The responses are still coming in from yesterday’s real estate marketplace survey, but I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to complete it. I really appreciate it. I was reviewing the responses this morning and I thought there were a couple of interesting takeaways.

First, most people who own a home have at one point or another thought about selling that home. And even the people who haven’t thought about it, said they would be willing to sell under the right circumstances. That is, they would sell for the right price, for a better place, and so on. At the time of writing this, nobody said they would never ever sell.

I think this is interesting because, even though the real estate market is a highly illiquid market, my hunch is that it could be made a lot more liquid with the right frameworks in place and if the barriers to selling could be reduced.

And sure enough, many of the folks who said they have thought about selling (but haven’t yet), said it’s partially because it’s too expensive and too much work to sell. But in addition to these barriers, two other points emerged that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to before – but make total sense. 

Homeowners also said that they haven’t sold because they’re too emotionally attached to their home and because they’re afraid they won’t be able to find another place to move into. 

Because of how illiquid the real estate market is and because home transactions are typically asymmetric (that is, buying and selling are independent actions), there appears to be a real concern that you could sell your home and never find anything better.

And since a home is such an emotion filled asset (as opposed to, say, a stock), people are naturally afraid of making the wrong choice. But then that begs the question: Are we, as real estate consumers, being left with suboptimal outcomes because we’re simply too afraid of the making the wrong choice?

If you know me at all, then you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space. I think the industry is one that has been incredibly slow to embrace technology, but that it’s only a matter of time before it does.

Two months ago I wrote a post talking about how entrepreneur and venture capitalist Keith Rabois is working on a home buying startup codenamed Homerun — now called Opendoor. Here’s how he recently described the state of affairs:

“My friend [PayPal and Palantir cofounder] Peter Thiel suggested that I come up with an idea to innovate in residential real estate,” Rabois told VentureBeat in April. “It’s the largest part of the economy unaffected by the Internet. And that was definitely true then, and even with things like Trulia and Zillow, it’s fundamentally true today. But the process of [selling a home] hasn’t been transformed by technology.”

What Opendoor is trying to do is really interesting, but I have a different idea. It’s called Unlyst. And today I’d like to ask the ATC community for a small favor. I’ve created a short home buying and selling survey (embedded below) that will take you at most 2 minutes to complete.

If you could please take the time to do that, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve made the results public as well, so you’ll be able to see how buyers and sellers currently feel about the real estate marketplace. If you can’t see the survey below, please click here. Thanks for your help!

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Earlier today it was announced that Keith Rabois–a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures and the former COO of Square–is working on a startup that hopes to make selling your home as easy as a few clicks. The codename for the project is Homerun.

“For most people, homes are their biggest asset and it’s completely illiquid,” Rabois said. “This is a really expensive transaction for many people. What we’re going to provide is instant certainty, liquidity and convenience for normal people to sell their homes.”

Rabois hasn’t shared many details, other than a pretty basic flow:

“I’m not going to describe the exact flow, but the general point is you’ll tell us what your address is and confirm your identity, then we’ll allow you to sell your home,” he said. “Obviously there’s a variety of ways you could verify your identity that we didn’t have in 2003, when I originally thought of this idea. Like Facebook Connect.”

This, of course, isn’t a new idea. Many companies have tried to improve the process of buying and selling homes by going online. But it’s a space that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation. I’m particularly interested because I work in real estate and it’s always struck me as a lumbering archaic industry.

So when a name like Keith Rabois announces that they’re working on solving a problem in this space, I get excited about what might come about.