Real estate technology companies that strive to streamline the buying and selling of homes continue to sprout up rapidly. Recent IPOs by two of the heavyweights — listing portals Zillow and Trulia — may draw yet even more attention and investment to the industry, which many say offers enormous potential for innovation.
Shedding light on the fierce battles to come in the newly carved-out niches of the real estate tech space, Paul Knegten, co-founder of Amitree, recently created a graphic that attempts to map the panoply of companies vying for footholds on the buying side of the burgeoning industry.
Knegten calls the "The Fixing Real Estate-scape" graphic a work in progress that’s intended to dynamically capture the industry’s journey towards achieving "The Latte Vision" of homebuying.
The phrase, coined by Inman News Publisher Brad Inman, refers to the potential for technology to eliminate the mountain of paperwork that’s generated when homes are bought and sold, and make transactions easier and faster.
The graphic lives on the blog Fixing Real Estate, which declares that the homebuying process is "broken," and invites readers to join a "crusade" to fix it.
"I’d love your feedback on what’s missing" from the graphic, Knegten wrote on his blog. "This is v0.1 of what I hope will be a valuable guide to the innovation that’s happening around us in real estate technology. Comment below or send me your thoughts. I can fix stuff here pretty fast."
He apparently can fix stuff pretty fast: The number of companies in the graphic has exploded since the map’s debut just two days ago. 1000watt, a real estate marketing firm, curates a similar roster of companies, called the 1000watt Index. Knegten said on his website that there are more than 200 companies that could be included on the "The Fixing Real Estate-scape."
