The paint was still fresh

Ask someone in Khobar why they took the flat they live in, and the answer is rarely about the flat.

The walls had just been painted, so it smelled new. The man at the door was polite. It was the third one they saw that day and they were tired of looking. Ask the landlord why he picked that tenant over the other two, and it is much the same: a quick reply on the phone, a familiar surname, a good feeling across the doorway.

Both sides walk away certain they chose. In a sense they did. But a lot of the choosing was done by fresh paint and a long afternoon.

This is one of the largest decisions most families make, made over and over across every city in the region, and it still runs on hunches and small signals that predict almost nothing. Where the light falls at four o'clock. Whether the agent remembered a name. Who answered first.

Everything that has changed so far has made the search wider, not wiser. More listings, more photos, more people seeing each one. That helps someone find a flat. It does little to help them find the right one, or to help an owner find the tenant who will still be there, happy, in five years.

There is a lot of talk now that new software will do the matching for us. Perhaps some of it will. But no tool can fix a match when neither side has worked out what it is matching for.

The waste in these markets is not a shortage of options or of reach. It is that people on both sides choose by whatever is in front of them on the day, and call it judgement. The useful work starts earlier, with knowing what you actually want, why you want it, and what has tended to go well.