Unneighborly

Exclusive: Homebuyers can access neighbors' political leanings with new real estate platform

Because stories about political polarization in the United States sell. Even when they don't deliver. This is really a story about (or advertisement for, if one is being cynical) a new real estate website called Oyssey. (Maybe there's a "d" missing... I don't know.) The basic gist of it is, I suppose, that it has information that other websites don't have. But there's a catch. In order the view the listings on the site, and the "block-by-block consumer and political data," would-be home buyers have to be invited to the site by a real estate agent, and sign a contract with said agent. The "win-win" here is that purchasers can access more information, and real estate agents can negotiate higher commissions in exchange for allowing access to it.

According to the company's CEO, a former real estate agent, "buyers often shift from asking whether the water heater is leaking to wondering if their neighbors are folks they'd like to invite to dinner some day." Personally, having had a water heater go out, I'd be more concerned with that than whether the people next door voted for someone I don't like. Not that the site could tell you that... secret ballots are, after all, secret. It's possible the site could tell you that a potential neighbor made a campaign contribution, but as the number of companies rushing to buy some of Donald Trump's fickle goodwill demonstrates, one doesn't have to support someone to know which side one's bread is buttered on.

It's unclear to me who the target audience of Axios' headline was; there may be just as many people who feel that they need assistance with their project to sort themselves politically as there are people who wring their hands over the phenomenon. Whether "Oyssey" (I still think there should be a "d" in there) sinks or swims will depend on whether real estate agents feel that the site brings enough value to home buyers that it's worth paying for a subscription, given that the cost (and more, supposedly) will be passed on to those buyers.

Maybe the headline should have focused on that; the idea that a website is looking to compile publicly-available data on people, and dangle that in front of prospective home purchasers. I'm curious to see what happens when (and it's only a matter of time if this catches on) a sale falls through based on incorrect or outdated information. It will also be interesting to see what happens if people in the markets the site covers start asking what data is has, and is sharing, about them. "Oyssey" may turn out to have a sideline, like other data broker sites, in asking for payment to correct the information they present about people. That might end up being the most viable part of this business.