Real Estate
Rental searches for pet friendly properties drop after law change
Rightmove searches for rental properties that allow pets have plummeted since law changes gave renters more rights. Following the introduction of the new rules, pet searches dropped by more than 50% in May and June compared with a year earlier. Landlords in England cannot unreasonably refuse pets in their properties under changes made in May in the Renters' Rights Act. But agents say some renters wrongly believe permission to have a pet is guaranteed, and landlords say some homes remain unsuitable for multiple pets or large dogs. Landlords must consider requests fairly and cannot unreasonably refuse them, but they can still decline where there is a valid reason, said Megan Eighteen, immediate past president of lettings agents trade body ARLA Propertymark. She said there was plenty of potential for misunderstanding, among tenants about pet-friendly properties.
Legendary Television City may be be sold in further blow to Hollywood
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Television City, at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, has served as a stage for some of TV's most legendary moments. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.
Measuring Racial Disparities in Rent Growth Under Algorithmic Landlord Concentration in U.S. Metros
The 2024 Department of Justice antitrust complaint against RealPage, Inc. named five major residential REITs for coordinating algorithmic rent pricing across hundreds of thousands of apartment units in major US metropolitan areas. This paper studies whether census-tract-level corporate landlord concentration (CLC), measured from SEC EDGAR 10-K property filings geocoded to census tracts, the first such application in the literature, is associated with rent growth 2019-2023, and whether that association is larger in majority-minority neighborhoods. Rent outcomes are measured using the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI). To account for the possibility that corporate landlords preferentially locate in neighborhoods already seeing rent appreciation, all regressions control for a fully novel Algorithmic Housing Burden Index (AHBI), a composite of pre-existing rent burden and market tightness from ACS data. Across 665 census tracts in ten US metropolitan areas, doubling REIT concentration is associated with 2.8 percentage points higher rent growth (p = 0.086, p = 0.030, HC1 robust). This association is significantly stronger in majority-minority tracts. Within the same metro, high-CLC majority-minority tracts are associated with 5.9 percentage points higher rent growth than comparable white tracts (p = 0.039). An XGBoost model predicts 44 percent of out-of-sample rent growth variance, with SHAP analysis independently confirming that CLC's contribution is positive in minority tracts and negative in white tracts. Taken all together, these findings provide the first tract-level evidence consistent with corporate landlord concentration being associated with disproportionately higher rent growth in communities of color.
A Censored Transformed Model for Proportional Outcomes with Boundary Mass and an Application to Loss Given Default Modeling
Qiang, Yuan Christopher, Sigrist, Fabio
We introduce the zero-one censored transformed normal (ZOC-TN) model for proportional responses with potential probability mass at the boundaries 0 and 1. The model combines a censored Gaussian variable with a two-parameter affine-logit transformation on the interior (0,1). We characterize the transformation parameters, establish large-sample properties, and relate the affine-logit specification to broader classes of interior distributions. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can capture a wider range of qualitative density shapes than several benchmark models while remaining parsimonious, computationally efficient, and numerically stable. Furthermore, the ZOC-TN model can be extended (i) to account for nonlinearities and interactions in a tree-boosting machine learning framework and (ii) to explicitly model residual spatio-temporal variability. We apply the ZOC-TN model to loss given default (LGD) modeling for a large dataset of U.S. residential mortgages and compare it to multiple benchmark models. We find that a tree-boosted ZOC-TN model with a spatio-temporal frailty Gaussian process delivers the strongest out-of-sample performance, indicating that mortgage losses are shaped by nonlinear covariate effects and by unaccounted-for space-time variation.
In Praise of a Dumb House
Tech has been encroaching on the family domicile for years--but actor, writer, and satirist Jill Kargman is all in on analog. My husband Harry works in tech, and every January he makes his yearly pilgrimage to Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where some 4,100 exhibitors are spread across 2.6 million square feet. The dominant concept at this year's edition was that, very soon, anything you put in your house will be compatible with voice-activated AI services like Siri, Alexa, or HomePod. Your newest home automation systems will come equipped with sensors and jazzy master controls on an iPad. The problem for me is that a tiny photoelectric cell you frantically wave to--rather than a switch to flick or press--rarely acknowledges me, because somehow I'm not human temperature.
AI wealth boom sending San Francisco home prices surging: 'It's ridiculous'
The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area's already expensive market are skyrocketing as employees at leading artificial intelligence companies come into gargantuan sums of money thanks to a boom in initial public offerings . With San Francisco's OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as SpaceX, which operates a major facility in the Los Angeles area, eyeing debuts on the stock market, the hot housing market may not abate soon. If their initial public offering (IPO) is well-received, the companies' multibillion-dollar valuations are poised to produce massive wealth for employees and executives holding shares, which experts say could trigger an uptick in demand for the Bay Area's limited housing stock.