Recently, the YouTube algorithm started surfacing well-produced videos to my feed, from realtors laying out information on attractive neighborhoods. Here's one on the towns in San Mateo county, and here's another talking about what's new in Sacramento county. The content is genuinely insightful, but I don't think this is a random occurrence. It's been getting more difficult for real estate agents to differentiate themselves from all the tools and systems available for housing.

Real estate agents, particularly those on the buying side, have been getting squeezed on both ends. On one side, real estate listing sites like Zillow and Redfin have successfully commoditized information about properties. Data that used to only be available in the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) directory is now free and easily searchable online, including things like photos and comparable listings. On the other, the transaction process has been automated and systematized: mortgage lenders^[1], contractors, insurers, etc. have pushed to connect directly with buyers and bypass realtors as intermediaries. The National Association of Realtors' (NAR) settlement a couple years back piled on, banning the default arrangement that buying agents had with selling agents to split commissions, and adding more pressure for buying agents to show their value to clients.

In response, realtors are scrambling to show that they can add value to the home purchasing process, by navigating the space between individual properties and entire cities and regions. Neighborhoods and towns fit neatly in this untapped middle. They have qualities like character and vibe that aren't as easily quantifiable as homes, where attributes like square footage, number of beds/baths, and price are easily listed and compared. But they're also too small to generalize on a regional scale, so an impression of great weather in the Bay Area may not apply to individual San Francisco neighborhoods.

Of course, a lot of this information is publicly available, in Google Street View and town hall minutes and standardized school test results. But the data is often fragmented and hard to make sense of, particularly when comparing multiple neighborhoods in a housing search. There aren't many services that engage at the district/neighborhood level either. I can really only think of Nextdoor, which is only available for existing residents of the area, and nowadays feels like a perpetual town hall given its tendency to attract "get off my lawn"-type complaints. The lack of disruption here speaks to the natural resistance that this level has to broader commoditization.

Realtors are banking on their expertise to fill this gap. During our housing search, I have some experience working with both: agents specialized in their local areas, and agents who covered lots of listings across multiple counties partnered with Redfin directly, and the difference was stark.

Area specialists gave me context with each house we toured. They talked about the neighborhood's streets, proximity to amenities, and other upcoming homes a few blocks down. We got a sense of the local residential building codes, city ordinances, and how the school district has been trending for the past few years. In contrast, the Redfin-assigned agent unlocked the doors, read off the single-page flyer on the kitchen counter, and discussed which cities would fit our budget. Of course, the Redfin route promised lower costs, as little as 40% of the standard commission rate charged by buying agents, pre-NAR settlement.

The result is a winners-take-most dynamic. Realtors are looking to establish credibility, in an age of influencers and videos, by staking out their local markets on YouTube. And they genuinely don't have a lot of space to maneuver: we're still talking about geographies on the order of neighborhoods and towns. Whoever succeeds in garnering recognition as the go-to real estate agent will get to leverage their reputation for a long time—it worked on our home purchase.