I ordered a grill online last year. Standard purchase, nothing special. But at some point after clicking buy, I noticed I could see exactly where it was at any given moment. Which facility it left. What route it was taking. A notification when the driver was a few stops out. The whole thing required zero effort on my part.
A few weeks later, I was helping someone close on a house.
They submitted an offer on a Tuesday and heard nothing until Friday. Not because anyone was being negligent, just because that’s how it goes. Escrow opened, and they suddenly found themselves fielding calls from a lender they hadn’t fully vetted, a title company they’d never heard of and an inspector they needed to schedule themselves. Costs started appearing that nobody had mentioned during the search process. The timeline slipped by a week and they found out two days before it happened. By closing they were exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the house itself.
Two experiences. Completely different industries. The gap between them is the whole point.
Consumers don’t compare industries
People don’t consciously stack their real estate experience against their Amazon experience. That’s not how it works. What happens instead is quieter. Every time a product or service genuinely impresses someone, it moves an internal needle they don’t even know exists. What used to feel fine starts feeling slow. What used to feel acceptable starts feeling avoidable. The floor keeps rising, and it rises whether any given industry is paying attention or not.
Uber raised the floor on what it means to know where something is and when it’s arriving. You didn’t have to think about it. You just knew. Airbnb raised the floor on pricing transparency. Total cost, visible upfront, before you commit to anything. Apple raised it on simplicity, the idea that a complicated thing could be made to feel straightforward if someone cared enough about the experience to design it properly.
Real estate didn’t create any of these expectations. It just woke up one day carrying them, along with every other industry consumers interact with. Real estate needs to raise the bar on homebuying transparency.
The wrong competitive set
Most brokerages still measure themselves against other brokerages. That’s not a criticism, it’s just how competitive thinking naturally works inside an industry. If your communication is better than the firm down the street, you’re winning. If your agents are better trained, your listings move faster, your brand is stronger locally, you have an edge.
Consumers aren’t running that comparison. They stopped running it a while ago.
By the time someone is sitting down to choose an agent or a platform, they’ve spent years being shaped by experiences that had nothing to do with real estate. Their reference point isn’t the other brokerage. It’s the last time something genuinely complex felt easy because whoever built it had clearly thought hard about what it would feel like from the other side. That’s a different problem than beating a local competitor on commission structure or marketing spend, and most of the industry still isn’t building against it.
The companies starting to pull away aren’t necessarily the biggest. They’re the ones that looked at the transaction from the outside in and asked what a person with modern expectations would actually find reasonable. Cost clarity before commitment. One point of contact who owns the process rather than a rotating cast of parties the buyer has to coordinate between on their own. Updates that arrive without the client having to ask for them. A timeline that doesn’t quietly shift and get mentioned almost as an afterthought.
None of that requires technology no one has built yet. It requires treating the experience as the actual product.
Where agents fit into this
This isn’t a case against agents. The agents genuinely thriving right now are the ones who figured out that their role quietly expanded without anyone formally announcing it. They’re not just negotiators and market experts. They’ve become the person responsible for making the whole thing feel coherent to someone who arrived expecting coherence because every other well-designed experience in their life provided it.
That’s a serious opportunity. When a client understands from day one what’s coming, when it’s coming, and what it’s going to cost, the relationship changes. They stop bracing for surprises and start actually trusting the process. Deals move cleaner. The calls get easier. And the referrals that come after reflect a genuinely good experience rather than a transaction someone just got through.
The brokerages and platforms that help agents deliver that are the ones agents will gravitate toward. Not because of what they’re offering on the business side, but because they make the actual job easier in the way that builds something lasting.
What the next generation gets right
The companies that define the next decade of residential real estate probably won’t be the loudest or the most capitalized. They’ll be the ones that looked honestly at the distance between what a modern consumer expects and what a typical transaction has historically felt like, and decided to close it rather than explain why it’s always been this way.
Real estate isn’t being evaluated against other real estate companies anymore. It’s being evaluated against every experience that quietly raised someone’s expectations without them even realizing it. The firms that understand that first won’t just grow. They’ll set the standard everyone else spends the next decade trying to match.
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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