iBuying has been one of the most disruptive ideas to enter the real estate industry in decades. iBuying, which stands for instant buying, is home-flipping taken to its logical end, done at a large scale by corporations, rather than just a small contractor.

The practice once held a lot of promise as technology has made it easier to buy and sell a home, see comparable sale prices and other useful information, and collect and analyze data to know what works and what doesn't. The concept was embraced by virtually every real estate tech player, including Zillow and Redfin.

However, it didn't work out as hoped for those two companies and they threw in the towel in 2021 and 2022. Zillow closed its iBuying business, Zillow Offers, in 2021, after finding that its algorithm for estimating home values wasn't nearly as good as it thought it was. At the time, CEO Rich Barton said, "We've determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated."

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Source Fool.com