal, walkability or community vibes are best served by people living and interacting on a daily basis in the area. There’s a reason why those of us moving to new neighborhoods ask our friends first “how is it living there?”

That’s why this top down approach of web scrapers sifting through local ad databases such as Craigslist, FB Marketplace and realty websites is a surface solution at best. Redisplaying the same information but now just buried through more layers.

Something akin to Waze with its user driven updates in real time seems like it would be the solution. Along with a top layer aggregator to sift through all of these alerts like “dogs barking at 3AM in this neighborhood”. Only once we solve the local congregation issue with giving local users a place to interact and exchange knowledge can we address the larger marketplace issue.