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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will rise 2% between November 2025 and November 2026. Heading into 2025, Zillow’s 12-month forecast for U.S. home prices was +2.6%. However, many housing markets across the country softened faster than expected, prompting Zillow to issue several downward revisions. By April 2025, Zillow had cut its 12-month national home price outlook to -1.7%. In the second half of this year, Zillow began upgrading its fo…

As always, many of this year’s best apps are ones you’ve probably never heard of. Sure, there are some big names on this list, particularly in the buzzy field of artificial intelligence, but the real standouts of 2025 innovated on a smaller scale. They give you better ways to take notes or remember things, write with just your voice, have fun snapping photos, or even indulge in some gaming classics. For this list, “apps” include desktop and mobile software, along with browser extensions and web tools. Some apps are entirely new, while others received transformative updates that make them worthy of a fresh look. Hopefully, you’ll discover something that quickly bec…

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the global workforce and rapidly expanding the expectations placed on today’s learners. The World Economic Forum predicts that technological advancements like AI, alongside economic and demographic factors, will lead to a net increase of 78 million global jobs this decade. Educational institutions now face a pivotal moment. They must evolve how students learn, how instructors teach, and how technology supports each step of that journey. For decades, the education sector adopted new technologies cautiously. However, the profound impact of AI on the workforce has accelerated interest and experimentation. Our latest research at Cengag…

2026 will be a good year for people who love to walk where cars once drove. As climate change accelerates—and cities continue to grapple with congestion and air pollution—urban priorities have been shifting. In May this year, Parisians voted to close 500 streets to traffic across all 20 arrondissements. London is moving forward with plans to pedestrianize sections of the world-famous Oxford Street, as well as Regent Street, and Piccadilly Circus. Meanwhile, Barcelona’s centuries-old promenade, La Rambla, is in the last stretches of a long-term redesign that will be completed in 2027, widening the pedestrian promenade and limiting access to residents’ vehicles and publ…

If 2025 was the year purpose went quiet, 2026 is when the fork in the road will become impossible to ignore. Insights from the Purpose Collaborative, a 40-member network of impact-driven companies, predict what the year ahead will mean for responsible businesses. On one path, companies move purpose from statements and discrete programs into the structure of the business: strategy, governance, KPIs, products, data, and even AI. On the other path, purpose gets quietly defunded, depoliticized, or pushed so far into the background that only a handful of insiders can see it. Both routes have real implications for long-term business success. “For companies that can inte…

A new year has brought a new pay rate for more than 8.3 million Americans. The minimum wage is going up in 19 states this week, with workers in Hawaii earning as much as $2 more an hour. Collectively, these pay increases will boost paychecks by a total of $5 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour hasn’t budged in nearly two decades, and still applies in eight states, many states and cities have steadily been increasing their minimum wages to well over double that amount. Seattle’s minimum wage, at $21.30 per hour, is now nearly triple that federal threshold. As is the case with Seattle, 47 cities …

On December 1, podcaster and venture capitalist Harry Stebbings posted on LinkedIn that candidates were 200 times more likely to get into Harvard University than they were to get a job at the $6.6 billion valuation AI startup ElevenLabs. According to his statistic, out of 180,000 applicants in the first half of the year, only 0.018% were hired by the AI voice agent platform. That figure—extrapolated from a July spike in applications—may have been hyperbole. But it still went viral. And out of tens of thousands of applications, just 132 candidates eventually got the job at ElevenLabs—indeed, much lower than Harvard’s 3% to 4% admission rates. “On average, we’re se…