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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Mortgage giant Rocket Companiesthe parent company of Rocket Mortgage, formerly known as Quicken Loansannounced on Monday it has entered into an agreement to buy Redfin in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.75 billion equity, or $12.50 per share. If completed, the move would integrate Redfins real estate search platform, which attracts nearly 50 million monthly visitors, with Rockets mortgage services. Redfin is known for its beautiful product but is also [a] data powerhouse in an AI-driven world100 million properties, 50 million engaged monthly users, thousands of the amazing real estate agents and 4 petabytes of data,” Rocket Companies CEO Varun Krishna wrote on LinkedIn on Monday. “Rocket has developed a platform that spans 40 years of mortgage expertise and a digital nationwide lending platform, across 3,000 counties and parishes. Redfin and Rocket are an amazing match for each other. According to the press release, there are four benefits Rocket Companies sees from the Redfin acquisition: First, it will introduce more consumers to the Rocket ecosystem. “Rocket Companies will benefit from Redfin’s nearly 50 million monthly visitors, 1 million active purchase and rental listings and staff of 2,200+ real estate agents across 42 states, the company writes. Secondly, it expects that will drive growth in the purchase of its mortgages. Third, the companies 14 petabytes of combined data will help drive its AI and personalization technology. “This data will strengthen Rocket’s AI models enabling easier and more personalized and automated consumer experiences,” Rocket writes. Lastly, the company expects to achieve “more than $200 million in run-rate synergies by 2027, including approximately $140 million in cost synergies from rationalization of duplicative operations and other costs.” And it expects “more than $60 million in revenue synergies from pairing the company’s financing clients with Redfin real estate agents, and from driving clients working with Redfin agents to Rocket’s mortgage, title, and servicing offerings.” In other words, Rocket Companies appears to be making a strategic move to expand its market share by integrating Redfins customer funnel with its mortgage business and build a powerhouse in residential real estate, creating a one-stop shop for homebuyers. While Rocket Mortgage increased its purchase loan market share by 8% from 2023 to 2024, it still pales in comparison to crosstown rival UWM [United Wholesale Mortgage],” Colin Robertson, the founder of The Truth About Mortgage, tells ResiClub. “Their tie-up with Redfin gives them the potential to capture 1 in 6 purchase loans going forward, which could see their market share quadruple from 4% to 16%+. The Rocket Companies’ proposed acquisition of Redfin comes during a prolonged housing transaction downturnmarked by a sharp drop in existing home sales and refinancingtriggered by the 2022 mortgage rate shock and strained affordability. The slump has led to industry upheaval, business failures, and a wave of mergers. While both of these firms have been affected by the slump, Redfin, in particular, has taken it on the chin. At its peak during the Pandemic Housing Boom, Rocket Companies had a $55.6 billion market capitalizationcompared to its $26.6 billion market capitalization at business close today. While at its peak during the Pandemic Housing Boom, Redfin had a $10 billion market capitalizationwell above its $1.2 billion market capitalization today. Since mortgage rates spiked in 2022, Redfin has faced a continuous wave of layoffs, with 1,362 layoffs in 2022, 201 in 2023, 82 in 2024, and nearly 500 already announced in 2025. Back in October 2022, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman told me that shuttering their iBuyer unit amid a then correcting market out West was causing Redfin to sell at big losses. Kelman explained it like this: Were sitting on $350 million worth of homes for sale that we bought with our own money, or worse bought with borrowed money. And what we always told investors is that we would protect our balance sheet by acting quickly. We dont have hope as a strategy. We immediately started marking down things When the shiitake mushrooms hit the fan, [investors] want to get out first. The way to do that is to figure out where the lowest sale is, and be 2% below that. And if it doesnt sell in the first weekend, move it down [again]. In November 2023, Kelman told me that things were still slumped for the business, adding that existing home sales were mostly dead as a doornail, so it couldn’t be worse. In August 2024, Kelman put Redfins situation bluntly, telling analysts that the Plan B if mortgage rates didn’t come down was to “drink our own urine or our competitors’ blood, stay in the foxhole.” Click here to view an interactive version of the chart below. When I took a look something like 50% of Homes.com’s traffic is paid,” Amanda Orson, CEO and founder of Galleon, tells ResiClub. “And that paid demo does not count their extraordinary ad spend on TV ads. It’s just not a sticky site. Redfin on the other hnd spends very little and generates an absolute truckload of organic traffic. For now. That advantage is not permanent, of course. I can’t think of another company for whom the acquisition of Redfin would get a better yield for its highest and best use than Rocket. Big picture: If the benefits of the Redfin acquisition come to fruition, it could not only cement Rocket Companies as the top player in the mortgage space (currently No. 2 by total dollar loan volume) but also further lay the groundwork for the company to pursue its broader real estate ambitionsand perhaps even challenge Zillow, which is working to build a housing Super App.
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E-Commerce
When the Eaton Fire burned through Altadena in January, Patricia Lopez-Gutierrez and her children had to flee from the house theyd been renting for a decade. Lopez-Gutierrez also lost work: Shes a housecleaner, and her clients lost their own homes in the fire. “I’ve been here for 18 years, and I really don’t want to leave this area,” she said through a translator. “My children and their schools are here. I’m trying to get more work so I don’t have to leave.” As she struggles to pay her billsincluding at her rental house, which ended up surviving the fire but was so heavily damaged by smoke that she’s desperate to find a new place to liveshe turned to St. Vincent de Paul, one of several local organizations providing direct assistance to fire victims. The nonprofit paid a utility bill for her in January, and then a car payment and dental bill this month. It was enough, for now, to make it possible for her to keep paying rent. The fire destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena, one of the more affordable corners of L.A. County. St. Vincent de Paul, working with a team of 18 volunteers, has helped around 150 families so far, prioritizing families with children and renters who lost their homes. In many casesparticularly for Hispanic residents who worked as housecleaners or gardenersresidents also lost their jobs. Others have minimum-wage jobs that make it difficult to afford to rent a new house or apartment. While St. Vincent de Paul covers bills directly (paying rent to a landlord, for example, or paying a doctor’s office), many other organizations are simply giving residents cash directly. Pasadena Community Foundation, a local foundation, has given grants through a wildfire fund to help support dozens of organizations doing that work. The Dena Care Collective, a new organization launched by End Poverty in California (EPIC) and FORWARD, has raised more than $1 million to help support families and businesses in the immediate aftermath of the fire with direct cash payments. “There is significant empirical data that highlights the efficacy of direct cash payments to families,” says Aja Brown, the former mayor of the city of Compton, who grew up in Altadena and is helping lead the Dena Care Collective along with former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs. “There’s also a wealth of data that substantiates [the fact that] bureaucracy and governmental systems are slow to react. And quite frankly, they aren’t designed for emergency relief. Getting cash in the hands of families is the most impactful and the most efficient way to help families; they innately understand what’s best for [their] aid and the relief based on their current conditions.” Cash is a critical tool for people living in poverty in ordinary times; in Stockton, a study of a program that gave a series of no-strings-attached checks to low-income residents found that people who got the payments were more likely to go from unemployment to full-time employment and take other steps for their future, like moving to a better apartment or fixing their car. In a disaster, quick access to cash is even more important to help people stay afloat. “In a disaster like this, of course people need cash, because water bottles aren’t wealth,” says Tubbs. “Clothing isn’t cash. People need money to be able to rebuild, to be able to move, to be able to persist.” GiveDirectly, an organization founded on the premise that sending money to the world’s poorest households can help them begin to overcome poverty, has raised more than $2 million for low-income households impacted by the L.A.-area fires. While getting some money from FEMA can sometimes take a month or two, the nonprofit is able to act more quickly. (FEMA gave eligible residents $770 to help cover immediate needs after the disaster, but getting any additional support took longerand $770 doesn’t go far in a city like L.A. Immigrants who don’t have legal status also can’t get help from FEMA.) Two weeks after the fires, the organization sent notifications to residents via a food stamp app inviting them to enroll for the cash payments, a process that takes roughly a minute. On average, the payments arrived three days later. The organization is giving transfers of $3,500, enough to cover two weeks at a lower-end Airbnb in the L.A. area, a month of food for a family of four, and a month of healthcare and transportation. Of course, the support is only a small and temporary part of the solution. As rents have steeply risen in and around L.A.something that was happening earlier and then exacerbated by the disasterpeople who were displaced are struggling to find places to live. Some renters are now doubled or tripled up with friends in tiny apartments. Homeowners who bought homes decades ago in Altadenaor inherited mortgage-free homes from parents or grandparents who paid little for themare often now finding that their insurance won’t cover the cost of rebuilding. Others lost coverage as insurers have dropped policies in areas at risk of fires. Even those who still have housing, like Lopez-Gutierrez, are dealing with new challenges. In her case, her landlord wants to raise her rent, even though he hasn’t repaired damage from the fire (and despite the fact that price gouging is illegal). She’s trying to find a new rental, but her low credit score is making that difficult. Even if bills are covered for a month or two, many families still don’t know what will come nextespecially since the rebuilding process will be slow. Before the fires, when St. Vincent de Paul helped pay unexpected bills for residents, the situation was different. “It’s the housecleaner whose son or daughter had to go to the emergency room and there was a $1,000 bill and they can’t afford rent,” says Dave de Csepel, an investor who helps lead the volunteer work at St. Vincent de Paul. “So we come in, pay that rent, and life goes onwe bridge them to get to the next month.” Now, he says, “This is a tidal wave that has hit this community. This is the beginning. It’s hard to see how all these families come out of this. We love the diversity of our community and we want to have folks stay in the area. But it’s hard to keep everyone together, and I’m afraid that there are a lot of hard times ahead for these families.”
Category:
E-Commerce
As protests against the Trump administration and in favor of Palestine continue to grow across the country, the U.S. State Department is reportedly planning to use tech to try and tamp down on dissent. This month, Axios reported that Marco Rubios “Catch and Revoke” plan to strip foreign nationals of the visas that allow them to remain in the country could be powered by AI analysis of their social media accounts. The mooted use of AI comes as former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil has become the face of the Trump administrations tougher line on protest, with Khalil currently detained and threatened with the revocation of his green card for his participation on on-campus protests. Using AI to try and analyze the contents of peoples social media posts for actions that the Trump administrationif notably not the law and rights set out under the countrys constitutional amendmentsdeems unacceptable is a risky move that runs the risk of creating huge false positives. And it worries privacy and AI experts in equal measure. For so many years, we have heard this very bad argument that we dont need to worry because we have democracy, says Carissa Véliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford. Precisely the point of privacy is to keep democracy. When you dont have privacy, the abuse of power is too tempting, and its just a matter of time for it to be abused. The risk Véliz and others worry about is that digital privacy is being eroded in favor of a witch hunt driven by a technology that people often have more faith in its accuracy than is truly deserved. Thats a concern too for Joanna Bryson, professor of ethics and technology at Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Disappearing political enemies, or indeed just random citizens, has been a means of repression for a long time, especially in the new world, she says. I dont need to point out the irony of Trump choosing a mechanism so similar to the South and Central American dictators in the countries he denigrates. Bryson also points out that there parallels with how Israel used AI to identify tens of thousands of Hamas targets, many of whom were then targeted for physical bombing attacks in Gaza by the Israeli military. The controversial program, nicknamed Lavender, has been questioned as a military use of AI that could throw up false positives and is unvetted. Unless the AI systems are transparent and audited, we have no way of knowing whether theres any justification for which 35,000 people were targeted, says Bryson. Without appropriate regulation and enforcement of AI and digital systemsincluding military ones, which incidentally even the EU is not presently doingwe cant tell whether there was any justification for the targets, or if they just chose enough people that any particular building they wanted to get rid of theyd have some justification for blowing it up. The use of AI is also something of a smokescreen, designed to deflect responsibility for serious decisions that those having to make them can claim are guided by supposedly “impartial” algorithms. This is the kind of thing Musk is trying to do now with DOGE, and already did with Twitter, says Bryson. Eliminating humans and reducing accountability. Well, obscuring accountability. And the problem is that when looking at AI classifications of social media content, accountability is important because its a case of when, not if, the technology misfires. The risks of hallucination and bias are big problems within AI systems. Hallucinations occur when AI systems make up answers to questions, or invents what could be seen as damning posts for users if their social media content is being parsed through artificial intelligence. Inherent bias in systems because of the way theyre designed, and by whom theyre created, is also a big factor in many errors in AI systems. In 2018, Amazon was forced to withdraw plans to perform a first pass at job applicants résumés because the system was found to be automatically rejecting all female candidates because of ways in which the AI had been set up and trained. Its bad enough for those errors to impact on whether or not someone gets invited to a job interview. But when it comes to potentially being detained and deported from the United Statesand risking not being allowed back into the country in the futureits a much more high-stakes situation.
Category:
E-Commerce
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