How Can Data Help Turn Renters Into Buyers?

America’s housing market is frozen. Renters want to buy, but many do not feel financially ready. Developers want to build, but they cannot see where true demand lies. The result? A stalled system where supply and demand rarely meet.

After a decade of technology solutions that streamlined mortgages and closings, founders and commercial developers alike are betting on data as the next frontier in housing. The invisible infrastructure behind how Americans buy, sell, and build is being rebuilt in real time. The stakes have never been higher – whoever can make sense of it all will shape the future of home ownership.

The tension is showing up in the numbers. About 15% of home-purchase agreements were canceled in September, up from 13.6% a year earlier. Buyers are getting cold feet as layoffs rise and insurance costs soar. Sellers, anchored by low-rate mortgages, are refusing to adjust prices. In this standstill, millions of Americans remain in rentals they would rather leave.

From Access to Intelligence

Long treated as a personal milestone, home ownership has now become a big data problem. Across the country, governments, lenders, and nonprofits are beginning to integrate the fragmented systems that determine whether a renter becomes a buyer. The tools at their disposal are plentiful.

Housing counseling records, credit readiness models, and zoning data often live in separate silos. The result is inefficiency. As families submit the same paperwork to multiple institutions, builders guess at demand without real-time insight. Aligning these datasets could transform both how people buy homes and how developers plan communities.

Moreover, the traditional 30-year mortgage is increasingly beginning to feel like a mirage. Shared equity, community land trusts, and lease-to-own programs are helping families buy partial stakes and build equity earlier. These models expand access, but they also depend on accurate data to identify where they work best.

Capital One Foundation’s $25 million initiative, Scaling Pathways to Homeownership, aims to fund and scale such data-driven solutions. In partnership with Chicago-based Lever for Change, the program invites ideas that bridge the gap between renter readiness and builder supply. It is part of the financial giant’s five-year, $265 billion Community Benefits Plan, introduced alongside its acquisition of Discover. The plan reflects how large financial institutions are being called to play a broader role in economic stability, linking affordable housing, consumer resilience, small business growth, and infrastructure investment within a unified framework.

Developed with input from community organizations representing more than 800 nonprofits nationwide, it highlights a growing recognition that housing access depends as much on coordinated data and capital systems as on new construction. “We are in a time of transition, change, and uncertainty,” stated Shena Ashley, President of the Capital One Foundation. “There is no better cure for anxiety than action.”

Andy Navarrete, Capital One’s Global Head of Enterprise Affairs, framed it as building an ecosystem where home ownership is “practical and attainable.” That ecosystem includes predictive analytics that map where demand will emerge and digital counseling tools that help buyers prepare for the biggest financial decision many will ever make. The goal is not just to finance homes, but to create systems that help people reach them.

Data as the New Key

For decades, the biggest obstacle to home ownership was affordability. Today, it may be information. As Matias Recchia, CEO of Keyway, a proptech platform using data and automation to streamline real estate transactions and asset management for mid-sized property owners explained, “In a new normal defined by greater transparency and the power of AI, the future of real estate will hinge on how well we turn information into insight.”

Recchia believes that transparency will be key. “By bringing structure to data on everything from rents and permits to demographics and migration, today’s technology allows lenders to better gauge portfolio risk in real time and developers to spot emerging demand or pricing shifts before the market reacts.” What emerges is a picture of housing as an information ecosystem, not just a financial one.

Capital One’s initiative is one piece of that broader shift. It reflects a move away from digitizing paperwork toward building intelligent systems that connect people to homes — not someday, but when they are ready.