Algorithmic home buying companies (or iBuyers) have now started to expand into Los Angeles. If you recall, most of these companies started in smaller markets where the homes are more homogenous, relatively inexpensive, and generally less liquid. Places like Phoenix. By tackling the second largest… Read More
The Wall Street Journal estimates that, from now until about 2037, roughly 21 million homes in the United States will be vacated by seniors. To put this number into perspective, it’s about 25% of the US for-sale housing stock and more than double the amount… Read More
Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the United States. It has a city proper population of about 1.6 million people and a metro area population of close to 5 million. It is also one of the fastest growing cities in the US. But being… Read More
Inc. Magazine just did a profile on Opendoor, which is a company that we have, of course, talked a lot about on this blog and that I continue to follow closely. It’s interesting to read about some of the challenges that they’ve been having as… Read More
I have been writing about algorithmic home buying on the blog since Opendoor launched back in 2014. I don’t have anything new to report on that today, but this recent article from the WSJ is interesting in that it talks about why Phoenix, in particular,… Read More
Bloomberg recently published a good summary of Zillow’s business and their move into algorithm home buying and flipping. (They are trying to avoid the “flipping” moniker because of the negative connotations associated with it.) Zillow started buying homes directly from owners last spring. They charge… Read More
The Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University recently published this overview of the “socioeconomic factors affecting demand for housing in Chicago.” Here is the change in population in the City of Chicago from 1950 to 2016: And here is a comparison between Chicago and… Read More
The Economist recently argued that Silicon Valley’s innovation hegemony is waning and that it is a product of two factors: there appears to be more innovation happening elsewhere (good news), but that innovation in general also seems to be harder to achieve (bad news). Here… Read More
This is an interesting piece by Bloomberg summarizing the current state of autonomous vehicles and in particular the (supposed) dominance of Waymo (Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle arm). Many believe they will be the first real entrant into the market. The company is currently running an “Early… Read More
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released it’s 2016 city and town population estimates. The press release can be found here. The headline isn’t a new one. Southern cities continue to grow quickly. This is not a new trend. Humans seem to like warm weather and… Read More
