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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months. Of the 50 largest metro area housing markets, 21 major metros now have more homes for sale than at the same point in 2019. Last year, that count was 13 markets. These are the 21 major markets where homebuyers have gained the most leverage: Memphis, TN; Austin, TX; Phoenix, AZ; Tucson, AZ; Denver, CO; San Antonio, TX; Orlando, FL; Nashville, TN; Tampa, FL; Oklahoma City, OK; Dallas, TX; Charlotte, NC; Seattle, WA; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Las Vegas, NV; Raleigh, NC; Birmingham, AL; Miami, FL; San Francisco, CA; and Portland, OR. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained the most leverage, are located in the Southeast, Southwest, and Mountain West regions. Many of those areas were home to many of the nations top pandemic boomtowns, which experienced significant home price growth during the Pandemic Housing Boom, which stretched housing prices beyond local income levels. There are some markets within Florida that have struggled with some inventory balance issues,” D.R. Horton COO Michael Murray said on the company’s October 28 earnings call. “Notably, Jacksonville and Southwest Florida have had some excess inventory, and demand has been a while coming to absorb that. So that’s kind of what you’re seeing in the current quarter’s results in the Southeast for us.” window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Once pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt. When and where needed, builders are often willing to reduce prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are still available. In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic domestic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that migration pullback demand shockand fewer homebuilders doing large incentivesactive inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight, keeping the advantage in the hands of home sellers.
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While Im happy to extol the powers of the written word, sometimes you need a little something extra to get your point across. Im not just referring to pictures, either, but also to annotations, flowcharts, and freeform drawings. These illustrative tools can be a powerful way to convey your message, whether by themselves or on top of an existing image. Allow me to (*ahem*) illustrate exactly what I mean, using a free tool that might end up being the image-editing, markup-magic-creating supplement you never knew you needed. 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! The picture of productivity Next time you need to mark up an image or feel like rolling your own flowchart, remember this website: Excalidraw.com. Excalidraw is a web-based app that bills itself as a digital whiteboard, but it is actually much more than that. With Excalidraw, you can also import your own images and then insert arrows, boxes, lines, and textor create completely freeform drawingsall on top of them. Youll be ready to start drawing or annotating in just a few seconds. The site is free to use and doesnt require any logins. To start using Excalidraw, just pick one of the drawing tools at the top of the screen, then click and drag on the canvas to insert it. You can easily import any image into Excalidraw and then mark it up in all sorts of interesting ways. To add an image, either click the image icon orif youre using the site on a computer and the image is in your clipboardjust hit Ctrl+V or Cmd+V to paste it in. Use the Cursor tool to select items that you want to move or delete, and use the Hand tool to move around the canvas. Excalidraw lets you save works-in-progress as files on whatever device youre using. Once youre finished, you can copy the resulting image to your clipboard or export it as an image file. If youre an expert at editing photos on your phonethanks, perhaps, to my colleague JR Raphaels Android Photography Masterclassyou may wonder why youd need a separate app for annotating images. For one thing, Excalidraw works on any device, not just your phone or tablet. (Ive found it especially helpful when marking up screenshots for my own tech advice newsletters.) Excalidraw also supports illustrations without an image, so you can build a flowchart from scratch or doodle away on an infinite canvas. Lastly, Excalidraw has more powerful annotation features than your phones photo markup mode, with additional drawing tools and a Layers feature for moving elements to the foreground or background. Excalidraw’s annotation options are especially exceptional. Some extra tips to keep in mind when using Excalidraw (some of which will only make sense if youre using a device with a mouse or keyboard): Right-clicking on the canvas reveals some useful options, including a grid mode and a Zen mode that hides the toolbar. Right-clicking individual items is helpful as well, allowing you to duplicate, flip, or move items forward or backward in the scene. While drawing lines or arrows, you can connect them to the edges of a shape, and theyll stay connected even if you move the shape later. Use Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to quickly undo edits. If you ever want to start from scratch, click the menu button in the top-left corner, then select Reset the canvas. (But consider saving your work first.) To save your creation as an image file, click the menu button and select Export. Youll see a preview of what your image will look like along with some extra options. (Of note: Embed scene includes some data in the image file to allow for future editing in Excalidraw.) You can then save the file (as a PNG or .SVG) or copy it to your clipboard for easy sharing elsewhere. Excalidraw.com is entirely web based, though you can install it as a Progressive Web App if youd like. The site is free to use with no ads, including the ability to save project files to your local device and export images. An optional subscription for $6 per month lets you save files online and access extra features such as presentation mode and team management. Excalidraw requires no sign-in, doesnt ask for personal information, and advertises end-to-end encryption for drawings. 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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Frequent flyers and travel hackers who visited SeatGuru on October 31 were met with an unpleasant surprise: a shuttered website directing them to Tripadvisors homepage. After nearly a quarter-century in operation, the beloved website that helped fliers determine which seats to grab, and which to avoid, is gone. Heres why, and three SeatGuru alternatives to try now. What was SeatGuru? SeatGuru was a website highly regarded by frequent fliers. The site hosted seatmaps for thousands of airplanes and categorized every seat on each aircraft in order to help fliers figure out which to book and which to avoid. Good seats were those with qualities like the most legroom in their class, the deepest unobstructed recline, and amenities like power ports. Bad seats were those with limited recline, proximity to the toilets, or obstructed windows. Since airlines rarely made customers aware of the drawbacks of certain seats, and priced them similarly to preferable ones, there was always some risk involved when selecting your seat while booking. SeatGuru took that uncertainty away. By visiting the site, you could pull up the exact make and model of your airplane for a selected flight and click any seat to see whether it’s good, bad, or something in between. You could then use the data SeatGuru provided to choose the seat that works best for you. SeatGuru was founded in 2001 and was one of those websites that exemplified the promise of the early internet: that newly accessible data could help improve our lives in many small ways. In SeatGurus case, it meant frequent travelers could make more informed choices about which seats to select. SeatGuru became so popular that in 2007, travel website king Tripadvisor acquired it. But now, 18 years after the acquisition, and 24 years after its founding, SeatGuru is no more. What happened to SeatGuru? While once a reliable repository of seat data, SeatGuru began to take a turn for the worse when the Covid pandemic started. Around 2020, SeatGuru stopped producing content for its blog, delisted its smartphone apps from app stores, and fell behind in publishing the latest seat map data, leading the site’s data to become increasingly unreliable. Still, even until this year, provided the configuration of any planes seat did not change, SeatGuru remained a valuable resource for frequent travelers hoping to find the best seats on their flight. But then, on October 31, with no notice and no fanfare, Tripadvisor pulled the plug on SeatGuru. Now, visitors to the site are redirected to Tripadvisors homepage. As for why, a Tripadvisor spokesperson told me that the companys pivot to AI initiatives was a driving factor in SeatGurus decline. Tripadvisor has been evolving its business for its next era of growth, one that is centered on experiences and powered by AI, the spokesperson told me. We’ve been focusing strictly on optimizing our legacy offerings, and deprioritizing areas of the business as we shift resources towards our marketplace growth opportunities. SeatGuru was one of the areas the company felt should be deprioritized. 3 SeatGuru alternatives to try SeatGuru may be joining many of its fellow useful websites from the early 2000s in the internet graveyard, but there are other ways to learn about a seat before you book it. The first is SeatMap.com. The site was launched in 2022 and was founded by AMD and Microsoft veteran Djois Franklin and Fred Finn. Finn has the distinction of holding two travel-related Guinness World Records: most airmiles flown by a passenger and the person who has flown the most flights on the Concorde. SeatMap hosts seat maps for planes operated by more than 750 airlines worldwide and categorizes each seat by color, based on comfort and amenities. In an email, SeatMap CEO Djois Franklin told me that the site was seeing a sharp uptick in traffic across the globe after SeatGuru shut down. To use SeatMap, just enter your flight information, and youll be presented with an interactive diagram of your flights seatmap. A second website SeatGuru fans should try is AeroLOPA. The site, founded in 2021, doesnt have the interactivity of SeatGuru or SeatMap.com (meaning you cant click on an individual seat to learn more about it), but you can look up specifc planes in the fleets of nearly 200 airlines to find detailed cabin maps showing the relative positions of all seats along with general information about any cabins seat widths, recline, legroom, and more. Finally, those wanting more social feedback about the best and worst seats should give SeatLink.com a look. The site lets you look up your specific flight, as SeatGuru did, and shows an interactive map detailing the amenities of each seat. SeatLink also lets users post comments about individual seats, enabling crowdsourced reviews and other socially aggregated data.
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E-Commerce
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