Zillow has waved the white flag on its home-buying operation, which it launched in 2018. Despite having its most active week of home purchasing to date in early October 2021, Zillow has since shut down its iBuying wing and laid off 25% of its workforce. The company has lost money—approximately $400 million—buying houses at higher prices than the market would pay. A nationwide contractor shortage compounded the issue, delaying the company’s timeline for flipping homes. As Wired reports, the “Zestimate” home valuation algorithm—which employed big data to predict the price at which the company could sell a property—was no match for the volatility of the market in the era of the pandemic. The Zestimate ran into further problems when it attempted to assess the value of less conventional products, such as residences that needed more work or fell outside the easy-to-sell, cookie-cutter type. “There are a lot of things that affect the valuation of homes that even very sophisticated algorithms cannot catch,” says Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia Business School. [Wired]
Last week, the city council of Ithaca, N.Y., voted unanimously to fully decarbonize its buildings, making it the first U.S. city to embark on such a plan. In November, the city and private partners will start the first phase of decarbonization: the electrification of more than 1,000 residential buildings and 600 commercial buildings. “On decarbonization, and frankly, just about every issue ... no one is coming to save us. Whether on climate or infrastructure ... we have more determination we will have to save ourselves,” says Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick. [CNBC]
In Rotterdam, the Dutch city that is 90% below sea level, local architecture firm Powerhouse Co. has designed Floating Office Rotterdam, an office building that bobs 60 feet from the harbor, connected by a gangway. At three stories tall, the 50,000-square-foot building serves as the headquarters of the Global Center on Adaptation, an international climate change advisory organization, as well as a swimming pool and restaurant. Designed in two parts—a floating concrete foundation and a timber building—the firm’s founding partner Nanne de Ru has likened it to “Lego construction.” It also provides a model for how coastal cities can adapt to sea-level rise. [Fast Company]
After remaining out of the spotlight following his departure two years ago from WeWork, co-founder Adam Neumann now admits he has regrets about his time at the company. His list includes convoluted accounting practices and employee stock options tanking after the company's devaluation. “It went to my head,” he says of the company's initial meteoric rise. “You lose focus on really the core of your business and why this business was what it meant to be.” Neumann maintains that despite walking away with more than $1 billion, he did not receive a golden parachute. [The New York Times]
A new RMI report finds that the clean-energy incentives in the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better plan will save Americans billions in electricity costs, countering a claim by opponents that costs would increase for consumers. “Clean energy incentives in the Build Back Better plan could help the United States reach its clean electricity goals by 2030, while saving utility companies and customers across the country $9 billion each year,” the report states. [RMI]
The Qaammat Pavillion—by Greenland-based Swedish-Greek architect Konstantin Ikonomidis for UNESCO—recently opened to visitors in Sarfannguit, Greenland, an area designated a World Heritage Site in 2018. Ikonomidis calls it a “conceptual sled-house” that explores the notions of home, constructed using traditional Inuit techniques for timber scaffolding. [Konstantin Arkitekter]
Catch up on some of the building and architecture news and events out of COP26, the 26th iteration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties. The conference opened on Oct. 31 and ends today. [ARCHITECT]
An interactive exhibition at the National Building Museum, in Washington, examines the design and infrastructure around the U.S.–Mexico Border Wall. "It's not just a story of our border, it's a story of how we build infrastructure to separate us from other people," curator Sarah A. Leavitt says. [ARCHITECT]
In his semimonthly column, Brian Brownell, FAIA, explains the benefits of “Scrapflation,” while warning against its deceptive variants “Shrinkflation” and “Skimpflation,” recently exemplified on an architecture scale by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Munger Hall. [ARCHITECT]
