Can @OpenDoor score a Home Run for Keith Rabois?

This is probably the start-up that will make Real Estate Tech sexy.

The proposition is simple: OpenDoor will buy your home, at the press of a button, very quickly.

Real estate is sexy. Real estate tech isn’t.

On twitter, the #realestate hashtag trends on a weekly basis.

Lots of talk of interiors, amazing properties you aspire to one day live in and stories of crazy tenants/landlords.

Why don’t Real Estate Tech Founders ‘get’ the property market?

It’s a very big market, with very little useful technology. So naturally everyone and their dear old Mom wants to ‘disrupt’ real estate using the internet.

Where exactly is the UK Greenbelt?

And no, we don’t need to build on the green belt. There’s plenty of other land to build on (brownfield sites in London are ten-a-penny).

See Henry Pryor’s tweeted image of the Greenbelt here:

Agents are paid for marketing. But they’re not very good at it.

Central to the existential crisis real estate agents across the world are facing is this very problem: the job of a real estate agent is to market property; but everything they project shows an inability to market…

The Real Estate Scraper Wars

I just read this article about MLSs, Property Portals and Real Estate Agents spending many millions of dollars on anti-bot software.

Just to lay this out clearly: companies that put data onto the internet want to choose who can take that data and what…

Why are online auctions for real estate such utter crap?

If you want to get the very best price for your property, every professional property person will tell you to stick it in the best marketed auction.

Meet the CEOs — Rightmove vs Zoopla vs Agents’ Mutual — @peterknightblog’s four-i

This is well worth reading, if you’re into this emerging portal war story.

An observation:

A ‘Land Registry’ for rental property data

Earlier this week, the UK’s tenancy deposit protection schemes reported hard numbers (via Property Industry Eye):

2.85m deposits protected at a
Total deposit value of (almost) £3bn

Rightmove releases The Trendometer — interactive house price trends

In what is probably the most fiddly interactive chart of all time, Rightmove gives anyone the ability to see UK house price rises (or falls) by any time period over the last decade and a bit.