The Insider: Issue 016

Happy Monday, folks. There’s a bit of wisdom waiting for you in your food. Read on for this, some cute dogs, human libraries, and other aha’s.

Last Week This Week

Compass made its fourth acquisition in the title business, scooping up a shop based in Denver, as it continues to charge hard toward its goal of standing up an “end-to-end” engine.

The feds announced a gradual pullback of subsidies offered through the National Flood Insurance Program in response to increased risk from sea level rise. This will hit Florida especially hard in the coming years, where Zillow predicts that 12.56% of all homes there will be underwater by 2100.

Matt Carter at Inman asks a question we’ve been pondering for a while here: “Will all lenders soon have a cash offer product?” The brute force of cash is enabling an increasing number of companies to fundamentally re-order the mortgage process, moving underwriting and funding to after the close. If this trend continues, it will leave companies without big balance sheets at a serious disadvantage.

 
Have You Heard About This?

‘Unjudge Someone’
In Denmark, a nonprofit group called Human Library facilitates the borrowing of people instead of books for face-to-face conversations. (Remember those?) The idea is to create a safe space for people to dialogue openly about sensitive topics in an effort to break down stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings. From their website: “Every human book from our bookshelf, represents a group in our society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin, etc.” We can’t think of much that’s more powerful than open dialogue, whether that’s in our greater society, our companies, or our homes.

What's Inside

Be sure to register for this week’s Live Webinar. Join Brian Boero for a 30 minute, Insiders-only briefing on what’s happening in the biz, from our 1000watt perspective, Thursday at 12pm PT / 3pm ET. Register here.

 

Flash Poll

Last week we sent a Flash Poll to 641 Realtors, asking them “If you could snap your fingers and make the MLS disappear, would you?”

The result?

89.9% said no

10.1% said yes

 

Inspiration Point

Press Record, Find Stories
Saas products and technology may seem impossible to market creatively or without a heavy focus on the product itself. Hats off to this Google Nest campaign that manages to never give us a single spec for its smart home device, and instead delivers quite simply its users’ own footage of hilarious pet antics caught on camera (narrated by some funny Brits). We love the slam dunk authentic storytelling that no one had to force to make engaging.

How It’s Made
"Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people's ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives." <====== We came across this soundbite from the late, great Anthony Bourdain and it felt so incisive and applicable to business that we had to share here. When we go through the motions just to get to the next thing, it shows up in the food.

 

Quote of the week

"The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”

— Rory Sutherland