What do the 2020s have in store for buying a home and technology?
If you were shopping for a home at the beginning of the 2010s, the experience most likely revolved around one person—the realtor.
The realtor is who you contacted to initiate the process. They informed you of current market conditions and gave you a sampling of what’s available on the local multiple listing service. They also likely referred you to a mortgage broker and title insurer.
But if you’re shopping for a home today, your relationship with the realtor is dramatically different. Instead of going to them first, you’ll browse listings on Zillow, Redfin, or any number of real estate web portals. The realtor you chose will likely have a formal relationship with one of those portals instead of with a standalone real estate brokerage firm, and that realtor will walk you through the process as curated by the portal.
In short, the realtor’s role in the 2010s changed from gatekeeper of the experience to trusted advisor who can guide buyers through the glut of information that’s now moved online.
“There is too much information and a lot of information is out of context,” said Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, an appraisal and real estate consulting firm. “[The realtor’s] role has morphed from here’s the information to here’s the right information. First of all that’s just a basic shift but it’s also a big shift. Their role is really as a curator now.”
While every decade sees advances in technology that change the way people live, the 2010s saw more than its fair share of the proverbial tech disruption. Smart phones were only a few years old in 2010, and the depression that followed the financial crisis in 2008 slowed the pace at which they saturated the market.
Over the course of the 2010s, smart phones and mobile apps transformed a number of industries into on-demand services. Uber and Lyft bring cabs to people where and when they want them. Seamless does the same with food. Streaming services do the same with movies and TV shows. Amazon delivers virtually anything to your door in as little time as a day.
But advances in technology have been slow to change the real estate transaction, and the changes that have occurred have been incremental instead of transformative. Zillow, Redfin, and Trulia launched in the mid-2000s but were essentially real estate search engines going into the 2010s.
Fast forward to today, and those companies have become fully formed listings platforms with a number of other related services. Big data and machine learning eventually lead Zillow to launch the Zestimate, which allows people to have an idea of what their homes are worth with the click of a button. Mobile apps give you a map of available homes for sale in a neighborhood. Internet of things (IoT) technology gives people access to a home on the market without needing a realtor or homeowner to let you in, and virtual reality lets you tour a home from the comfort of your couch.
“Think about the verbs—I want to search, I want to find, I want to browse—that has dramatically changed [over the last 10 years],” said Zillow president Jeremy Wacksman. “I want to buy, I want to sell, I want to finance—that’s really not much different from what it was 20 years ago.”