Certainty as a Service Part II (Transmission #340)
WRITTEN BY: GREG FISCHER
The first wave of certainty in residential real estate was easy to spot.
It showed up as cash offers, fixed timelines, and simple promises. Sell your home today. Close in two weeks. Remove contingencies. Reduce friction. iBuyers packaged these outcomes into a single product and proved something important: consumers will willingly trade some upside for predictability.
That lesson stuck. But the market moved on.
LAY OF THE LAND
Today, certainty no longer lives in one place, one company, or one moment in the transaction. It has fractured across the lifecycle and shifted upstream. What buyers and sellers want now is not just speed or liquidity, but confidence that a deal’s fundamentals will hold.
The problem is that many of those fundamentals are no longer stable.
Inventory is harder to see. Financing is harder to trust. Insurance is harder to secure. The physical reality of a home is harder to verify. Exit paths that once felt obvious now depend on timing, geography, and optionality.
In 2018, uncertainty was mostly about whether a transaction would close at all. Today, transactions are still closing. What fails is everything around them.
A home is listed, but not publicly. A mortgage rate is quoted, then repriced. An offer is accepted, then paused for insurance approval. A buyer tours a property digitally, then discovers in-person that the version they understood was incomplete. A seller plans to move, only to find their next step blocked by capital or timing.
Certainty did not disappear. It became conditional.
iBuyers were the first large-scale attempt to bundle certainty into a single experience. In doing so, they revealed demand, not dominance. Their models worked best when appreciation was fast, capital was cheap, and risk could be abstracted. As conditions changed, the levers available to them multiplied, but the simplicity of the original promise faded.
That evolution matters, because it exposed something new. Certainty is not a product. It is a system.
It is assembled from visibility, transferability, coverage, verification, and optionality. Some of those live in the MLS. Some live in lending. Some live in insurance markets. Some live in data, imagery, and physical verification. Others live in financial strategy and timing.
What makes this moment different is that certainty now lives across institutions, not within them.
MLSs control canonical records and distribution norms. Brokerages control relationships and access. Lenders and insurers control financing and coverage. Portals and platforms shape discovery, presentation, and verification. Startups and investors control the levers that determine optionality when conditions change.
No one owns certainty outright anymore. That creates risk. It also creates opportunity.
The categories that follow are not trends. They are pressure points. Places where deals now break, stall, or quietly lose trust. They represent the new surfaces where certainty is either created or lost. Let's dive in...