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Brad Hargreaves, founder and editor of the built work-centered publication “Paper Driven,” spends a lot of time learning about companies and products that impact residential real estate. .
On Thursday at Inman Connect New York, Hargreaves shared with attendees his thoughts on six emerging technologies that he believes will significantly shape the future of residential real estate.
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“These are a little bit bigger, ranging from pretty tactical and pretty predictable to pretty weird,” Hargreaves warned ICNY attendees.
Below are the fast-growing technologies that Hargreaves highlighted in a talk called “How technology is shaping the future of housing development.”
home equity agreement
As the cost of owning a home continues to rise, companies are emerging to address how homeowners can leverage equity in their homes to make them more affordable, Hargreaves said.
He specifically called out four companies that cater to this market: Point, Acre, Unlock, and Unison.
Points advertises that it allows homeowners to access up to $500,000 in home equity in exchange for points in which homeowners receive a portion of the future appreciation of their home.
Acre, on the other hand, taps into the long-term rental market to help renters of three to five years access what Hargreaves called a “synthetic share” in rental housing. At the end of that rental period, renters can choose to buy or cash out.
Unlock buys 36% of the owner’s home equity in exchange for 18% of the home’s value, with a capped return of 20%, so homeowners remain grateful on top of that.
Unison offers up to 15% of a home’s value converted into cash, and in return, it shares a portion of the change in the home’s value when the homeowner decides to sell.
“There’s a lot of liquidity in this market right now,” Hargreaves said.
AI models dealing with recent lawsuits
“There has been a huge proliferation and explosion of different companies looking to bring AI-like models and innovations that could benefit from recent litigation,” Hargreaves says.
Some of these companies are bringing flat cooking agents to market, including Realstar.ai, a pure AI agent.
Some Hargreaves are described as being more in the middle of the spectrum, such as Turbohome, a flat cooking agent “supercharged” by AI that includes a buyer cashback program.
Meanwhile, companies like Sidekick can connect AI tools to existing brokerages to make agents more effective and efficient.
“It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out over the next 18 months,” Hargreaves said of these AI models.
Adus
Hargreaves said Ados has “absolutely taken off on the West Coast” in response to recent regulatory changes.
“Once these are legalized, especially without owner occupancy requirements, they will take off,” he added.
More and more companies are dedicated to selling manufactured Adus and general contractors that specialize in Adus. Amazon sells tiny houses.
After California passed reform legislation in 2016, ADU production “swelled” in the state and continues to grow every year. Now, states are also beginning to allow them to be packaged and sold as completely separate units, rather than being tied to a primary residence.
AI tools to enhance property development
Whether it’s single-family, multifamily, or commercial real estate development, AI tools are emerging to help developers imagine these new spaces.
A product still in development, Hargreaves said, is a natural language site search platform that allows developers to find property sites by entering desired site characteristics.
TestFit is a program that allows developers and architects to potentially supply test sites with different architectural plans, ultimately helping developers move faster with their projects.
Gosource, on the other hand, is a kind of construction materials marketplace. “On the surface, it looks very simple,” Hargreaves said.
The tool has a ChatGPT interface, but users can also provide any image and find the best material to read with images.
Progress in living off the grid
Aside from water sources, there have been major developments in many technologies that help facilitate living off the grid, especially when it comes to the internet, battery power, and solar energy.
Starlink uses satellite technology to provide internet to users and has opened new internet capabilities to homeowners in remote areas, Hargreaves said.
“Starlink has been a pretty fringe technology for two years now, so I went to Target and bought it for $400 and ended up having faster internet than I could have dreamed of five years ago,” he said. Said.
Battery technology has improved significantly over the past two to three years and is likely to continue to improve and become cheaper over the next decade, Hargreaves said.
With solar, battery power outage, and StarLink internet, homeowners in more remote locations can set up with most of the tools they need to live off the grid, Hargreaves argued.
driverless vehicle
The hype around driverless vehicles in 2016 and 2017 was a bit premature when Elon Musk and others really talked about it, Hargreaves said. “Now they’re actually happening.”
Waymo has largely emerged as a leader in this space, Hargreaves said, and its cars now serve large parts of San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin.
“It’s a great experience in many ways, quite different [and] Hargreaves asserted that “Uber and Lyft are much better these days,” noting that they have a lower rate of accidents compared to human-operated vehicles.
“In San Francisco, they just passed Lyft in market share,” Hargreaves said, but Uber remains the market leader.
As a parent, Hargreaves said he also thinks the advent of Waymo will change the dynamics of how kids are transported from place to place.
“I don’t think I’d be willing to put them in an Uber with a weirdo, but I might be happy to put them in a Waymo,” he said.
Email Lillian Dickerson
