You can stop reading. If you only read the title of this post, you would know everything you need to about what drives us, and what our mission is.

But if you're still reading, I'll refine it further:

We exist to help people make better decisions.

We didn't come to this mission overnight. When we left our day jobs, we didn't yet understand that the world needed, and could have, objective guidance that was truly in people's best interest. We also didn't realize decoupling guidance from revenue was possible, or that all the "that's just the way things are" language in long-standing industries is not as immutable as the incumbents would have you believe.

But we learned those things. We identified the real problem consumers face, and we asked ourselves a simple question: if we were the first people in history tasked with solving it in 2026, what would the best solution look like? Below is a peek into how that sequence played out.

The problem in real estate is astonishingly simple:

People do not know if, when, or how to buy and sell a home.

That's it. That's the pain. If people knew how to do that the way they know how to brush their teeth, write an email, or drive a car, they wouldn't need outside help.

It's an information problem - or more precisely, a lack-of-information problem. One group of people (the public) does not have the expertise or information they need to complete a high-stakes task. Another group does. Before the modern agent model, that gap was largely handled by families or legal professionals. The people with the information were called experts, and for monetary compensation they shared what they knew. That is how the current industry was born. On May 12, 1908, the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges (now NAR) was founded.

Back to the information problem. In 1908, the fastest way to exchange information was face to face. The telephone had not reached widespread adoption, and the telegraph was mostly limited to long-distance use. Humans were the best available solution to bridge the information divide. Person A didn't have what they needed. Person B did. The brokerage model was born and the rest is history.

In 2026, the problem is largely the same: people still do not know if or when to buy or sell a home. The difference is that humans are no longer the fastest or most effective way to solve it.

Software is.

We live in a data-driven world. We rely on apps to track health, finances, travel, and more. We rarely make important decisions without looking at the numbers or comparing today to yesterday. Data helps us understand where we are, what needs to happen next, and how to get there.

Real estate is the exception. It's an industry where consumer access to data and context lags far behind other areas of our day-to-day life. Search platforms like Zillow and Redfin share useful signals - days on market, price reductions, price per square foot - but they do not actively help the consumer answer the core question:

Is now a good time to buy or sell? Should I buy or sell at all?

Credit where it's due: today's platforms have democratized real estate information in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Zillow made it easy to know what a home might be worth at any moment. Before that, you needed a professional estimate and had to trust the individual providing it.

Redfin went further in a pro-consumer direction by introducing salaried agents. That mattered, because it was one of the first serious attempts to confront one of the biggest structural problems in real estate:

Conflict of interest.

Agents operate in a flawed system they did not design. Many genuinely care about their clients. But the model still pays them to transact, not to advise.

Agents earn a commission when someone buys or sells. That is when they get paid. That is the only time they get paid. They do not get paid to sit an open house, pull a report, do research, or give market updates in isolation. If you never buy or sell, they never get a check. That's not their fault; it's the system they're also beholden to.

Put simply: they are not paid to solve the full problem.

Agents do solve the last part exceptionally well (the "how do I?" part). Once someone has decided to buy or sell, a good agent is indispensable. They guide people through a complex, emotional process and are worth their weight in gold.

The systemic failure is in the first part of the sentence: helping people know whether they should buy or sell at all.

A brokerage model paid only on transactions cannot be a fully honest advisor on the decision to transact. There are too many financial reasons to encourage action. Again, this isn't the agent's fault - it's the system that's letting us down.

Redfin saw part of this and tried to separate guidance from the deal by putting agents on salary. That was a meaningful step.

But there is still a deeper issue: humans.

We have an information problem that we are still trying to solve primarily with people.

Expert humans share information - sometimes from databases only they can fully access - with non-expert humans who only see pieces of the picture.

What if the public had access to the information themselves, all the time? What if someone could track everything related to their real estate goals, capabilities, and timing in one place? What if guidance was decoupled from revenue - so the platform did not make money whether you bought or sold, or waited?

That is not a brokerage. That is not a lead marketplace. That is software built around guidance.

It is a modern solution to the original problem:

People do not know if, when, or how to buy or sell a home.

It is exactly what we are building at Aligre.