I was the CTO of a startup that tried this; it's extremely difficult because most people (it turns out) want a real estate agent or someone to help them. Additionally, it's a real chicken or egg situation-- without inventory, no one will use your app, and with no one using your app you won't get any inventory. There are two ways around that, one is to pay for data but then you'll have to deal with local MLS requirements. The second is copious amounts of money ($150-200 million) to burn for years in advertising to acquire eyeballs.
Your app looks great, and I truly wish you the best of luck! I'd love to see someone succeed doing this...
Wow, rubyn00bie, I'd love to talk with you. I wonder who you were with and how long ago. We anticipate that will be an issue for awhile, but we have a jar full of ideas how we will overcome that problem. Kind of the coke recipe. Thanks for your feed back and we will take all the luck we can get. Richard
I'd be happy to setup a call sometime, do you have an email address? I've seen a whole helluva lot of that space (though it has been 5-6 years now since I was there). The company was called Househappy, before I left the company pivoted into being a home ownership platform instead a buy/sell platform. I'm still quite sure that we're started the trend, on housing websites, of a photo driven approach :)
My standard formula (tempted to call it a standard joke) is to build an aggregator that lists the competitors offers, in your case as many properties from as many agencies as possible.
Some you have to pay for their data, some you can do for free, some want to pay for better listings.
On a different note, without an agency one can leverage the lack of artificial urgency. ATM, with few listings, the longer listings last the better it is for you.
It's much easier and cheaper (in terms of time/money spent) just to use https://www.listhub.com/home.html to aggregate the data. Many MLS are run on old beige boxes living in closets.
I sort of disagree with the analysis about having things sit longer. One of the issues is that if it sits too long, because markets are hot, sellers will just go with an agent and never use your platform again. Additionally, many buyers will assume that the data is stale because its old. It's really a difficult situation with so many non-obvious layers of complexity in how it works.
Yeah, they ended up pivoting into home-ownership space after burning through cash and doing a CEO swap to secure new investment. Now it's sort of "car fax" and concierge experience for owning a house. It's a good idea, but real estate is a really hard industry for tech (IMHO), and it's just capital intensive to make any progress.
Your app looks great, and I truly wish you the best of luck! I'd love to see someone succeed doing this...