The Hidden Costs of Fragmented Real Estate Data: A Call for Industry-Wide Reform

Written by:

Rudi Davis

Date:

29 Sep 2025

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The real estate industry’s fragmented data landscape is creating significant risks for consumers and barriers for innovation, according to RealReports COO/Co-Founder Zach Gorman, who argues that the current state of real estate data infrastructure is holding back progress across the entire sector.

“Data in the real estate space is in disrepair,” Gorman says. “It’s highly fragmented. There’s a lot of incumbent providers that are incredibly protectionist about it. It’s often out of sync or stale.”

The Real-World Impact

This fragmentation isn’t just an abstract technical problem, it has serious consequences for everyone involved in real estate transactions. Gorman points to a personal example that illustrates the stakes: “My co-founder was trying to buy a place in Northern California, and they got rejected by 10 insurance companies for wildfire risk. You know this is a huge problem, a huge problem, to have an uninsurable home.”

The Three-Sided Problem

According to Gorman, the data fragmentation crisis impacts consumers in significant ways. Many lack access to critical information, which can lead to both emotional stress and financial consequences. In numerous cases, consumers only discover problems too late in the process, limiting their ability to make informed decisions.

Real estate agents also feel the effects of fragmented data. They often spend excessive time researching across multiple sources, and conflicting information can undermine reliability. The complexity of accessing comprehensive data sometimes leads agents to skip thorough research, potentially affecting the quality of service they provide to clients.

Technology innovators face their own set of challenges. Accessing the necessary data can be prohibitively expensive, often requiring multi-year contracts that cost millions of dollars. Startups, in particular, are disadvantaged, as Gorman notes, “For startups, it’s not palatable. You can’t do that,” making it difficult for new entrants to compete or innovate effectively in the real estate technology space.

The Innovation Barrier

The current data landscape particularly stifles innovation, Gorman argues. New companies trying to build solutions face massive upfront costs just to access basic market data. “Whenever we’re trying to build new things, we need data, we need infrastructure, but it can take millions of dollars in contracts that are multi-year terms,” he explains.

The Path Forward

RealReports’ solution centers on establishing a more accessible and reliable data infrastructure. Their approach emphasizes building consensus across multiple data sources, creating agile access models for startups, ensuring data accuracy and timeliness, and developing scalable methods for seamless integration across platforms.

“Let’s just make the most reliable resource for data that exists,” Gorman says, describing their mission, “and do it in a way that is agile, so that the startup ecosystem especially can benefit from just being able to spin this stuff up and focus on actually building their specific use cases.”

The Solution: A New Data Framework

The company’s experience indicates that solving the data fragmentation crisis requires breaking down protectionist barriers, creating more flexible access models, building reliable consensus across multiple sources, and enabling innovation through affordable access, ensuring that consumers, real estate professionals, and technology innovators can all benefit from accurate, consistent, and actionable data.

“We want the startup ecosystem to focus on actually building their specific use cases and implementations and products and services,” Gorman concludes, “and not just building data infrastructure, because that’s not the job that they’re trying to do.”