Real estate will be virtualized like every other illiquid asset. This means:
* Ownership of real-estate gets rolled up into REITs. REITs are experts at building, buying and selling real-estate and they can do it at scale. "Home ownership" where small-time retail investors buy and sell real-estate will get selected away as its a grossly inefficient model.
* Real-estate property managers like Ziroom and WeWork and AirBNB will take out leases and resell highly customized and liquid packages. They provide not just access to the property but to a wide range of services and auxiliary services.
* The PMs now manage their inventory and pricing in real-time.
At this point you can start to think of real estate as any other "cloud service": acquired on demand, at fluctuating prices, and accessible through a whole clearly defined service/API layer.
We're starting to see this in China and SEA already in a big way [1]. Here again Asia is way ahead of the curve. Real-estate "on demand" means companies and even families are basically moving between different properties every month based on prices and needs. Office desks can be rented for as little as 15 minutes.
The key obstacle here has always been renter quality and the various housing legal regimes. In Asia at least the government seems primed to step in and vouch for renter quality which which will likely evolve into something like a credit rating for renters. The legal questions are still totally up in the air but that's not stopping people for now. Companies like Ziroom have been known to get up to some shady antics like evicting people in the middle of the night or hiring policemen to intimidate people.
[1] https://chinaeconomicreview.com/why-chinese-millennials-are-...