Re:Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential star...
by jklein11 on Friday December 09, 2016 @08:57PM
(#13143554)
Could you give some more detail on what the political/business challenges are?
Re:Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential star...
by bb611 on Friday December 09, 2016 @11:15PM
(#13143985)
The biggest one is that realtors exist entirely because of regulation a the state level.
After that is the extremely entrenched business interest in the status quo - a lot of people are making money off the current system, and any real disruption is going to cost 95-99% of the real estate industry their jobs.
As noted elsewhere, the level of regulation is such that even offering better data to buyers/sellers has a lot of regulatory overhead, including physical offices with real people.
It's a solved problem to make a system that stores information about home listings and transactions. Other countries have done it. Yeah, houses are annoying because of all the weird combinations. But the thing is just a CRUD app.
This system still exists because of organizations that are based on information asymmetry. A small group of experienced people could make a really, really nice platform for sharing real estate data in a month and it would never get anywhere.