You Might Find Your Next Home on Amazon

Over the coming decades, housing will continue to be transformed from a product into a service. Just like we order an Uber or get noodles delivered to our doorstep without much human interaction, soon we’ll be able to rent, buy, or sell homes nearly instantly with an app.

This will be a profound change for the residential real-estate industry, which has historically been a “people-driven” business. It involves many different human jobs in order to make a deal happen—realtors, mortgage brokers and lenders, lawyers, title underwriters, inspectors, management companies—and has been surprisingly resistant to the kind of tech-led “disruption” and automation that has overturned other industries.