Uber Cofounder Aiming To Bring Transparency To The Real Estate Market

Buying and selling a home involves lots of parties and lots of time spent going back and forth on the negotiations. Uber Cofounder Garrett Camp is trying to streamline that process with his latest startup Haus.

Brought to the world from Camp’s Expa Studios, Haus digitizes the whole buying and selling of a home or property, creating a place for all the parties to communicate. For example, sellers will be able to list their home on the Haus platform, while buyers and their agents can post their offers, tweak them and see what other unnamed would-be buyers are offering.

Haus is bringing a new level of transparency to the real estate market, which is notorious for secrecy when it comes to negotiations on a real estate transaction. The way it is set up now involves faxes, phone calls, FedEx, email or in-person communications. That’s fine for a large swath of the population, but there are others that don’t want to deal with anyone offline. Haus is banking on that and people’s desire to bring more transparency to the real estate market. After all, with Haus, buyers and sellers can see the ongoing process between the seller and parties interested in purchasing the home or property.

“We think the openness will create a more efficient market and that the number of offers and price will ultimately be dependent on demand,” said Haus GM Sarah Ham in a report. “Bidding wars are a common, almost accepted, part of the real estate process today. But with our approach, buyers know where they stand. Buyers will know what they need to offer to make their offer competitive, but they also won’t negotiate against themselves.”

While lots of people may welcome more transparency in the real estate market, it could turn off some people who bristle at getting in a bidding war, even if it’s online.