Kite flyer, kite maker.
I've been flying multi-line, controllable sport kites for over half of my life. I attend kite festivals very frequently and occasionally travel throughout the US or internationally for kite festivals.
About 6 years ago, I started building my own sport kites. Now days, I have a workshop with 5 sewing machines, 2 3d printers, and other equipment, all of it revolving around kite making.
I can't really imagine my life without kites involved.
"Zillow was found to be price fixing", you say this as if there was some legal investigation. There wasnt. There were a bunch of salty realtors cherry picking data and confusing correlation for causation. The fact of the matter is, Zillow overpaid and underpaid for houses, and eventually lost millions of dollars during COVID era market swings, recognized the risk of the business and shut it down after only 3 years.
The ibuyer business was intended to take on all of the burden of buying and selling houses to make it easier for consumers to move.
"That’s what one real-estate agent claims in a video that went viral on the social-media platform TikTok"
Hardly a compelling source.
" he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers."
Based on what exactly? Zillow used publicly available information about houses, just like everyone else does. Zillow traffic patterns had nothing to do with it and really wouldn't even be useful for that. Buying decisions were based on home value and forecasted ability to resell, not derived interest based on page views.
"Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,”"
False. Zillow literally excluded houses that it bought from its comps to avoid that bias. I know because I wrote that code.
Zillow over payed for houses, then couldn't sell them as quickly as expected because the COVID housing market took a down turn, and so they sold them at a loss, lost millions of dollars, and closed the house buying business. They also made plenty of low offers or under-payed for houses at times. They were trying to break even on home value on the hole, but couldn't reign in the wild swings of gains and losses. Their entire business model was based on the seller fees, not on the house value.
In any case, they closed that business in 2021, and has since sold the rest of their inventory.
I don't see how that would have a lasting effect on housing prices though. I'd attribute it more to a housing shortage due to people buying up real estate, and keeping it as rentals. Even when operating, Zillow aimed to resell houses within 3 months, not hold on to them as investments.
Based on the actual Zillow report, it's just based on home values across the board in different regions. So, these are averages. Of course, if you make more improvements and stuff, your result would vary.
You can just click through to the actual Zillow report instead of Yahoo's article about it: https://www.zillow.com/research/years-to-profit-33215/
They discuss the analysis right there.
How did Zillow do this?
Define "engineer" in a way that accurately describes what you think is an "engineer" while simultaneously excluding software engineers.
"you can't convince me" doesn't sound like an invitation to debate. It sounds like a warning that debating that topic with you would be a waste of time because you won't listen anyway.
I can provide my justification for believing that voting for a 3rd party is a waste of a vote. Are you actually willing to be convinced if a sufficient argument is presented? I.e. are you retracting your "you can't convince me" statement? If not, I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince the unconvinceable.
You are keeping yourself from growing as a person because you would rather block your ears than consider another person's perspective.
If you care about making good decisions, you should want to hear other perspectives and make (or revise) your decisions with as much information as possible. Instead, you've made up your mind with a bit of information, and refuse to hear more. Science, for example, adjust it's views based on what is observed. You are refusing to observe so that your current believe can be preserved.
It's not even about wanting to "vote D", I don't really care about that. It's about the intellectual dishonesty and laziness of being unwilling to ever change your mind about something to the extent that you push away anything that might make you stop being so lazy and dishonest.
It's still a side pursuit. I have a full time job as a software engineer. I do sell the kites I make on occasion, but I have no intention of making it a proper source of income.