Yes!! You nailed it! I spent a long career in software and now work in real estate, and you are spot on that they are not a company who understands real estate well enough to be buying and selling it. There are plenty of bad real estate agents in the world, but the amount of know-how and connections that good ones have is exactly the encapsulated in the examples you gave - local, specific knowledge that a national/international player isn’t going to have and isn’t going to be able to scale without a whole lot of human investment… gee wiz, kinda like real estate firms.

I wish I had the data that I assume they have internally, because watching their actions I’m not convinced they understand what questions would actually be interesting to explore with ml.