On a recent weeknight, Dahlia and Adam Brown came home to their spacious Colonial on a quiet cul-de-sac in Marietta, Ga. The Browns both work demanding jobs and have two young sons. They bought the house in June using Knock, a company that’s trying to revolutionize the real-estate industry with a “home trade-in platform” making it easier to buy and sell at once. That solution was ideal for the Browns, who are just as busy as most couples but more introverted, making the idea of prospective buyers tramping through their private space seem excruciating.
Across town, Martha Seay was overseeing movers in a rambling brown ranch-style house nestled among tall hickory trees. The day before, she had closed on the sale of the house, where she and her husband had raised their family, to the real-estate company Zillow. The next day she would leave for Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the couple had just bought a retirement home.
Seay had wanted to move for years, but the idea of selling was daunting: “I said, maybe next year, maybe next year, maybe next year, because I didn’t want to go through all the crap you have to go through.” Selling to a company took just a few clicks and one visit from an appraiser. Seay was delighted. “I cannot tell you how much the stress was relieved,” she said.
The Browns and Seay are the consumer faces of the disruption that’s currently roiling residential real estate. As different models — home trade-in companies, “iBuyers,” partnerships between new upstarts and old stalwarts[1] — clamor for attention, lots of attention is focused on trying to determine what’s here to stay and what’s just an awkward rough draft — the Pets.com of the housing market.
But these families are also part of a massive industrial revolution. Information technology has remade processes as disparate as ordering dinner delivery, hailing a cab and trading stocks. Now it’s coming for an industry so 20th century that much of the paperwork is still done on paper, where customers are often steered among professionals scratching each other’s backs, and where there’s enormous incentive for the incumbents to keep it hard for customers to manage on their own.
The stakes are big: $74 billion of real-estate-agent commissions were paid out in 2018, and investors have poured billions into all kinds of disrupters[2]. Early adopters like the Browns and Seay provide a glimpse of what the future real-estate market could look like. But just as online retail has hurt the bricks-and-mortar retail industry, and tech-enabled social networks have changed not just high-school reunions but the political process, data-fied real estate could upend our lives in many ways, some we can’t even comprehend yet.
“There’s over 100 million active users on Zillow Z, -0.19%[3] ...