The big thing I couldn't help noticing was how inefficient the real estate industry is. There's so much regulations and people taking a huge slice out of the consumers pocket.
Even the notion of ownership by consumers is at odds with modern times, after all, we hackers are finding it too onerous to even maintain physical servers and off-loading that to the cloud, while most people are still plopping down huge sums of money and mortgages to lay claim to small patches of land, in a clumsy procedure where we fork over almost a tenth of that large sum to people who provide little value (real estate agents, lawyers, city fees).
PG should put out a call to kill real estate like he did with hollywood. There's huge profits for hackers if we wrestle it away from the current players (bank, agent, lawyers), and a lot of good for consumers.
AirBnb's a good start, further steps might be to unify it with Uber, Shopify, SpoonRocket, Exec, and Mechanical Turk and reduce consumers experience down to a few button presses. There's a big opportunity for a company to offer complete life management in an app.
As someone who has been in the RE industry for 6+ years now (loan officer and now processing):
> how inefficient the real estate industry is. There's so much regulations
My biggest time consumer are boilerplate disclosures and astonishing conditions, which have become nightmarish since the housing crisis. That 10 day delay in closing? Someone mis-dated and now we have to wait out Dodd-Frank before proceeding. That 41 page package of forms you need to sign and return before we can even begin underwriting? Sorry, required. The $150 you received from your grandmother for your birthday? Yeah, we're going to need a gift letter. I wish I was being facetious.
> people taking a huge slice out of the consumers pocket
Unfortunately, RE and mortgages are just high-touch industries. People need to be re-assured that someone is working on their behalf. Look what happens when PayPal shuts down an account and gives a generic response? Or Google does the same when blocking a Gmail or AdSense account? People have a complete meltdown. Imagine if that is someone's home purchase (doubly worse for first time homebuyers), and they receive an email stating "Sorry, your loan was denied" with a link to "File an appeal". The ones I work for receive calls all day every day from buyers and agents wanting updates and peppering with questions and concerns.
I automate as much as I can in my workflow (thank you Python and C#) and have considered outsourcing it, but it's a job that is 95% edge cases and one-off situations. The best targets for efficiency improvement are lenders' and RE agents' internal procedures, but that's another discussion.
Thanks for that insider perspective, that will be useful to hackers attacking the space.
An approach would be completely abstract the process. I believe the ownership model is a completely broken process that's pushed by the nefarious banks (It's easy for them to just conjure up money from thin air and indebt us for 30 years - reserve banking. This is the root cause for the relentlessly growing, but almost entirely useless, home ownership industry).
Hotel 2.0 revolution is needed. Airbnb, but with professional, heavily computerized, management of much larger property portfolios.
I think cutting out the agents and lawyers would be pretty dangerous if you were not able to solve the huge problems for consumers that make them necessary. I am about to close on a house next week and would be completely lost without a quality realtor. There is a ton of regulation and risk that make buying a home extremely difficult, especially for first time home buyers. A good realtor does a lot more than just drive you around and collect a check. The same goes for attorneys. Neither provide a whole lot of direct value, but they both mitigate loads of risk.
I closed on a house 6 months ago. My realtor was only good for dealing with problems he and the seller's agent created. The problem I found was that no one in the process can be trusted. It doesn't matter if it's a bad deal (or worse) for seller or buyer, they get paid to close.
The big thing I couldn't help noticing was how inefficient the real estate industry is. There's so much regulations and people taking a huge slice out of the consumers pocket.
Even the notion of ownership by consumers is at odds with modern times, after all, we hackers are finding it too onerous to even maintain physical servers and off-loading that to the cloud, while most people are still plopping down huge sums of money and mortgages to lay claim to small patches of land, in a clumsy procedure where we fork over almost a tenth of that large sum to people who provide little value (real estate agents, lawyers, city fees).
PG should put out a call to kill real estate like he did with hollywood. There's huge profits for hackers if we wrestle it away from the current players (bank, agent, lawyers), and a lot of good for consumers.
AirBnb's a good start, further steps might be to unify it with Uber, Shopify, SpoonRocket, Exec, and Mechanical Turk and reduce consumers experience down to a few button presses. There's a big opportunity for a company to offer complete life management in an app.