So it was announced today that Adam Neumann -- the cofounder and former CEO of WeWork -- has been quietly buying apartment buildings across the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, he is involved in entities that have acquired more than 4,000 apartment suites valued at least $1 billion.

The buildings, which seem to be fairly typical and have at least a few hundred doors, are located in cities like Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, Nashville, as well as in many other US cities. It's not clear what the exact plan is for this real estate but people who claim to know things are saying that it will involve "redefining the future of living", or something along these lines.

Presumably this means catering to young professionals with cool design, fun amenities, and beer taps. Whatever ends up happening, it is interesting to see some of the cities that he/they are targeting. They are the cities that we've all been talking about for many years. You know, the ones that are growing quickly and have greater housing supply elasticities.

The following video was published last week showing the "secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break." Said differently, the company used anonymized mobile phone data to see where spring breakers went after they left the beach. This was in order to better understand how they may have contributed to the spread of COVID-19. If you can't see the video below, click here.

The video is astonishing for two reasons. One, it shows you the extreme reach of just one beach in South Florida. Imagine if they had analyzed all of the beaches up and down the coast. And two, a lot of you are probably freaked out that this sort of mobile phone data is available to private companies. If you'd like to learn more about how this all works, check out this opinion piece from the New York Times.