The real estate industry mistook consumer exhaustion for innovation opportunity

Every time consumers complained about real estate, the industry seemed to hear the same thing: opportunity.

Confused buyers struggling to understand the process? Build a new platform to explain it. Agents losing leads? Launch another subscription layer. Communication breaking down between parties? Add a coordination tool. Transaction stress hitting record highs? Bring in another vendor to manage it.

The pattern is consistent enough that it deserves a name. Call it the monetization reflex, the instinct to treat every friction point as a product gap rather than a structural failure. Over the past two decades, this reflex has shaped how our industry was built, and it’s a big part of why transactions feel heavier today than they did when there was a fraction of the technology.

I want to be clear about what I’m actually arguing here, because it’s easy to misread. This isn’t a complaint about software proliferation or vendor overload. Those are real problems, but they’re symptoms. The root issue is about incentive structures, specifically, who benefits when real estate transactions become more complex, and who doesn’t.

The industry monetized friction, deliberately or not

Think through how each pressure point in the transaction cycle became a business.

Lead generation fragmented into an ecosystem of competing platforms, each taking a slice. Transaction coordination became its own professional category, billed separately. Compliance requirements spawned dedicated software verticals. Showing management tools. Digital signature layers. CRM platforms that don’t talk to each other. Referral marketplaces. Title portals. Each one arrived with a legitimate pitch (efficiency, transparency, speed) and each one added a participant to a transaction that the consumer had to absorb in time, cost or cognitive load.

The thing is, none of these businesses were built to simplify the transaction. They were built around it. There’s a meaningful difference.

A system designed to simplify would reduce the number of hands a transaction passes through. What we built instead was a system where more participants meant more touchpoints, and more touchpoints meant more monetizable moments. Complexity wasn’t a bug. For a lot of business models in this industry, it was a feature.

Complexity started masquerading as professionalism

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

At some point, consumers began to internalize the layers as a signal of legitimacy. More steps, more specialists, more approvals, it must be serious. This is how a $500,000 transaction ends up requiring sign-offs from six different parties, each of whom the buyer or seller encounters once and never interacts with again.

I’ve sat across from clients who assumed the complexity meant they were being protected. In some cases they were. In a lot of cases, they were paying for handoffs.

That distinction matters because the industry has long used the language of professionalism, fiduciary duty, specialized expertise, compliance requirements, to justify processes that, examined closely, exist primarily because removing them would threaten someone’s business model. Not because consumers need them.

The honest version of this conversation requires acknowledging that much of what passes for industry infrastructure is really accumulated operational bloat, defended by the people it pays.

Consumers never asked to become their own transaction managers

I want to draw a line here, because this argument gets conflated with an anti-agent position and that’s not what I’m making.

Consumers still want guidance. They want someone who knows the market, who can read a negotiation, who they trust to flag the things they’d miss. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the gap between what consumers need from experts and what they’re actually asked to absorb.

There’s a version of the transaction where expert guidance is genuinely present at the moments it matters. And then there’s what most buyers and sellers actually experience: duplicated effort across parties who don’t share information, unpredictable costs that materialize late in the process, delays created not by complexity of the deal but by the process’s own machinery and a general sense that nobody is actually responsible for the whole thing.

Consumers aren’t asking for less expertise. They’re asking for fewer handoffs. Those are very different requests, and the industry has spent years responding to the first one while ignoring the second.

The next winners will build around removal, not addition

The businesses that win the next decade of real estate will not be the ones that add the most features. They’ll be the ones that take the most away.

Specifically: fewer coordination points between parties, workflows that collapse rather than expand, cost structures that are transparent from day one rather than revealed at closing, and someone who accepts centralized responsibility for the transaction rather than distributing it across seven vendors with limited liability.

None of this is technologically complicated. Most of it has been technically possible for years. What made it commercially complicated was that simplifying the transaction meant dismantling business models built on its complexity. That’s a harder problem than building software.

The NAR settlement cracked this open. It made the structural incentives visible in a way that even non-practitioners could see. But the commission structure was always just one expression of a much broader pattern, one where the industry organized itself around friction rather than resolution.

Eventually someone was going to build the other way. The question was always whether the industry would get there first, or whether consumers would stop waiting.

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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