New Real Estate Platform Oyssey Aims To ‘replace Zillow’

A new real estate platform launching this month is offering homebuyers a glimpse into neighborhoods beyond the standard Zillow listing.

Oyssey, a tech startup founded in 2022, is leveraging social data — including age, education and income demographics — as a means of understanding homebuyers beyond their standard housing preferences.

The platform is soft launching this month in New York and Florida for real estate agents, teams, brokerages and MLSs to peek into potential neighborhoods and explore political leanings and local demographics.

According to CEO and co-founder Huw Nierenberg, Oyssey is an “invite-only, through select buyer’s agents, home search platform.” Nierenberg also added that the platform creates custom buyer-brokerage agreements in the wake of the National Association of Realtors‘ settlement that requires agents to have buyers sign contracts.

“It’s about time buyers have control of how their own contracts work and that can mean more commission opportunities for savvy agents,” he added. “[We operate as] a Customer Purchasing Management Platform (CPMP) for brokerages to support their buyers, manage compliance, and organize documents securely by address.”

Nierenberg went on to say that Oyssey compiles political data that is “based on a range of publicly accessible data like election results and campaign contributions. The consumer data is licensable commercial data, including addresses associated with dog ownership. We are extremely confident about the accuracy.

“We’re raising our seed round to take the industry by storm and to replace Zillow, who, in our opinion, has missed every opportunity to provide real value for buyers,” he added.