regulation can be a pain as you say -- there are a lot of highly regulated components of real estate, but some of them are pretty easy to get into as well. For example, crafting rental property management software like maintenance ticketing systems.

Some interesting companies in the residential home sales game are trying to streamline the process. Off the top of my head, paperless pipeline & dotloop are both trying to reduce the paper volume.

there was also a brandery.org (cincy incubator) company in the last cycle that was doing something similar.