Most modern friction doesn’t come from complexity. It comes from starting over.

People don’t struggle because tasks are hard. They struggle because the same tasks must be done again and again, with no continuity between attempts. Accounts are recreated. Histories are rebuilt. Decisions are repeated. The underlying information exists, but it doesn’t travel well. Each transition wipes the slate clean.

Housing is where that reset becomes unavoidable. A home is the largest asset most people will ever own, yet it behaves like it has no memory. When something breaks, the problem isn’t only repair. It’s context: what happened before, when it happened, who touched it, and where that record lives now. Usually, it doesn’t live anywhere useful. If anywhere.

Moving compresses all of that failure into a single moment. Utilities, warranties, providers, addresses, maintenance, schools, logistics. Everything collides at once. And despite decades of consumer technology, the experience remains largely unchanged. “It’s still a royal pain in the ass,” said Karen Watts. “There’s nothing to really help you. Everything is different.”

The difficulty isn’t volume. It’s variability. “Every single move is different,” Watts said. “Every single move has a different checklist, every single move has different things that have to get done, and they’re all different.” What applied last time may not apply again. What was known becomes unknown.

That pattern is common enough to be normalized. “Moving is always in the top seven most stressful points of someone’s life,” Watts said. She cited research showing how often it occurs: “The average American moves 11.7 times in their life, and every second someone in the U.S. is packing up to move.” Frequent enough to create friction, but infrequent enough that most people never build durable systems around it.

For Watts, the deeper issue had less to do with logistics and more to do with how homes are treated as data. The insight crystallized during a used car purchase. “We bought a used car… and I get this Carfax report,” she said. “And I’m like, if we’re tracking all this information on a car, why are we not tracking this information on somebody’s home, which is their biggest asset, the biggest asset most people own in their entire lives.”

Cars carry structured, transferable histories. Homes do not. Not because the information doesn’t exist, but because it is scattered. “If you think about a home, your real estate agent has some, your insurance company has some, your home inspector has some, all your service providers have some, you have some,” Watts said. “The list goes on and on about where your data is, for your home.” Reassembling it requires discipline most people don’t maintain. “That requires some significant discipline in using technology, which most people don’t.”

Watts has lived that fragmentation repeatedly. She has moved 26 times and owned 22 homes. “I moved a bunch,” she said. “There was a period… where I think we moved four times in two years.” She describes herself as process-driven. “I’m a huge process person,” she said. “We have processes in the house.” But repetition didn’t create mastery. “I had processes, but they were breaking because every move was different.”

That gap led her to build a company around the absence, DomiSource, a software platform built around the idea that a home should carry its own record over time. The challenge isn’t building a tool. It’s assembling a category that has never had a single point of record. Housing data exists everywhere, but it has never been designed to accumulate around the home itself.

In that framing, the move isn’t the core problem. It’s the moment when a deeper one becomes visible: the home has no durable memory.

Moving doesn’t create chaos. It reveals it. And as long as homes lack memory, every transition will continue to feel like starting over.

Want to stay ahead on the best business trends in Hampton Roads?
Subscribe to this week in 757: https://www.innovate757.org/newsletter

Sources and references

Residential movement statistics referenced in this piece are drawn from U.S. Census Bureau research on lifetime mobility and household relocation patterns:
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/calculating-migration-expectancy.html

Car ownership history and record-keeping comparisons reference Carfax, a consumer vehicle history reporting platform:
https://www.carfax.com

DomiSource is a Hampton Roads–based home technology company focused on creating a persistent digital record for homes across moves and ownership changes:
https://domisource.com