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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In early October, a post on X by FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller caught my attention: Speaking with a home builder last night (Chattanooga, TN): High-demand in the low-end of the market (<$300k), as people are looking to upgrade from renting. Can't build enough. Almost no demand in middle market ($300k-700k), as it tends to be the upgrade market and the buyers— Craig Fuller (@FreightAlley) October 4, 2025 While Fullers narrative rings true in some pockets of the country, it isnt the case everywhere. The dynamics he describesstrong demand at the low end, softness in the middlereflect certain regional realities, but not necessarily whats unfolding across the broader Southeast housing market. According to my reporting and research, theres currently a lot of variation by price tier. Several Southeast homebuilders have told me theyve actually seen greater softening in the entry-level segment over the past yearthe very segment many builders have been chasing. Some rolled out smaller floor plans or trimmed square footage to entice priced-out homebuyers, but those efforts are now meeting slower demand. Meanwhile, the higher tiers have held up better. Part of that cooling stems from simple oversupply and stretched affordability. Builders across the Southeast ramped up production of smaller, sub-$350,000 homes in 2023 and early 2024. But elevated insurance premiums, rising property taxes, and household budget fatigue have since taken a toll, especially in Florida and parts of Georgia. This month, I launched the ResiClub Terminala new platform that includes analysis by home-price tier: lower-tier (5th to 35th percentile), middle-tier (35th to 65th percentile), and upper-tier (65th to 95th percentile) homes, all broken out by market. That tiered data confirms what Southeast builders are reporting: The lower end of the market has shown the greatest weakness over the past year across much of the region. Lower-tier home price year-over-year change Upper-tier home price year-over-year change Within the ResiClub Terminal, ResiClub PRO members can click on individual markets to see this data down to a local level. For example: Lower-tier home prices are down 7.5% year over year in DeKalb County, Georgia. Upper-tier home prices are down 0.9% year over year in DeKalb County, Georgia. When you zoom out and look at this on a nationally aggregated basis, the upper-tier, middle-tier, and lower-tier stats are all pretty close. Upper tier: -0.1% Middle tier: +0.2% Lower tier: +0.6% The fact that current housing market dynamics by price tier are nearly identical on a ntionally aggregated basisdespite significant underlying variationis a reminder that its important for housing stakeholders to have accurate, localized information.
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I like chatting with my friendswho doesnt?but I dont always know where to find them. There are simply too many apps. Some of my friends text, others use WhatsApp, while others yet insist on using Discord or the DM feature in whatever random social network they prefer. Its a mess, and it can mean keeping several tabs open all day just to keep the conversations flowing. It makes you wish some application could combine all of your conversations into one place. This is a dream that used to be reality. Applications like Trillian, Pidgin, and Adium all combined instant messaging services like AIM, MSN, and ICQ in one handy interface. Over time, though, messaging services got more protective of their APIs, and these sorts of all-in-one portals slowly stopped working. The dream, it seems, is dead. Or is it? This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Messaging, minus the mess Time to meetor maybe just rememberan exceptional app that takes all of your messages and puts them in a single streamlined interface for easy, ongoing access. The app is called Beeper. It can connect to all the major messaging platforms: Google Messages, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Signal, LinkedIn, X, Discord, and Slack. Its one application for all of your conversations no matter where they might be happening. Installing Beeper is quicka minute or two, tops, but adding in all of your messaging services could take longer, depending on how many different things youre connecting. Now, if Beeper rings a bell, theres probably a reason. You may recall a controversy around Beeper a few years back involving Apple. The application was initially launched as a way for Android users to send blue bubble messages to Apple usersa feature Apple then worked diligently to shut down. (These days, Beeper can connect to iMessage only via its desktop Mac version.) In the time since then, the programs been acquired by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress and Tumblr, and given both new resources and a new reason for existing. If you have an Android phone, you can use it to manage your text messages alongside messages from other applications (something that, as an iPhone user myself, makes switching to Android a tempting option). And no matter what type of phone youre using, combining several little-used messaging apps into one that you keep openon your phone and/or computeris in and of itself worthwhile. I hardly ever open LinkedIn or Facebook, for instance, and yet I never miss any messages on either platform with Beeper in the mix. Beeper unites all your chat apps and makes them feel like a single streamlined communication system. Ive personally been using Beeper for years, and I love that it creates a single inbox for all of my ongoing conversations across any applications. Before this tool, I would constantly see a notification, intend to respond, and then never get around to it because the message came in via an application I dont check often. That doesnt happen anymore. I honestly believe Beeper makes me better at keeping in touch. I also like that you can archive messages, allowing you to create a sort of inbox zero for text messages. If I see something I intend to respond to later, I simply leave it un-archived in my inboxthe same as I do with emailsthen power through my messages whenever I have a minute. There are a bunch of other nice features beyond that. On the desktop computer front, Beepers keyboard shortcutsincluding a built-in command barmean I can jump between conversations without ever touching my mouse. I could go on, but you get the idea. Beeper is just a well-put-together piece of software that solves a common problem. It takes a little bit of fidgeting to get going at first, but the results are 100% worth it. Beeper runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, ChromeOS, macOS, Windows, and Linuxso basically, everything. The service offers a free version that supports up to five accounts on different messaging services, which is probably plenty for most people. If you need to connect to more than that, youll have to spring for a paid subscription, starting at $10 a month (or $100 a year). Many of Beepers integrations run in the cloud, meaning an encrypted copy of your messages does get stored by the company. The privacy policy is pretty solid, though, and there are no ads or data monetization built into the application. Its funded entirely by subscribers. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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I was thrilled this week when Apple issued a press release announcing that its original film, F1 The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, would make its streaming debut on the companys video service December 12. But it wasnt the news about the movie that excited me. Rather, it was a small line at the end of the press release that quietly announced something else: Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. The + branding on Apple TV+ always bugged me. Whenever I looked at it, I thought, Apple TV plus what? Apple News offers a free base version and a paid version that gets you more content, called Apple News+, which makes sense. But theres never been a free version of Apples video streaming service, so what was the + signifying? The + branding had also grown increasingly tiresome over the years, as nearly every streaming service added the mathematical operator onto its name. Mercifully, Apple has now decided to subtract the plus. Heres the why, and how the company could go further toward to ending brandings most tiresome scourge. The company didnt invent the +, but it embraced it like no other Until this week, Apple had been leaning hard into the + branding for yearsnearly as hard as it did to the much more iconic i branding in the early 2000s. Apple debuted its first + branding all the way back in October 2011 with its AppleCare+ extended warranty program, which covered accidental damage to a users iPhone. It used an alphabetic version of the nomenclature with the iPhone 6 Plus model in 2014. But it wasnt until 2019 that Apple began to go hog wild on +. That year, Apple debuted the Apple News+ news subscription service and the Apple TV+ video streaming service. A year later, in 2020, Apple debuted the Apple Fitness+ workout streaming service, and a year after that, the company added its latest + service, iCloud+. Yet Apple wasnt the first tech or media company to tack + onto a product. The earliest I can remember is NBC Universals and News Corps Hulu Plus back in 2010, and then, several months before Apple debuted AppleCare+ in 2011, Google came out with its now-defunct social network Google+. The next major company to embrace the “+” was Disney, with ESPN+ in 2018. However, the + really went viral in the final months of 2019. In September of that year, BET launched BET+. Two months later, Apple TV+ and the streaming giant Disney+ arrived. In the years that followed, we got more: Discovery+, Paramount+, AMC+, the short-lived CNN+, and more. But it was Apple, with its no fewer than five + products, that was the clear cross-bearersorry, plus-bearerfor the techno-media industries. Apple explains why it killed off the Apple TV + Apples announcement to drop the + from Apple TV+ this week came out of the blue. However, shortly after the abrupt name change, the company explained its reasoning. In an appearance on The Town podcast (via 9to5Mac), Apples senior vice president of Services, Eddy Cue, who oversees products including Apple Music, Apple News, and the newly named Apple TV, spoke about the subtraction of the +. Cue revealed that the company originally named its streaming service “Apple TV+” simply because Apple had used the “+” mark in its other subscription services, such as Apple News+ and iCloud+. “But we do that when we have a free service and then theres a paid version,” Cue acknowledged, noting the distinction between Apple TV and the company’s other paid services. “We stayed consistent because of it,” Cue continued, admitting, “but we all called it Apple TV, and we said, given where we are today [with the service’s brand awareness], its a great time to [ditch the “+”], so lets just do it. Apple shows no signs of entirely abandoning the + My colleague, Grace Snelling, spoke to several branding experts the wake of the Apple TV service rebrand. They all seem to agree that Apple made the right move in dropping the +. As Snelling noted, in the early days of the streaming wars that began in 2019, the “+” addendum attached to a name served as an easy identifier, indicating that the product being sold was a streaming service. However, now that the symbol has become ubiquitous, it has lost some of its branding power. As Cue pointed out, the Apple TV streaming service brand is now strong enough that the “+” is no longer needed. Yet while Apple has now subtracted the + from Apple TV, the company remains firmly on the + side of the equation. Four of its products still carry the mathematical moniker: Apple News+, iCloud+, Apple Fitness+, and AppleCare+. Here, the + makes more sense than it ever did on Apple TV, since it signifies additional features. Cue’s comments suggest that Apple has no intention of eliminating the “+” from the rest of this product lineup. Still, it’s worth noting that the removal of “+” from Apple TV’s name isnt the first time in 2025 that Apple has eliminated the symbol from one of its products. In September, Apple replaced the iPhone Plus model in its smartphone lineup with the new iPhone Air.
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