Show HN: Masterkey – A TurboTax-like platform for self-service home buying

13 points by giulioco 10 hours ago

Hey HN- Masterkey founder here. It’s 2025, and while we’re supposedly on the cusp of AGI, we still buy houses as if it’s 1925. A recent Fed study [1] found the typical 3% buyer-agent commission is inefficient (shocker) and costs American homebuyers $35B every year. That seemed broken to me, especially at a time where a whole generation is struggling to buy homes in the first place, so I built Masterkey: a self-service option (like TurboTax) for buying a home. If you still want an agent and can afford it, great- but I do think people should have options.

Masterkey walks you from budget planning to closing, giving you step-by-step tools and resources. If you need extra help for a specific step, we’ll provide you with a list of top-rated professionals in your area (e.g., inspectors, real estate attorneys, mortgage brokers) so that you can hire help on an as-needed basis.

We also include a co-pilot-like LLM that has the context of your home-buying journey that you can ask questions to. Obviously, it’s not a substitute for a licensed professional; we just wanted an assistant that stays context-aware.

Some features:

- AI Property Analyzer: paste any for sale Zillow URL, get an instant AI-generated breakdown plus a short notebookLM-style pod summary. - Open House Scheduler: send a link to the listing agent to coordinate tours (you handle the rest). - Docs/Tasks/Properties: keep everything in one place - upload paperwork, track tasks, chat with AI about a specific property or document. - Market Watch: Alerts for new properties matching your saved criteria.

All the core functionality is free. We have a paid tier with higher limits and access to some of the more advanced features.

This is brand new so things like the AI analysis etc are still rather basic, but would love any feedback on how I can improve on it.

[1]: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg/publicati...