The American real estate market operates through deliberate forgetting. Every property transaction begins at zero knowledge, requiring full re-verification of information that was verified last year, and the year before, and every year stretching back decades. This engineered memory loss costs billions per transaction in redundant data verification—money spent not to discover new information but to rediscover what was already known. Multiply this across 5 million annual transactions and we burn $234.8 billion yearly on systematic inefficiency, a tax that enriches verification providers while impoverishing families.

This systematic inefficiency represents merely the visible symptom of deeper structural failures. The real estate industry wasn’t designed for efficiency or transparency—it was architected by intermediaries, for intermediaries. What appears as natural market complexity is actually manufactured friction, designed to extract maximum value while providing minimum service. The solution requires understanding how this extraction machinery operates, why it persists, and how decentralized infrastructure can dismantle it entirely.