If you ask most people, they’ll tell you that real estate agents will never ever disappear. 

Despite the internet, mobile phones, social networks, and companies (here in Canada) such as comFree and PropertyGuys, the bulk of the market still employs an agent when it comes time to buy and/or sell a home. This is true both in Canada and the United States. And it may always be true.

But there are lots of entrepreneurs and people in the real estate community experimenting with different models. OpenDoor and Open Listings are two new startups out of the US that I’ve been following closely.

At the same time, there is a certain fraction of the market that is willing to go at it alone. By some estimates this number could be as high as 25% in Canada. Of course, this is a hard number to measure accurately since there isn’t just one method of selling a home privately and many transactions likely go untracked.

But one thing that I’ve been wondering for awhile now is why the percentage of private home sales is seemingly so much higher in the province of Quebec. According to Wikipedia, this number might be greater than 50%. And a quick search on comFree (duProprio in Quebec) seems to suggest that this may indeed be the case.

Here are the comFree search results for downtown Toronto. There are 62 properties.

And here are the duProprio search results for downtown Montreal (notice I tried to maintain the same zoom level). There are 2,746 properties.

If anyone has any insights on this phenomenon, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below. I don’t know why this is the way it is.

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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