Ask HN: Why is innovation in the Real Estate sector so slow?

I used to ask the same question myself. I went and talked to many real estate agency principals and found that the most important step for them is to get listings. If you don't get enough listings, then you don't have sufficient cashflow.

Buyers do look at the real estate web sites to find properties that meet their needs, then they go and inspect them, etc. The transaction involves contracts, lawyers, conveyancers, title registrations, etc.

So when you talk about disruption, which portion of the chain are you talking about? An end-to-end system would need to hook into many existing systems and those are different for every country, state, county, some times even cities.

1. Very few people make real estate transactions as frequently as once a year, let alone daily.

2. The amount of money involved in a real estate transaction encourages prudence and due diligence.

3. Every piece of real-estate is unique. That means that acquisition always entails tradeoffs and opportunity costs.

4. The real-estate sales market has aspects of a highly competitive commodities market. This means that ultimately, technologies that improve efficiency ultimately result in lower prices across the industry. For example the internet has tended to lower real estate commissions as sellers are more able to market properties themselves and to are better able to negotiate with multiple agencies.

To put it another way, what's the business case?

There are also very few open source projects for building websites for realtors.

A quick google for "real estate open source" shows mainly outdated projects, several of which are not actually open source.