THE BYTE

Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.

This week we’re taking a BYTE out of unexpected sales, smart cities, living with the in-laws, Amazon VR, and the difference between Millennials and Millennials. Dig in!

Generally

A Surprising October
In October, U.S. new home sales unexpectedly soared to a 10-year high, housing starts rose 13.7%, and builder confidence rose by two points to a level of 70.

Now That’s Exciting
The forecast for new home sales in October expected a decrease of 6%, but instead October had an 18.7% increase from October 2016 and a 6.2% increase from September 2017. This put sales at the highest level since 2007. Some are saying the mild weather helped increase sales. Supply is still tight, but housing starts are up to 1.29 from 1.14 million. This is still 2.9% below the starts from October 2016. With the high demand as well as the natural disasters that have hit the U.S. the increase in housing starts was expected. Permit authorizations also increased by 5.9% so this trend of housing starts may continue to rise.

Why Stop At Smart Homes…

When You Can Build Smart Cities?
Several companies and cities have partnered to not only better their city but to launch them into the future. Here is a look at six smart cities in the works. Google (or Sidewalk Labs) in Toronto; Bill Gates in Belmont, Arizona; Elon Musk in Melbourne; and NEOM in Saudi Arabia are just a few of the projects trying to design the future of our neighborhoods. Some features of these smart cities are net zero capabilities, driverless cars, high-speed WIFI everywhere, Artificial Intelligence, and so much more.

Take Notes

Stay A While
Multigenerational living is on the rise. There was a rise to 19% of the U.S. living in multigenerational housing in 2014 and that is actually getting us back to the 1950 rate of 21%. When broken down by demographic Asian families had the highest population in multigenerational homes at 28% .A more recent survey showed that 44% of shoppers hoped to accommodate for elderly parents.

Not Quite The Same
Millennials get quite a bit of news coverage now-a-days, but turns out we may need to break that age group down a little bit more when it comes to buying homes. Older millennials and younger millennials are quite different when it comes to credit score, loan-to-value, and debt-to-income ratio. With credit scores, older millennials average a 731 and younger millennials average a 712. Which may be important because millennials accounted for 40% of home buying from January-September 2017.

Totally Unrelated

Jamming Out
For those that can’t ever get their printers to work, this music video from OK GO might actually blow your mind.