The store that shouldn't exist
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. You can buy a Tesla on a website in about four minutes, no salesperson, no showroom, no handshake.
So why does he have stores?
He doesn't need them. He has them because people like to kick the tire, and they like to do it around other people. You can configure the whole car online, but the reason you actually bought it was sitting in one the day before, in somebody else's passenger seat, and felt it.
Does the same thing hold for a house?
More so, and it isn't close.
There's no way I'm spending a dollar on a house without some kind of professional there showing me something. Not a listing page. Not a virtual tour. A person, in the room, who knows what they're looking at.
I'll go further than that. If a realtor wants to be a little robot with a face walking around the house with me, fine, I'd probably take it. I can poll ten out of ten people and get the same answer. Nobody is buying a house without someone there advising them.
Then why does every forecast say otherwise?
Because the forecast keeps measuring the listing and ignoring the decision.
Finding the house was never the hard part, and it stopped being hard years before AI showed up. The hard part is the week you're deciding whether to stretch, whether the inspection report is a dealbreaker or a negotiating chip, whether you'll still want this street in five years. None of that counts as search.
Tesla figured this out with a product you can genuinely understand from a spec sheet. A house is the biggest financial decision most people ever make, and it comes with schools, commutes, neighbors, and a version of your life you're trying to picture.
So what should the technology actually do?
Take the work that pulls the agent out of the room.
Not the advising. Not the read on the house, or on the two people standing in it deciding whether they can see themselves there. The paperwork and the chasing, the parts that have the agent answering email at nine at night instead of picking up the phone.
Tesla kept the stores because the moment that closes the sale is a human one. Real estate has a hundred of those moments per transaction, and we keep building software as though the goal were to remove them.