Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Empire State Building took 110 days to build—today, changing a window would take two years. Alex Rampell (a16z) and Varun Krishna (Rocket CEO) expose how asset inflation turned housing from the American Dream into a wealth transfer machine where the median homebuyer age jumped from 30 to 38 in just fourteen years. While Silicon Valley burns billions on products people use daily but never pay for, Rocket quietly assembled a $10 billion profit engine and is now buying up the entire housing funnel—from Redfin's 50 million monthly searchers to one in six US mortgages—betting they can crack the code everyone else gave up on: turning a once-in-a-lifetime transaction into an everyday relationship.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Housing in some sense for me is like that final frontier of Pintech.
0:03.5	Sort of the end goal for most consumers.
0:05.7	All of FinTech in some ways leads to a consumer carrying fundamentally about generational wealth.
0:11.3	And generational wealth, it comes from things like homeownership, right?
0:15.3	It comes from long-term appreciation.
0:17.1	It comes from creating something that's safe and sustainable for you and your family and your family's family.
0:21.6	And that's the American dream.
0:23.6	Part of the problem that all the old people have all the money.
0:25.6	It is like a catastrophic issue right now.
0:27.6	If you're getting paid in cash, you might get a 3% salary bump every year, but the S&P 500, like, compounds at 10% of year.
0:34.6	The median age of homebuyers has jumped from 30 to 38 in just over a decade, and it's not
0:40.4	getting better.
0:41.5	Today, you'll hear from Brun Krishna, CEO of Rocket, and A16Z general partner, Alex
0:46.4	Rampel, on why housing has become the final frontier of fintech.
0:50.5	We discuss how old people cornered the market through asset price inflation while young people get paid in depreciating cash,
0:56.8	why the Empire State Building was built in 110 days, but you can't change a window pane today in less than two years.
1:03.4	And the paradox of real estate sites with 50 million daily users that can't figure out how to make money,
1:08.9	what Alex calls Zillow and Chill.
1:11.5	Plus, how Rocket is flipping Silicon Valley's playbook.
1:14.7	Instead of building a toothbrush product and searching for monetization, they're starting
1:18.7	with a $10 billion profit engine and working backward to daily engagement through their
1:23.1	acquisitions of Redfin and Mr. Cooper.
	...

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