This company will turn your garage into an apartment for free—and help you rent it out

In Los Angeles, rising rents are forcing people to leave the city and exacerbating the area’s homelessness crisis. The county needs more than half a million new units of affordable housing to meet demand. A new startup, called United Dwelling, wants to take advantage of the county’s 250,000 underused two-car garages (and its hundreds of thousands of backyards) to tackle the problem—making a deal with homeowners to build a new apartment on their property for free, managing rentals, and then split…

Why you won’t own a home the way your parents do

When thinking about venture investable opportunities, it comes as no surprise that housing and residential real estate are particularly interesting for us at OMERS Ventures. The sum total value of all the houses in America was valued at $33.3 trillion in 2018, representing a 49% increase from 2012.[i] There are 139 million[ii] housing units in the US and six million were purchased in 2018 (11% newly built).[iii] The median home price in October 2019 was $270,900, up 6.2% compared to October 2018…

WeWork in Talks to Sell Unit for a Lot Less Than It Paid 8 Months Ago

WeWork, seeking to cut costs and unload assets, is in discussions to sell one of its business units for less than a quarter of the price it paid eight months ago, according to people familiar with the talks. A group of investors and technology executives are negotiating a purchase of the Managed by Q unit from WeWork that would value the software business at less than $55 million, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. Dan Teran, a founder of Ma…

Convene Expands Partnership with Sterling Bay to Three Chicago Properties

Workplace services company Convene reports that it has entered a managed service agreement with Sterling Bay for 22,000 square feet at the One Two Pru office complex in the South Loop here. The deal expands the Convene-Sterling Bay workplace services partnership to three Chicago properties. Under the terms of the deal, Convene will manage the building’s meeting and amenity experience on the 11th floor of the 2.3-million-square-foot development, including meeting and event space, a tenant lounge,…

Google, Amazon, and Apple join forces to develop IP-based smart home connectivity standard

Google, Amazon, Apple, and other technology companies have teamed up to develop a smart home connectivity standard that makes it easier for software and devices to play ball across the smart home ecosystem. Connected Home Over IP, as the new working group is called, will be spearheaded by the Zigbee Alliance, a group of companies that develop and maintain the ZigBee standard, which enables close-proximity devices (e.g., light switches, smart speakers, locks) to talk to each other in the home.

AT&T’s 5G network goes live in 10 cities

AT&T announced last week its 5G network has gone live in 10 U.S. cities. The network is available for users in Birmingham, AL; Indianapolis; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Pittsburgh; Providence, RI; Rochester, NY; San Diego; San Francisco; and San Jose, CA. Customers can only use the network if they have a Samsung Galaxy Note10+ 5G smartphone and have either AT&T’s Unlimited Extra or Unlimited Elite plans. The 5G network is in the low-band spectrum, which has slower speeds than millimeter wave…

Three Year Old Roofstock Tops $2 Billion in Real Estate Transactions

Roofstock, an online marketplace where you can invest in single-family rental homes, has topped $2 billion in transactions. The three-year-old platform topped $1 billion in January 2018. In July, Roofstock said it had surpassed $1.6 billion thus investing velocity is increasing. In a release, Roofstock states that the supply of investment opportunities is increasing – by 10X since 2018. Sellers can benefit by moving their property 77% faster than more traditional channels, according to the Propt…

AI experts urge machine learning researchers to tackle climate change

At the Tackling Climate Change workshop at this year’s NeurIPS conference, some of the top minds in machine learning came together to discuss the effects of climate change on life on Earth, how AI can tackle the urgent problem, and why and how the machine learning community should join the fight. The panel included Yoshua Bengio, MILA director and University of Montreal professor; Jeff Dean, Google’s AI chief; Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and founder of Landing.ai; and Cornell University…

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Travis Kalanick Is Exiting His Uber Holdings Uber Quickly

Forget Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Travis Kalanick is having the sale of the century. The Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder unloaded $350 million more of stock this month, bringing his proceeds to more than $2.1 billion since a share lockup ended Nov. 6. The 43-year-old’s remaining stake in the ride-hailing company now constitutes about a fifth of his $3 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, down from about 75% before the lockup….