Would You Buy This House Sight Unseen? (BusinessWeek)

Well, one guy did, as bold buyers snap up real estate without setting foot on it.

Kevin Kwong, a Seattle-area engineer, bought this home in Orlando without visiting it.

There are lots of tools now to help investors buy real estate without getting anywhere near it. There are virtual tours of office buildings and homebuying algorithms for Wall Street landlords. More recently, developers of luxury condos have offered digital walkthroughs to foreign buyers.

What, you're not a foreign millionaire or billion-dollar private equity fund? New research by the Seattle brokerage Redfin has something to tell you anyway.

One in five Americans who bought a home in the past two years said they had made an offer on a home they had never visited, based on a poll of 2,100 recent buyers conducted for Redfin by SurveyMonkey. People who paid more than $750,000 for their homes were particularly likely to make a blind bid, with 53 percent of them submitting an offer sight unseen. So were millennials, 30 percent of whom made such an offer.

There's no simple way to compare those numbers with historical norms. People relocating for work have been the obvious candidates for this scary maneuver. It's not surprising that younger buyers are more comfortable using online tools that facilitate the virtual homebuying process. It isn't clear why wealthier buyers are likelier to bid on homes sight (or site) unseen, but it makes sense that newer homes would attract more blind offers than fixer-uppers.

Another takeaway from the survey is that some buyers are moving away from traditional real estate services and toward—wait for it— companies such as Redfin, which isn’t shy about touting its tech startup roots or a commission structure that is generally cheaper than traditional brokerages. For the last year, the company has offered virtual walkthroughs that offer an "interactive view from every angle inside a home."

But buying a home sight unseen doesn't have to be so high-tech. Kevin Kwong, 31, who works as an industrial engineer in the Seattle area, was shopping for a retirement home for his mother- and father-in-law in Orlando. He used the Street View feature on Google Maps to get a feel for the neighborhood and asked his real estate agent to take some iPhone videos of the houses he was interested in. Kwong says he was emboldened to do his shopping online because he was buying a home in a planned community, easier to research from afar than an older house in a residential neighborhood.

Plus, he had already bought a house the old-fashioned way, actually entering it first. 

"If I wasn’t already comfortable with the house-buying process," he says, "I probably wouldn’t have done this.”