Sometimes founders search high and low for the right startup idea, while other times it comes to them. Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli are two of the lucky ones.

On August 4, Grant de Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, UK, noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.

Eric Wu built and ran Opendoor, one of the more ambitious real estate startups of the last decade, before stepping away in 2022 after fast-rising interest rates abruptly slowed down home sales. He spent a year resetting — he’d been running the company for eight years at that point — and could have easily jumped…

If you’re running marketing for a real estate brand, you already know the deal. Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin sit at the top of nearly every high-volume query, and AI Overviews are quietly compressing what’s left of the informational clicks below. That’s the real estate marketing challenge in 2026. Everyone else has already adopted the basics,…