Ryan Johnson used to work at a San Francisco tech company, Opendoor, that makes software for buying and selling homes. Four years ago, he decided he’d rather build them.
Johnson, who grew up in Phoenix, moved back to Arizona and joined the growing ranks of tech industry expats now trying to shake up the U.S. housing market. The opportunity he thinks he spotted: not enough homes in walkable areas.
“The majority of the U.S. wants to live in a walkable neighborhood, but only 8 percent does,” he said. “And it’s because the U.S. largely stopped building walkable neighborhoods with the advent of the car.”
Johnson, the CEO of Culdesac, is planning to open a 1,000-person, car-free development this year in Tempe, near Phoenix. The company straddles the line between the housing and tech worlds, employing several software engineers and forming partnerships with tech companies including scooter-operator Bird. It’s been eyeing locations such as Denver, Dallas and the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina for future sites.
The startup is part of a rising trend of tech entrepreneurs turning their attention to housing construction, an industry with a steep learning curve for outsiders and one that for decades has resisted disruption.
The push seeks to address an urgent need: the massive shortage in the inventory of U.S. housing units. Last year, Realtor.com estimated the gap between the demand for homes and the available supply was 5.24 million units, and rents have risen more than 20 percent in some markets, with similar rises in home prices.
But it’s far from the tech industry’s first foray into housing. Websites from Redfin to Bankrate have long helped people search for housing or financing, and more recently, tech firms such as Zillow and Opendoor have pushed into a type of large-scale house-flipping known as iBuying, adding a new wild card to the housing market.
About half of Americans, 49 percent, said in a Pew Research Center survey in October that the availability of affordable housing in their community was a “major problem.” That was higher than the percentage who said drug addiction, Covid-19 or crime was a major problem.
“We’re seeing a lot of innovators step into the housing space with creative ideas,” said Michelle Boyd, program director for the Housing Lab, a nonprofit adviser and investor in housing startups that spun out of housing research at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s a really big need, and there’s a lot of room to make money, if you can break through with innovation.”
Startups are looking …….
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/tech-companies-already-flipping-houses-093052759.html