Polymarket Adds Real Estate Gambling Amid Housing Crisis

By Nate Aeilts

Can’t afford a home? Already struggling to pay for one? Or, perhaps you’re willing to help harm your fellow Americans in either of those first two camps? Either way, Polymarket has you covered.

As of Jan. 6, Polymarket has teamed with Parcl, a housing data and analytics firm, to help you build, or foist upon others, a mortgage-sized debt without ever touching real estate.

Joel Berner, Senior Economist at Realtor.com, seems to think this is a great idea, saying, “Beyond speculating or gambling, homeowners and prospective homebuyers could utilize these markets to hedge against their interests in the market.”

That opening proviso sure is a doozy.

Polymarket also facilitates housing-market gambling in specific markets, such as New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.

A System for Manipulating Systems

There is already overwhelming evidence that so-called “prediction markets” are fundamentally corrupting.

There is every incentive for Polymarket and Parcl employees to “trade” on contracts in these markets themselves, and absolutely no repercussions or redress to restrain them.

Government officials, employees, and contractors are now financially incentivized to game this system, placing trades one way or the other minutes or moments before legislation and regulation drops that will determine the outcomes.

The conflicts of interest here, as in every wager in a prediction market, are staggering. The average, overconfident user is essentially gambling against experts taking advantage of naiveté.

As one Reddit user put it in the sub r/REBubble, “They really want us gambling our money on everything, don’t they?”

Insider Trading as a Good Thing?

Not only do prediction market advocates want to pretend their offerings aren’t “gambling,” they also insist that the fundamental flaw of insider trading—usually regulated against in standard financial markets for stupendously obvious reasons—is somehow a good thing.

Polymarket’s founder, Shayne Coplan, has argued that his platform is akin to a crystal ball because it incentivizes people to divulge information to the market, thereby forecasting outcomes in advance. Never mind the fact that such money-making revelations, like the illegal ousting of Nicolás Maduro, often come in the last moments before a market is closed when ostensible insiders flood long-shot outcomes with their “trades”.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) recently introduced the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026 in the wake of the Maduro incident. Torres told Fortune.com, “The intersection of insider trading and government decision making is not only corrupting to the market, it’s corrupting the government itself.”

State lawmakers in New York are also considering a prediction market bill.

How these kinds of manipulations will play out in the housing sector remains to be seen. As U.S. society picks up speed in our freefall into the “financialization of everything,” the real costs of these choices will grow far faster and more perniciously than we can track in real time, and ultimately depriving us all of much more than money.