Editor’s Note:

This article is part of Entralon Hub’s Leadership View series, where senior contributors examine the structural forces reshaping access, participation, and long-term stability in global housing markets.

In this feature, Dr Farid Zadeh Bagheri, CEO & Founder at Open Estate, examines one structural weakness inside traditional real estate systems: information that is unevenly distributed, revealed too late, and difficult to verify. It’s not the only friction in real estate، but it is a decisive one, because it silently determines who can participate with confidence and who enters the process blind.

The Real Problem Is Not “Lack of Data” It’s late, uneven, and hard to verify before commitment begins

Real estate is full of data: listings, asking prices, marketing brochures, agent opinions, comparables. The problem is that the information that actually determines outcomes is often:

  • Uneven: some participants see more, earlier
  • Late: key details emerge after commitment begins
  • Hard to verify consistently: facts are difficult to validate and compare across participants and stages

When those conditions exist, the market can look open while functioning like a gated system. “Access” becomes less about willingness and more about informational position.

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Investor Lens:

A market becomes selectively accessible when the truth is not equally visible.

How Uneven Information Shows Up: Off-market is the most visible symptom but not the only one

Off-market deals are not automatically unethical. Privacy and discretion can be legitimate. But structurally, off-market activity highlights something important: opportunity can travel through networks, not discovery.

That creates two different experiences of the same market:

  • For insiders: earlier signals, clearer urgency, clearer terms, real negotiation ranges
  • For outsiders: partial visibility and delayed clarity, often after time and money have already been spent

In that environment, first-time buyers don’t only compete financially. They compete against informational advantage.

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Investor Lens:

Off-market is less about hidden inventory and more about hidden signals.

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Price Becomes a Narrative, Not a Comparable Fact: Why “asking” can’t be treated as “true pricing” in low-transparency settings

In a transparent market, price helps people compare options. In an opaque market, price often becomes a story, shaped by incentives, side terms, negotiation conditions, timing pressure, and selective disclosure.

This is how two numbers can both be “true” and still mislead:

  • Listing price shapes perception and anchoring
  • Real transacted value may differ due to terms and constraints the public never sees clearly

That’s why regulators in some markets push for stronger, earlier disclosure rules, because pricing becomes easier to game when comparable facts arrive late.

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Investor Lens:

Without consistent disclosure, price discovery turns into late interpretation.

The Highest Cost Is Late Risk Discovery

For many buyers, the biggest danger isn’t the mortgage rate. It’s entering a process where the most important risks only become clear after:

  • emotional commitment forms
  • fees are paid
  • time is invested
  • alternatives are missed
  • walking away becomes expensive

When risk is revealed late, the buyer is no longer choosing freely. They are negotiating under pressure.

This is where “access” becomes a trust issue: not “Can I afford it?” but “Did I have the chance to understand it in time?”

(That’s also why policy reform conversations increasingly focus on front-loading information, so key facts are available earlier in the journey, not after offers and costs begin to stack up.)

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Investor Lens:

Late risk discovery turns decisions into damage control.
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Why the Market Can Still Look Healthy: Activity can continue while access quietly collapses