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Key Takeaways Proptech startups have historically targeted real estate agents and brokerages for revenue, sidelining the end-user experience.
In industries like travel and finance, intermediaries have been cut out, empowering consumers directly — real estate tech lags behind in this regard.
If you want to understand why proptech hasn’t delivered on its promises yet, you don’t need to look at the technology. The technology has been good, honestly. You need to look at who these companies decided to get paid by, because that choice shaped everything about how property technology actually gets built and who it actually serves.
For the better part of a decade, venture-backed proptech startups chased revenue from the fastest payer in real estate. That payer wasn’t the buyer sitting nervously at a closing table or the seller trying to figure out if they were getting a fair deal. It was the agent. Or the brokerage. The companies that controlled the transaction and already had budgets set aside for exactly this kind of thing. So proptech built for them, and it built really well for them, which is actually part of the problem.
When you optimize for the middleman, the end user pays for it
Lead generation platforms, agent CRMs, brokerage marketing suites — the proptech ecosystem got flooded with products that made intermediaries more efficient and more visible. From a pure business standpoint, it made sense. Agents were willing to pay monthly subscriptions. They wanted better tools. The revenue was predictable, and the sales cycles were manageable.
But here’s what happened on the other side of that model. Every time a proptech company designed a feature, the question was never, “Does this make it cheaper or more transparent for the person buying the home?” The question was, “Does this help the agent close more deals or generate more leads?” Those are very different questions, and over time, the gap between what proptech promised consumers and what it actually delivered to them got pretty wide.
The costs didn’t disappear. They just moved. Consumers ended up paying more for less clarity, and meanwhile, the real estate industry kept congratulating itself on innovation.
Other industries actually figured this out
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