By 2030, AI is predicted to add +$15 trillion to the global GDP thanks largely to solving data issues according to PwC. Lending money used to be a tricky business but time consumers and technology is changing. Banks and other industries are struggling to cope with the changing consumer demand, but a few are getting it right.
Continue reading… “How AI is really going to change real estate in 2020 and beyond”
Baby Boomer home sales will flood the housing market: Report
Baby Boomers’ homes will be sold on a large scale over the next 20 years, but with millennials refraining from home ownership, who will be buying them?
The U.S. housing market is on the verge of being inundated with homes for sale on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the housing bubble in the mid-2000s.
The tsunami is being driven by a grim reality: Baby Boomers dying.
Continue reading… “Boomer homes to flood US market, but who will buy them?”
Risk is potential for flood of sales during any property slump. Xi has said homes are for living in, not for speculation.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mantra that homes should be for living in is falling on deaf ears, with tens of millions of apartments and houses standing empty across the country.
Soon-to-be-published research will show roughly 22 percent of China’s urban housing stock is unoccupied, according to Professor Gan Li, who runs the main nationwide study. That adds up to more than 50 million empty homes, he said.
The nightmare scenario for policy makers is that owners of unoccupied dwellings rush to sell if cracks start appearing in the property market, causing prices to spiral. The latest data, from a survey in 2017, also suggests Beijing’s efforts to curb property speculation — considered by leaders a key threat to financial and social stability — are coming up short.
Continue reading… “A fifth of China’s homes are empty. That’s 50 million apartments”
Eric Wu, founder and chief executive of Opendoor, a startup company that flips homes, at its San Francisco headquarters.
Many venture capitalists have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity for tech startups because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient.
SAN FRANCISCO — Opendoor, a startup that flips homes, attracted attention in June when it announced it had raised $325 million from a long list of venture capitalists. The financing valued the 4-year-old company at more than $2 billion.
Continue reading… “The next industry to be disrupted by technology: real estate”
Technology has forever changed how Americans shop for homes. Thanks to sites like Zillow, Trulia and the dozens of others like them, buyers can now brown se listings, find homes and narrow their search all on their own—without ever calling in an agent.
And with online mortgage lenders cropping up left and right, they can even take it a step further, getting pre-qualified for a loan long before they’ve honed in on that dream home.
But though tech has allowed homebuyers to do all this legwork themselves, in most cases, they’re still forced to go through agents to finalize the transaction. And those agents? They get the same 3% commission they did decades ago—for seemingly doing a fraction of the work.
Continue reading… “Are real estate agents still relevant in the age of tech?”
Born during the aftermath of the financial meltdown a decade ago, a publicly-traded real estate brokerage called eXp Realty is establishing itself as one of the brightest rising companies in its industry—and one of the most creative users of digital technology today.
By several measures, the company is experiencing a moment of true exponential growth.
Since last October, eXp Realty’s stock price has surged more than 300 percent, and this year the company announced they had doubled their number of real estate agents in just seven months. At the beginning of the year, they had roughly 6,500 brokers, but today they have over 12,000 operating in more than 300 markets across the US and Canada. This pace of growth is unprecedented for a single national brokerage and almost unthinkable for a real estate company not structured as a collection of local franchises.
Continue reading… “Inside a $1 Billion real estate company operating entirely in VR”
From personalized wellness programs to fitness-focused apps, luxury homes are focusing on making residents feel better
It’s the non-stop pace of our digital lives. An increasingly isolated and aging population. Rising chronic illness. Climate change. Given the pressures of the modern world, a gym membership and taking the occasional “mental health day” often just aren’t enough to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
One way to achieve optimum wellness, experts and developers say, is by choosing a home that is designed for it.
A new study suggests that you should probably count the number of trees on the block, the next time you are hunting for a house or apartment. Continue reading… “Feeling 7 years younger and $10,000 richer by living near a lot of trees?”
According to a new research paper, America’s sprawl cost somewhere in the range of a trillion dollars every year. Continue reading… “Bad urban design cost $1 trillion a year”
San Francisco’s real estate market is insane and here’s definitive proof. Mortgage research site HSH.com has estimated how much salary you need to earn to afford the principal, interest, taxes and insurance payments on a median-priced home in 27 metro areas. Continue reading… “How much you need to earn to buy a home in 27 U.S. cities”
Condominiums have been the easiest way to get a foothold into the housing market for many first-time homebuyers, a pit stop on the way to a dream home.
Continue reading… “Price gap between homes and condos at record level”
So far real estate brokers have done very well in the Internet era.
Last month, around 18,000 people gathered in New Orleans to look at the future of real estate brokerage. Inside the massive Ernest N. Morial Convention Center booth after booth at the 2014 Realtors Conference & Expo extolled the joys and efficiencies of the new electronic economy and the technologies which can make brokers and lenders more efficient and profitable.
Continue reading… “Is the realtor an endangered species?”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.