Curated daily by our industry experts. Stay informed on how tech is shaping the real estate industry with these important headlines.
THE REAL DEAL
Demand for instant home-buying has started to pay dividends for Redfin. The Seattle-based discount brokerage said second-quarter revenue rose 39 percent to $198 million, beating expectations. The company’s net loss widened to $12.6 million, compared to $3.2 million, thanks to a bump in marketing expenses as it poured money into national ads touting a slew of new ventures, including instant home-buying.
BLOOMBERG
In 2017, shortly after becoming a venture capitalist, Jess Lee attended a startup conference in Los Angeles. Her badge identified her employer as Sequoia Capital, an Apple Inc. and Google backer that was gearing up to raise more than $12 billion in several new funds. Under most circumstances, that’d be enough to get a VC mobbed, but the crowd largely ignored Lee, the first female investing partner at Silicon Valley’s most prestigious firm. “No one was even looking at my name tag,” she recalls. I…
ALTUS GROUP
Altus Group Limited (“Altus Group”) (TSX: AIF), a leading provider of software, data solutions and independent advisory services to the global commercial real estate (“CRE”) industry, announces the launch of cloud-enabled version 12 of ARGUS Enterprise (“AE”). AE 12 is the latest version of the industry leading global asset and portfolio management platform used by thousands of customers around the world.
VENTUREBEAT
It’s a miracle most enterprises manage to find anything in their labyrinthine storage setups. Companies increasingly tap a mix of public and private clouds that don’t always play nicely together, and the jargony nature of their employees’ search queries make them tougher to parse than, say, web searches. Fortunately, IBM’s recent work in natural language processing promises to address those and other search challenges in the corporate domain. In four papers scheduled to be presented at the An…
BISNOW
Coworking giant WeWork is planning to acquire SpaceIQ, a company focused on analytics software that makes more efficient use of office space. The deal is The We Company’s latest move into PropTech as it prepares for its initial public offering as soon as September. The acquisition is characteristic of WeWork, which has bought nine other companies since the first quarter of 2018, most of them with tech specializations. The deals diversify WeWork’s tech capabilities, but as an IPO approaches, t…
SKIFT
Vacasa, the vacation rental management service, will buy Wyndham Vacation Rentalsfrom Wyndham Destinations, the companies said Tuesday. Vacasa will pay $45 million in cash at closing and will give Wyndham Destinations up to $30 million of equity interest in the newly formed company. Vacasa will pay the remaining balance in either seller financing or cash, for a total of $162 million in value. The deal is a milestone for the Portland, Oregon-based Vacasa and its founder and CEO Eric Breon. …
CONNECT
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” goes the unofficial slogan of this gaming hub in the desert. To which the team behind Bleutech Park Properties might reply, “Not if we can help it.” The $7.5-billion Bleutech Park Las Vegas is slated to break ground in the Las Vegas Valley in December of this year, creating a mini-city that the project’s backers promise will “bring life to new technologies and alter the future of construction design. Smart buildings equipped with new, self-healing, ener…
THE REAL DEAL
Just a few days after abruptly closing its doors, co-living start-up Bedly has inked an agreement for another company to take over some of its sublease agreements. Brooklyn-based Outpost Club will take over some of Bedly’s lease agreements at its Manhattan and New Jersey properties, the companies announced on Thursday. Bedly founder Martin Greenberg indicated that similar second deal at its other properties will be announced soon. The value of the agreement was not made public.
BLOOMBERG
Jon McNeill, who was hired last year to run Lyft Inc.’s operations, is leaving the company. The founders, who have struggled to retain an operating chief, said they won’t hire a replacement. Before joining Lyft, McNeill was a deputy to Elon Musk at Tesla Inc. He spent two and half years at the automaker, where he served as president of global sales and service….
VENTUREBEAT
One needn’t be an oracle to forecast Airbnb listings prices — AI models fed customer reviews and rental features will do the trick. That’s the conclusion drawn by a team of graduate students at Stanford, who investigate in a paper on Arxiv.org (“Airbnb Price Prediction Using Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis“) systems leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to anticipate future Airbnb rates….
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