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About Temu:
Temu is an online market presenting top quality items from the world’s prime suppliers and models to individuals at wholesale price ranges whenever, anywhere, and in any quantity. As a member of PDD Holdings (Nasdaq: PDD), Temu works carefully with its worldwide network of suppliers and logistics associates to create and curate high-quality merchandise for customers to delight in the conveniences and comforts of lifetime.
About PDD Holdings:
PDD Holdings (Nasdaq: PDD) is a multinational commerce team that owns and operates a portfolio of corporations. PDD Holdings aims to convey additional corporations and people into the electronic economic system so nearby communities and small enterprises can gain from greater productivity and benefit by means of new chances.
When Madeline Heckman decided to move from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn last year, she knew exactly where to start her search: with StreetEasy. “I honestly didn’t bother looking at other alternative apps,” she said. The interface was user-friendly, the entire city’s listings were there, and her previous website of choice, Naked Apartments, had shuttered in 2020. She ultimately found the place of her dreams,a two-bedroom with a walk-in closet in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Heckman is in good company. Ask anyone in New York City how they found their apartment, and the answer is a no-brainer: in 2022, StreetEasy might as wellbe the city’s entire real estate business.
This wasn’t always so. For the entirety of 2006, the first year of StreetEasy’s reign, the real estate giant did not hire a single employee from the industry. The two founders didn’t want to operate under the assumptions associated with the business. They wanted a fresh start.
They got that and more: the company was acquired by Zillow in 2013 for $50m, and the pair’s real estate brands now boast a 70{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} market share. Today, StreetEasy not only hosts a list of all available rentals and homes in New York City, it also allows users to secure agents and schedule viewings.
From the moment would-be renters or buyers start their hunt to the moment they walk into their new homes, keys in hand, StreetEasy facilitates it all.
“It’s almost like saying you buy your stuff on Amazon,” one agent said during a phone call (like others quoted in this piece, the agent requested anonymity due to their ongoing relationship with the company). “Like, OK, you could buy it from Target or somewhere else, but Amazon is still Amazon.”
But as StreetEasy has revolutionized the city’s real estate, its success hasn’t gone unchallenged. As is the case when a company disrupts a market, winners and losers abound – and sometimes trade places in the process.
Total dominance (and total disruption)
In its infancy, StreetEasy’s real estate Rolodex was accumulated by scraping listings from the internet and pairing them with specific information – such as the number of days a property had been on the market or fluctuations in price.
Illustration: Gizem Winter/The Guardian
Things changed in 2017, when the platform began charging a “per listing, per day” fee for rental properties. Starting at $3, it jumped to $4.50 in 2018, landing on $6 a year later. (Sale property listings remain free for agents to post.)
These fees directly affect agents. An anonymous broker said that the 30 apartments they currently have listed on the platform are costing them about $6,000 a month to maintain. They estimate that the listing fees have cost them a total of half a million dollars since their introduction.
In 2015, StreetEasy introduced the first iteration of its other primary revenue stream: StreetEasy Experts. Today, real estate agents who go through a formal joining process are promoted in listings with ties to their previous work – for instance, in buildings or neighborhoods where they’ve made deals. These “Experts” – who pay StreetEasy when they close a deal – are advertised ahead of the listing agent.
When a user attempts to schedule a showing for a listing, they have to scroll past the promoted Expert for the option to contact the listing agent. That can benefit new agents looking to grow their client lists, but established agents told the Guardian it was frustrating to lose their leads to Experts.
“It takes away from the exclusive agent’s ability to collect the larger commission,” one said. He also claims that the program eliminates some of the flexibility that’s allowed if a buyer or seller was working with the original broker: “If the person came directly to one broker collecting the whole commission, they could probably lower their commission to make the deal work.”
The brokers’ rebellion
Before StreetEasy, many brokers put their listings in a public database, so renters and buyers had to approach brokers if they wanted to learn more about a property.
Now StreetEasy allows customers to become thoroughly informed before ever speaking with an agent. For instance, the site offers a home valuation tool to give sellers a free estimate of their home’s current market value. From there, sellers can receive emails to keep them up to date on when it’s the right time to sell, alongside records of recently listed and in-contract homes in their neighborhood.
Even though Anna P (who asked to withhold her last name) bought her home in Brooklyn over six years ago, she keeps the same search filters on to keep an eye on the market.
“I watch the available places in our price range getting smaller and smaller over the years and it sort of helps with buyers’ remorse,” she said over direct message. “We couldn’t have done any better! And our property value is going up!”
Many brokers, feeling the system is rigged against them, have repeatedly called for boycotts. Following the introduction of listing fees in 2017, the agencies Brown Harris Stevens, Town Residential, Compass, Stribling & Associates, Warburg Realty and more stopped updating their StreetEasy feeds.
A Queens street with Manhattan’s skyline in the background. Together, Zillow and StreetEasy boast a 70{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} market share. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
But StreetEasy bypassed the issue by allowing individual agents to manually update listings themselves, and in early 2020 StreetEasy stopped accepting automatic listings feeds from brokerage firms altogether. Listings from agents at Brown Harris Stevens, Compass and Warburg Realty ultimately appear on StreetEasy, although companies such as Compass have attempted to get an edge on the website with the introduction of their own exclusive listings.
A June 2021 survey of New York residents conducted by YouGov found that more renters described StreetEasy as trustworthy than any other real estate platform.
“Why fix something that’s not broken? I think that’s the way customers see it,” Kaptan Unugur, senior global real estate adviser and licensed salesperson at Sotheby’s, said. He added: “We have to have a good relationship [with StreetEasy] because that’s our only option.”
If you can’t beat them, find your niche
Emily Bergmann is one of the few NYC renters who found all of her previous apartments using platforms such as Twitter and Craigslist.
“[StreetEasy is] useless if you are one person who doesn’t have roommates they’re looking with already,” she said over direct message. (If an apartment hunter wanted to find a place before securing roommates, they’d need to put down a full deposit up front, something Bergmann said had been financially prohibitive for her in the past.)
For her first solo apartment in Prospect Heights, which she moved into this past month, she went with Listings Project.
“Everything on StreetEasy was out of my price range,” she said. “My place on Listings Project was a lease takeover in a rent-stabilized building that was easily $200 below the cheapest studio in my neighborhood [on StreetEasy].”
Unugur, of Sotheby’s, believes there are better sites out there, but hardly any competitors match StreetEasy in revenue. While Zillow reported $1.7bn in the third quarter of 2021, Redfin reported $540m and CoStar, owner of Apartments.com , reported $499m.
So rather than compete on scale, real estate alternatives in New York tend to focus on a niche.
Listings Project began 20 years ago as a personal email list run by Stephanie Diamond, when she was looking for an apartment. The service now spans over 200 countries, with the highest percentage of listings in New York. Listings Project remains community-based; searchers can only access listings after they subscribe to the newsletter or sign up to the site. Diamond said each post received a “direct human touch”, vetting for inclusion and editing for gentrifying language.
Illustration: Gizem Winter/The Guardian
Realtor.com, owned by NewsCorp, boasts features to give buyers information about the environment around their potential property, including a noise indicator – with a map to show where and what the source of the noise is – and flood risk data.
Lee Lin, the CEO of RentHop, said its unique strength lies in its efforts to weed out bad-faith brokers, claiming to have a much stricter verification process than other sites. It also tracks conversations between clients, agents, and landlords to ensure prompt and consistent replies while respecting privacy.
“We have suspended or banned many cases where agents have not kept their listings up-to-date, including banning our largest advertiser last year after a few repeated violations and warnings,” Lin wrote in an email.
But StreetEasy isn’t slowing down. The service received 180m visits in 2021, up almost 40{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} from 2019, according to a spokesperson. Plus, luxury homes sold nearly two months faster this past year than the year before, with the overall median Manhattan asking price jumping more than 10{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9}, according to a recent StreetEasy market report. On the rental side, there’s been a significant drop in inventory as apartment-hunting picked back up following the initial effects of the pandemic, making the landscape even more competitive.
“Every day, our teams are thinking about what is still inconvenient or difficult about finding a home in NYC,” Caroline Burton, StreetEasy vice-president and general manager, wrote over email. “What technology can help improve the process?”
In 2022, she said, the site aims to focus on smarter and more efficient ways to match buyers, sellers, and renters with agents.
In that sense, StreetEasy’s only competition is itself.
Last year, a Zillow survey showed that 36{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of buyers would even purchase a property sight unseen. But despite all the desperate buyers willing to skip the in-person showing, most people still expect to actually see a home first.
During the height of the pandemic, real estate agents across the country discovered that social media platform TikTok was an ideal way to safely show prospective buyers homes. Now, some are saying the video app has revolutionized the way they sell real estate — and it is here to stay.
Madison Sutton is a 25-year-old agent in New York City. She specializes in off-market deals and what she calls “hidden-treasure apartments.” But during the pandemic, she was scraping the barrel for leads because so many people were moving out of the city.
Sutton created her TikTok account, @TheNYCAgent, in early 2020. She had “no expectations for it whatsoever,” citing the pandemic as the catalyst for starting her account. But as soon as she started posting apartment tours on the app, she said interest in her TikTok and her properties spiked.
“There were days I was getting two or four hundred inquiries for one apartment,” she recalled. “What TikTok did, I couldn’t have expected or planned or calculated in my entire lifetime. It’s completely changed my life.”
Sutton said 100{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of her business now comes from TikTok, and her commissions have almost doubled.
Nearly three-quarters of TikTok users spend more than an hour on the app weekly, according to Statista. The endless scroll and use of algorithms keep users coming back for more. It’s this format that Sutton finds an asset. “Where else in New York City could you see 10 apartments in 10 minutes other than TikTok?,” Sutton said.
And while typical house hunters fret over scheduling in-person tours, online-savvy ones can view in-depth videos that Sutton makes with the flick of a finger.
Part of what makes TikTok so useful for real estate agents is the quick-fire video interface and algorithmically curated For You page. Videos that appear on a user’s For You page are collected according to their unique interests, region, search history, and interactions with advertisers. Because TikTok uses such engagement metrics to determine interest in a video, a new content creator does not need a large following or paid promotion for their video to go viral and reach a broad audience.
It took Fort Worth, Texas, realtor Prince Whiting just a week on the platform to get his first hit. Since creating @TheHouseofWhiting in January 2021, he has amassed 2.2 million likes on his videos. The exposure he gets on his content is virtually free, unlike his previous method of paid print advertising.
“I’d say about 90{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of the views are on the For You page and not the people that follow me,” said Whiting. “Everybody has an opportunity to go viral. It’s not because you have a 100 million or a million followers and that check mark to verify.”
Whiting said that unlike other social media platforms, the popularity and consistency of TikTok hashtags like #homesforsale (24.4 million views) and #luxuryrealestate (556 million views) make it easier for him to reach people who are ready to buy.
As with all new social media, there is of course a learning curve. With six years of experience in real estate and zero knowledge of TikTok, Dallas real estate broker Joseph Felling admits it took him a few tries to find his niche on the platform.
Felling said he’s found the most success by showcasing Dallas’ low home prices relative to other major metropolitan areas in the US. More than any other platform, TikTok has allowed him to reach clientele from outside of Texas.
“I think Covid really made people experience what more there is,” said Felling. “It’s so crazy how many California buyers I have had in the past year because they’re able to sell their million-dollar property in California, move to Texas and get a much larger property for $500,000.”
He said he now gets about 75{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of his leads from TikTok, and his sales have nearly quadrupled. As a result, Felling has stopped marketing his properties in print publications.
The future of real estate
The brokers CNN spoke with all joined TikTok within the past two years, and they all believe the app is the future of real estate.
It has certainly garnered a huge following: in September 2021, TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users.
“We live in such a visual society,” said Felling. “Video is the wave of the future. That’s how you’re going to get people’s attention.”
Sutton also said that a more visual medium allows possible buyers to imagine themselves living in a particular town or city. She often mixes local video content into her feed, showing her favorite restaurants and markets in nearby neighborhoods.
Most of all, realtors can use TikTok to engage their buyers in a conversation. Sutton said she’s created lasting relationships with clients over TikTok who often return to her for the next step of their house hunting journey.
“[TikTok] is creating this relationship that’s much more long-term,” she said. “I may not have had access to these clients, or they may not have been exposed to someone like me.”
According to Sutton, there are no downsides to starting an account. “If you’re a realtor, you should be on TikTok. No questions asked,” she said. “Even if a video performs poorly, it’s not about the performance. If one of those people who sees that video finds their home … I’ve done my job.”
MOORESVILLE – Lowe’s will release a new conclude-to-conclusion know-how solution in its cellular app on the most up-to-date iOS devices equipped with a LiDAR sensor, with the purpose of simplifying do-it-your self household tasks.
LiDAR is definied as a detection procedure which performs on the theory of radar, but makes use of mild from a laser, in accordance to Oxford Languages.
“We can all agree, home enhancement can be actually intricate,” Joshua Shabtai, senior director, ecosystem, at Lowe’s Innovation Labs, a aspect of Lowe’s, explained to WRAL TechWire in an job interview this 7 days. “It commonly can’t shift ahead with no a lot more details.”
Which is where by the company’s new solution will assist, said Shabtai.
Measure Your Space is “an intuitive, close-to-close space scanning, measurement and estimate encounter in the Lowe’s iOS app,” the firm observed in a statement.
The technological know-how product, developed within just the present Lowe’s iOS software, will make it possible for for an conclusion-to-close encounter for men and women fascinated in getting suitable info about just one certain use circumstance: flooring.
The software employs the most current technology outfitted to sure Apple goods: its LiDAR sensor.
LiDAR, which stands for “light detection and ranging,” is made use of to evaluate elevation and distances, across a selection of apps. The application crafted by Shabtai’s workforce makes use of the sensor, which is now equipped on Apple iPhone 12 Professional and iPad Pro equipment, to scan and measure space proportions.
The moment scanned and measured, the application can faucet Lowe’s solution strains and existing database, to present a consumer an estimate of completing a Do it yourself challenge.
Shabtai observed that the new beta software that utilizes the LiDAR sensor is just the beginning for attainable use situations.
“LiDAR made use of to be for genuinely high-priced use scenarios,” claimed Shabtai. “Self-driving automobiles, robots that need to have LiDAR sight to navigate,” he mentioned.
But that is altered, now, said Shabtai.
“Apple has built a specialized sensor that is compact more than enough to healthy inside the front-dealing with sensor in the digicam on the Apple iphone,” reported Shabtai. “More precision than at any time in advance of.”
Hardware, or the sensor equipped to these cellular units, carries on to increase, reported Shabtai. But so does software, that can use the components sensors to course of action that information, pointed out Shabtai. That is the future of cell technologies for anybody that works to total dwelling projects, irrespective of whether simple Diy fixture installations, flooring installation, kitchen cupboard installation, or one thing greater, like an whole yard deck and patio remodel, recommended Shabtai.
But there are continue to worries that technologies cannot deal with, on your own. Or could it?
Due to the fact one particular of the main troubles in any property enhancement venture is a want of details, which includes proportions and spatial associations, but also the specific goals of the task and how it might disrupt or permit actions, things to do, routines, or more, in a home, Lowe’s is targeted on giving price-added ordeals, all within its cell application, said Shabtai.
Assume of it this way, Shabtai famous: it is actually tricky to concur on how to move a challenge forward when you really do not have all the information and facts obtainable, specially the information and facts that is in a collaborator’s minds eye.
Lowe’s aims to change that, setting up with this merchandise.
Lowe’s picture. The upcoming launch of the Measure Your SpaceBETA practical experience in the Lowe’s app is a glimpse into Lowe’s eyesight for spatial commerce, a foreseeable future wherever emerging systems place residence details at customers’ fingertips.
“We envision a upcoming wherever men and women have all the accessibility to info about their space, in 1 place,” reported Shabtai. “We at Lowe’s want to carry the initial to provide that to customers all about the nation.”
Shabtai phone calls this “spatial commerce,” and famous that Lowe’s intends to broaden the scope of this effort significantly further than flooring estimates.
It commences with the Evaluate Your PlaceBETA, said Shabtai, “in which our clients can choose their unit, and in a subject of minutes, can scan and capture a comprehensive ground system, that enables them to store readily available possibilities, get estimates, and make a choice about how to increase their property.”
The merchandise will be out there inside of the Lowe’s application in early 2022, reported Shabtai.
