Your next SaaS: Cheap house, fast internet

From the most recent issue of Unvalidated Ideas which I just put out this morning (or evening for most of you):

Cheap House, Fast Internet (Tier: B)

Show tech and office workers cheap houses with fast internet. This idea is super easy to validate -- put together an excel list and start selling access to it (this is roughly how YNAB started).

This isn't a financial newsletter but here's the context (mostly USA specific):

Humans generally need shelter, and thus rent and purchase homes to live in
The primary limitation to purchasing a home is not how much money you have, but how much a financial institution (normally a bank) trusts you, because they create the money they will give you.
Low interest rates created "cheap money" for people trusted by banks, meaning they could easily get money to purchase homes
Not enough homes are being built (especially due to the crash in 2008), and this is especially true in many high-demand areas
People and financial institutions purchase homes as relatively low risk investments than the equity markets.
There is a both a shortage in supply and high demand for housing in the USA

Assuming there is no large paradigm shift, houses are not going to get cheaper any time soon. Maybe we'll finally see a decline in how fast prices grow ("disinflation") but the underlying problems are really hard to change overnight (communal condos in the suburbs? not a bad idea maybe...).

The recent rise in interest rates is already affecting house prices, but there are a lot of people with money out there, and there's no housing market crash in sight (the last 2 years have given those that were capable time to clean up their house finances). The data is not intuitive:

Pending home sales fell by 3.9% in April, according to data released last week by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), while sales of new single-family homes, which account for 9.5% of all home sales, tumbled to a two-year low last month, down by 16.6% - the fourth straight monthly decline.

Meanwhile, median home prices have jumped by 19.6% from a year ago to $450,600, just as sales of new homes are down by almost 27% compared to a year ago.

Anyway, most of the time a certain niche of people with lots of money want cheap houses, with fast internet -- give them what they want, with a UI that they expect (probably a map). Add in some basic sliders and up to date data.

Optionally, tack on some advertising or reach out to Redfin and Zillow for early sponsorships (and probably a future acquisition offer). Another interesting path is partnering with local real estate agents, but that's much harder to scale and negotiate, so a pure info-product play probably makes sense here at least early on.

There's a whole 'nother side of the equation, enabling existing home owners/renters access to which properties have access to the fastest internet speeds in their areas, but that's an idea for another day.

Getting access to a cohort of people searching for a home opens up avenues for customer research, newsletters, and lots of other products -- buying a home is certainly not the end of the journey for home owners. Getting a foothold into this market is extremely lucrative, this idea compounds.

Cheap House, Fast Internet (Tier: B)

If you liked the word salad above...