The real estate data industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation

Generative AI has democratized access to public real estate data, making large-scale scraping and analysis trivial for anyone with basic technical capabilities.

This shift poses an existential threat to traditional data aggregators like CoStar, Green Street, and Moody's, whose competitive moat has long been built on collecting and organizing hard-to-access information.

Meanwhile, Google has launched a pilot program allowing property listings to appear directly in search results—complete with pricing, photos, and integrated lead capture. If scaled, this could fundamentally reshape property discovery online and disintermediate listing platforms like Zillow and Crexi that currently serve as gatekeepers between buyers and inventory.

In this evolving landscape, I believe the real value will migrate toward decision-support tools that deliver actionable insights rather than raw data. For instance, Platforms enabling investors to query conversational systems that surface opportunities based on nuanced criteria like lifestyle fit, commute patterns, or climate risk, rather than forcing them to manually sift through data portals. The future belongs to platforms that augment judgment, not just aggregate information.

It's an interesting point, Ruthy, and I agree that most of the value in data will be in decision support tools and other productizations of the data.

That said, there's a lot of different ways to package data, and there are still some categories, like residential rents, where the data points are so challenging that scraping is not an effective tool.

I think there will be a winnowing of data vendors and only those who have genuinely hard-to-capture data will survive. Lots of room for competing packaging of that data, though, and marketplaces that are uniquely structured for the specific needs of their communities, once built, have lots of staying power - particularly in the professional world. I'm guessing Zillow will have some trouble from Google, but Crexi will fare better.

Agree! Specifically - the real estate domain in not one of the first technology adaptors, so new products are not easy to adopt.