Not all opportunities come from new industries. I have written quite often about how the music and banking industries, although quite mature, are full of new opportunities. Both industries are facing strong forces for change that the dominant businesses cannot, or sometimes simply choose not to, adapt to. Demographic and technological changes are at work in both of these industries.
From a post at News Alert (based on a story in the LA Times) it is clear that the same is becoming true for the real estate industry.
A decade ago, Richard Barton launched Expedia.com and helped transform the travel industry by handing consumers the same tools to book reservations that travel agents had long controlled.Now, Barton is applying the same approach to real estate -- and is banking on equally dramatic results.
While Expedia.com killed the entrepreneurial sector of the travel booking industry, I believe that this venture and others like it, will actually open up the real estate industry. Barton's venture addresses only on piece of the real estate transaction. In many ways it is more analogous to e-Bay in how it should break open a mature industry to all forms of new innovation for start-up entrepreneurs to exploit.
(Thanks to Ben Cunningham for passing this story along).
