I’m not sure about the temperatures where you are, but here in Baltimore, it’s cold, really cold. On the bright side, I notice that the sun is coming up a little earlier and it’s setting a little later. Typically I hate January, and if you’d asked me each day this month if that was true I would have said yes, but when I look back on what the month provided, I have to say it was a pretty damn good month. I got a fancy new washer and dryer that hold ginormous amounts of laundry and my kids love that there’s an app for it so they’re doing their own laundry. I prepped and sent my tax documents to our accountant, filmed my very first IBS presentation, produced our first ever home builder website and marketing benchmarks in which I don’t use an outside source for comparison, and hiked more than 20 miles of trails in Patapsco State Park with my husband. Not to mention that more than half of my 8 parents/ in-laws have received the first dose of the vaccine.
HOUSING
Speaking of Covid, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but it’s had a rather sizable impact on home buying. 15% of people indicated that they were going to buy a home in the next 12 months last quarter. That’s a rise of more than 4% over the 4th quarter of 2019. Increases in intent were present across all age groups, the biggest increase though was from millennials who are really coming into their own when it comes to purchasing a home.
CLUBHOUSE
The new kid on the social media block is Clubhouse. I’ve been seeing friends, especially real estate agents, talking about using the app and I was curious about it so earlier this week when Dennis offered up an invite on our office chat, I took him up on it, if only to secure my @mollywhite username. Mission accomplished on that front, but I’ll be honest, I’m still not totally sure how I’ll use it in the day to day. That’s why I’m including this link for a how-to guide, in case anyone else is curious about the app. I have two invites to share, so if you’re interested, email me (I’ll need your cell phone number to text the invite to) and we can learn the app together. I do feel like there could be some interesting use cases for builders looking to share knowledge and be early adopters.
There was lots of talk this week about google’s answer to third party cookies, FLoC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. Essentially, they’re blending people together into cohorts that share similar interests, rather than having individual user data. The program they say is effective and they’re opening it up in the second quarter of 2021 for public testing. It remains to be seen, if this is actually effective, and there’s already been some pushback, but we shall see what the future holds as all of the ad platforms scramble to solve the data privacy problem.
There you have it for this week’s news. I’m signing off and am going to go wrap myself in several blankets to try and stay warm. Word on the street is that there’s a snow event coming on Sunday. Monday will bring the start of a new month. And Tuesday we’ll see if winter will end sooner rather than later. 🤞 that Punxsatawny Phil doesn’t see his shadow.
