Every month Zillow generates 366 million visits from roughly 227 million unique visitors. Redfin attracts  roughly 54 million monthly. These are successful business models, consumer facing, built on the back of MLS data.

You're paying $4,000 a month in rent. You have a job, decent credit, and you're looking to make a nest. But you're stuck in a situation that defines the entire first-time buyer crisis. The money is here, but the housing costs take all the fun out of it.

Stop calling it a "loophole." A 1031 Exchange is the single most powerful capital strategy in real estate investment, but missing one technicality—one deadline—can instantly void the entire benefit.

Your $50M net worth won't get you a $5M house.
Most AI founders don't understand the gap between documented liquid assets and illiquid equity. Lenders don't care about your cap table. They care about what you can prove today.

You are trying to figure it out and by "it" I mean all of it—relationships, family, career, friends, clothes, food, being cute, and why you're still renting.

You make $186,600 a year—the current Area Median Income for San Francisco County. Solid job, decent credit, and money in the bank yet, you're still paying $4,000 a month for a place with no garage and pet [...]

Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood), the bill's author, framed it plainly: "A working stove and a working refrigerator are not luxuries—they are a necessary part of modern life." In an ever-evolving landscape of affordability issues, habitability, and human rights, California is finding it necessary to level the playing field. AB 628 doesn't represent a philosophical shift—it codifies what many jurisdictions already recognize: functional cooking and food storage are non-negotiable components of habitable housing, not amenities to be negotiated away or deferred.

Approximately 64% of estates contain real property, and a lot of that real property leaves something to be desired. Deferred maintenance, title defects, tenant issues, “lots of stuff,” or simply a property nobody wants to keep—real estate in probate creates work outside an attorney’s primary wheelhouse and pulls focus from higher‑order priorities in the administration. Layer that on top of everything else already on your desk, and the file gets heavy quickly.

Insurance coverage is such an issue that the California purchase agreement forms have an insurance contingency in place since June of 2024. Buyers walk into open houses thinking about quartz counters and school scores not hip to the fact that insurance is now another hurdle to homeownership.

Real estate has a lot of moving parts and one of the reasons I began to write about the process was to cement some of the basics that I learned over the years. One of the basics recently got a big update. [...]

The title of this piece, 'the Affordability Enigma' part reminds me of an 80's band, one from Massachusetts that would cover "Life in a Northern Town" by Dream Academy—don't judge—dreamy and hardworking and astute—kind of like people I [...]