Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.” Unlike housing demand, housing stock isn’t as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up. As a result, the heightened demand drained the market of active inventory and caused home prices to overheat, with U.S. home prices in June 2022 sitting at a staggering 43.2% above March 2020 levels. …

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,” he says, and filled with 400 trees. Other streets will allow cars, but prioritize large swaths of green space. The design gives residents public space, and doubles as climate i…

Your four-year-old needs a bike. The cheap ones from a big box store will work, sure—but they’ll be heavy, clunky, and harder for them to learn on. The premium Woom bike weighs half as much—but it costs $400. You want the best for your kid, but do you want to drop that much for something they’ll use for a few months? With a bit of internet sleuthing, you might come across an alternative. There’s a 50,000-person Facebook group devoted entirely to buying, selling, and trading used Woom bikes across the United States. And the brand noticed this group bubbling up. But Facebook Marketplace has limitations—transactions aren’t always secure, and buyers can’t easily searc…

Elon Musk’s loss in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, decided on Monday by a jury and upheld by a judge, wasn’t the only damaging revelation to emerge from the California courtroom. The two-week trial also punctured the carefully managed public images of some of the most prominent figures shaping AI for hundreds of millions of people. Whether it was Musk’s combative texts to Altman threatening to make “[Altman and Brockman] the most hated men in America” if OpenAI refused to settle, co-defendant Greg Brockman’s painfully earnest diary entries about becoming a billionaire (“Financially, what will take me to $1B?”), or Mira Murati’s anxious messages to Microsof…

In a major salvo in the AI race, Google announced on Tuesday a slew of new and updated products at its I/O developer conference. These ranged from tools that deploy personal AI agents to code generators to search tools to a new “world model” for generating physically accurate video. Taken together, the releases paint a picture of Google’s current strategy for bringing AI to consumers and businesses. It’s a strategy that effectively leverages the company’s vast information infrastructure, built up through search, in ways that give it clear advantages over newer AI companies. New models Google DeepMind’s newest models are bigger and smarter, deeply multimodal, an…

Across job listing sites over the past few months, you might have noticed something curious. Alongside traditional titles like “designer,” “engineer,” and “product manager,” a new crop of roles is appearing. They have names like “designer engineer,” “builder,” or “design crafter,” and they represent a tipping point in the design industry that’s just beginning to play out. That tipping point is captured in the second annual AI in Design report, published by the investor firm Designer Fund and the venture capital firm Foundation Capital. This year’s report draws on a survey of over 900 designers across 60+ countries, including partners like Stripe, Framer, Linear, Noti…

The release of Google’s latest AI models this week at Google I/O was yet another example of the direction of travel for the generative AI revolution. Facing a user base that is increasingly burning more tokens under basic subscriptions or API access, AI companies are starting to hike prices and throttle usage. In response to those cost pressures, consumers are beginning to cut their cloth accordingly. And while frontier AI providers are releasing ever more powerful models into the world, smaller companies are advancing, too. Often based in China, these are frequently accused of copying the innovations of U.S. models through techniques like distillation, or reverse eng…

Airport lounges have spent decades promising travelers the same thing: a quieter place to sit and wait. But a new concept opening next week inside Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport is betting that modern travelers, especially millennials who grew up gaming, want something far more immersive for their layover. Portal Lounge, a new tech-forward independent lounge concept from Gameway founders Jordan and Emma Walbridge, officially opens at MSP on May 28. The lounge combines gaming, chef-driven food and drinks, immersive design, and interactive technology in an attempt to reimagine what travelers actually want from airport downtime. The opening represents a…

Energy costs are increasing, and while it may cost a lot more than before to heat or cool a home, they’re basically peanuts compared to operating a hockey arena. That’s why the National Hockey League is bringing in a building automation heavyweight to help. This week, the NHL announced a new partnership with Honeywell aimed at increasing the efficiency of hockey facilities around the country in an attempt to lower operating costs. The multi-year partnership makes Honeywell—a massive company that provides products and services to many different industries—the “Official Building Automation and Energy Management Partner of the NHL.” The primary issue the partnership …