Real estate tech started like streaming and ended as a bundle

Remember when Netflix felt like the answer to everything?

One price, one app, watch whatever you want. People were ditching cable because the math was obvious. Why pay for 200 channels when $12 a month got you everything you wanted to watch. Simple, cheap, done.

Then Disney launched their own thing. Then HBO. Then Paramount, Peacock, Apple. Now you’re paying for six different things, half of which overlap, and the show you want is always on the one you almost cancelled last month. Somewhere along the way the whole point of it got lost.

Real estate did the exact same thing. And the industry has been pretty quiet about it.

We didn’t modernize real estate. We just kept piling stuff on top of It.

The original pitch for proptech made sense. Real estate was slow, paper-heavy, and way overdue for a technology upgrade. And some of what came out of that era genuinely helped, listing search got dramatically better, digital signatures saved everyone a trip to the office, some of the communication tools made deals run smoother.

But here’s what actually happened. Every problem got its own product. Showing coordination became an app. Transaction management became a platform. Pricing data became a subscription. Lead generation basically became its own economy inside the industry. Compliance got its own software category. Then CRM systems. Then lender marketplaces. Then MLS layers that were never designed to talk to any of the newer stuff sitting on top of them.

Each one solved something real. Nobody stopped to look at what the whole pile looked like from the outside.

From the outside it looks like a mess. An agent running a deal today might be jumping between five or six different tools just to get one transaction closed, none of which connect cleanly, all of which cost something, all of which add a place where something can get dropped or delayed. The person buying or selling doesn’t see any of that directly. But they feel it.

They feel it when someone asks for the same document three times. They feel it when a simple question takes two days to come back because it had to pass through four different people first. They feel it when the closing cost estimate from week one looks different from the number they’re signing in week four and nobody has a straight answer for why.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s just what happens when nobody stops to ask whether the thing underneath all the new stuff still holds up.

Complexity has a price, and it’s coming out of your pocket

Every vendor in that stack needs to get paid. The platforms charge fees. The subscriptions cost money for the professionals running them. And since the way real estate gets compensated is still tied to the transaction itself, a lot of those costs end up folded into the deal somewhere, inside percentages that are hard to question, in line items that show up late, on a closing statement that’s genuinely difficult to parse even when you’re trying.

People aren’t confused about real estate costs because they’re not paying attention. They’re confused because the costs are hard to follow even when you are. The process has been patched so many times that people who work in it every day often can’t give you a clean answer about where everything goes.

The streaming comparison holds here too. When cable broke apart into individual services, most people didn’t end up spending less money. They just had more choices about what to be confused by. Real estate did the same thing, layered on technology and choice without making the experience any cheaper or clearer for the person writing the check at the end of it.

The next big thing won’t add a feature

The streaming wars are slowly collapsing back toward bundles and consolidation, not because anyone loves bundles, but because people hit a wall with the fragmentation and the market had to respond. Something similar needs to happen in real estate.

But it won’t come from adding another layer. Putting a smarter AI assistant on top of a 12-step transaction spread across six platforms doesn’t make it a simpler transaction. You just get a friendlier interface for the same underlying chaos.

What actually fixes it is fewer steps, fewer parties, costs that show up early and make sense, and a process someone can follow from start to finish without needing it explained to them. The companies that figure that out won’t be the ones with the longest feature list. They’ll be the ones who looked at everything that got piled onto real estate transactions over the last twenty years, decided most of it was solving the wrong problem, and started cutting instead of adding.

That’s harder to build than another integration. It’s also what people are basically asking for every single time they close on a house and walk away wondering what just happened to them.

The industry spent twenty years adding. The ones who figure out how to subtract are going to win.

Blake O’Shaughnessy is a real estate broker turned co-founder of Ownli.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

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