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 what active home shoppers want, the newest thing on the block, award season, the big picture of urban areas, and a new delivery method. Dig in!

Generally

Shoppers

Survey results from Realtor.com show what current home shoppers are looking for this spring.

Results Are…

Realtor.com found that most shoppers (42%) are looking for ranch style homes, with 50%+ looking for three bedrooms, and 75% looking for two bathrooms. Guess which room is the most important room in the house? 80% of people said was the kitchen. The results are very detailed and broken down by age group and overall results for each question, which can be viewed here. Other findings were that the least searched features were a guest-house and man cave. Also people really like garages and would love their home to have one.

New Kid On The Block   

But How Do They Stack Up?

A former smart guy at Amazon has entered the housing space. His new project, Blokable, is basically premade smart homes for order. What makes Blokable different from other pre-fabricated homes is that they are easily stackable and they are in talks with a ski resort in Utah to make an apartment complex out of individual Blokable units. It is also possible to order several and “build” a house how you want. They are looking to make smart homes more accessible, expandable, and easy to buy.

Take Notes

Congratulations!

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced their winners for the 2017 Housing Awards. The awards this year feature homes from all over the U.S., from New York to Los Angeles. The awards try to highlight the trends from each year, this year they highlighted the green building structure, accessibility, and the universal design to showcase the “importance of good housing as a necessity of life.”

Time To Move?

Yelp wants to do more than just let you rate your favorite and least favorite restaurants. It wants to have robots bring you food. Yelp’s Eat24 has partnered with a robotics startup, Marble, to allow people to order food and have a cute little robot, that kind of looks like a cooler, bring you your chicken chow mien before it gets cold. The robot is aware of its surrounds so it doesn’t run into people or cars or fire hydrants. So you may not need to search for some cash to tip your delivery driver.

Where Does Your City Fall?

CityLab has mapped the “New Urban Crisis” around the U.S. to show which cities have the most severe income inequality, class segregations, and unaffordable housing? The winners of this prestigious awards are Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago, but really most major cities didn’t rank well. The measures to create the map include, wage/income inequality, educational/occupational lines, economic segregation along income, and more.

Totally Unrelated

More Basketball

In case you haven’t seen enough of NBA’s Golden State Warriors player, Draymond Green, watch him go undercover as a training Realtor.