Latest news with #Kelman
Press and Journal
16-07-2025
- Business
- Press and Journal
First look inside how £39m transformation of Inverness Castle will 'tell the story of the Highlands'
Inverness Castle's transformation is nearing its completion – with some areas of the redevelopment already finished. The £39 million project is on track to open in autumn according to principal project manager Jason Kelman. From being home to a prison and criminal courts, it will soon feature immersive rooms aiming to celebrate the 'past, present and imagined' of the Highlands. Mr Kelman said the north tower construction work is completed and will now undergo a deep cleaning process before opening. He said: 'I think we've done pretty well on this contract. 'I've done a lot of listed building contracts over my time, I've got 35 years of experience in the construction industry. 'To be where we are on a project of this size and scale and complexity, in the time it's taken, it's very good.' Despite challenges holding up work, he is still feeling positive about opening later this year. The project is part of the Inverness and Highland City-Region Deal, a joint initiative supported by up to £315m investment from the UK and Scottish governments, Highland Council and other public sector agencies. Mr Kelman said the focus on making sure local contractors have been utilised is causing a slight hiccup due to a Highland construction 'boom'. Mr Kelman added: 'Overall on the programme, we have had a couple of issues which have held us back slightly. 'One of the biggest issues we've been hit by is labour shortages. When we set the contracts we wrote into the tender we wanted local businesses to be used. 'That has probably come back to bite us slightly because the construction industry within the highlands is booming at the moment. 'We have also had issues with materials, as it is natural stone which we're using and sometimes what had been quarried out wasn't to the quality of our needs. 'At the beginning, a lot of material prices were going up, so we did an exercise to order as much as we could. 'The final pieces which we're waiting on include glass and glazing windows which are coming from Austria. 'But it isn't something to worry about. I've worked on other projects where we have delays, where we're talking months and months. 'We're not there with this project. We're really looking at, at most, weeks.' Head of The Inverness Castle Experience Garry Marsden has said the new attraction is 'fairy-tale-like' by combining the magic with the castle setting. Joining from his role at Sandringham Estate, he is looking forward to seeing a huge number of customers enjoy the experience, of which 220,000 are expected annually. Mr Marsden said: 'The Inverness Castle Experience is completely different to what people will perceive it to be. 'If you got 100 people in this room and ask them for expectations, they would never guess what is behind those walls and in each room. 'It's something completely different and I think that's important. This is telling the stories of the Highlands, the faces, the sounds and so much more. 'Inverness is the gateway to the Highlands – and people who come here can hopefully take some of that information away.' Mr Marsden will head up a staff team of around 90 once the castle experience is open.
STV News
02-07-2025
- Health
- STV News
Scotland's childhood obesity 'rising' amid calls for tougher action on food
Health experts warn Scotland continues to suffer some of Europe's worst diet-related outcomes, with obesity and type 2 diabetes on the rise — particularly in deprived communities New figures reveal children in Scotland's poorest areas are more than twice as likely to be at risk of obesity Food Standards Scotland says government progress on diet and public health reform is welcome but far too slow The watchdog accuses policymakers of allowing commercial pressures to override health priorities Scotland is now in danger of missing its 2030 target to halve childhood obesity Scotland continues to face some of the 'poorest diet-related health outcomes' in Europe, according to health experts. Food Standards Scotland (FSS) says levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes and other non-communicable diseases are rising, particularly among those in the most deprived areas. Data from Public Health Scotland (PHS) shows that children living in the most deprived areas are now more than twice as likely to be at risk of obesity compared to those in the least deprived areas. FSS says recent commitments from the Scottish Government to improve public health by taking a preventative approach are welcome. However, progress has been described as 'too slow and not far-reaching enough' to meet the scale of the challenges faced. Heather Kelman, chair of the FSS Board, said: 'We welcome the direction of travel, but action must be stronger, faster, and better resourced. 'Public health cannot continue to take a back seat to commercial interests. Delays and compromises only serve to deepen existing health inequalities with a continuing increase in dietary related health costs.' FSS warns that the current restrictions on food promotions must go further if they are to be fully effective. Mrs Kelman continued: 'This should not be a choice between health or growth. When HFSS sales increase, the NHS and taxpayers pick up the bill. 'Of course we recognise that growth is important, but we need a system that prioritises public health over commercial interests.' FSS also noted that Scotland continues to lag behind other parts of the UK in implementing diet-related measures, calling for stronger collaboration with the UK Government to tackle issues. Mrs Kelman continued: 'Without urgent and coordinated action, Scotland risks missing its ambition to halve childhood obesity by 2030, and allowing diet-related illness to continue placing unsustainable pressure on the NHS. 'Clinical solutions can help, but are not a panacea, and preventing diet-related ill-health conditions is still a much better solution. 'We need a bold strategy to reshape the food environment. The intent is there. Now we need delivery, leadership, and the political will across all UK administrations to follow through.' The Scottish Government has been contacted for comment. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
USA Today
10-06-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Rocket Mortgage is buying Redfin. We got the CEOs to break it down.
Rocket Mortgage is buying Redfin. We got the CEOs to break it down. Show Caption Hide Caption How to clean your carpet and rugs properly Rugs and carpets can trap odors. Here's how to clean them properly. ProblemSolved, Reviewed In March, Rocket, America's largest mortgage lender, announced plans to buy Redfin, a national brokerage that's spent its 20-year history trying to 'redefine' residential real estate. There are big numbers involved: Redfin's website attracts nearly 50 million views every month; Rocket says it handles more than 100,000 calls every day. The deal is worth nearly $1.75 billion. But Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies, say the consumer is at the heart of the deal. 'Homeownership is fundamentally a human business,' Krishna said during a May investor call. Still, the tie-up comes at an auspicious time. As USA TODAY has reported, there are deep fissures in the industry about how much control any one company should have over how real estate listings are shared publicly and who should represent buyers and sellers. At the same time, higher-for-longer mortgage rates and elevated home prices are fraying the American Dream, and making profits and margins challenging, as Kelman memorably noted in a 2024 call with analysts. USA TODAY sat down with Krishna and Kelman for one of their first joint appearances since the announcement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. USA TODAY: What does the acquisition mean for consumers in the housing market, for buyers and sellers? Varun Krishna: Today when you think about the process of buying or selling a home, the consumer sort of gets handed off from industry to industry to industry. One industry helps them with the process of searching for a home and working with a realtor, another industry helps them with the process of financing. Within that, there are industries that help them with things like title, insurance and then they get kind of handed off into the servicing business where they spend a lifetime handling things like property taxes, their monthly payments and their escrows. And the whole process is just so complicated. It takes time, it takes energy, it's expensive. What we want to do is fix that. We want to take something that is expensive, manual, and antiquated, and we just want to make it all seamless and frictionless, and ultimately create more savings and value for the Kelman: The central economic problem that people under 40 have is that they don't believe in the American Dream anymore. They can't afford a house, they get lost in the process, they get overwhelmed by the fees. They're spending half their down payment on the broker and the banker. And I do think we can fix that. USA TODAY: The start-to-finish real estate experience has been a Holy Grail for a long time. We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the vast majority do have fixed-rate mortgages, we know that homeowners insurance costs are rising pretty dramatically, pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today.
In March, Rocket, America's largest mortgage lender, announced plans to buy Redfin, a national brokerage that's spent its 20-year history trying to 'redefine' residential real estate. There are big numbers involved: Redfin's website attracts nearly 50 million views every month; Rocket says it handles more than 100,000 calls every day. The deal is worth nearly $1.75 billion. But Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies, say the consumer is at the heart of the deal. 'Homeownership is fundamentally a human business,' Krishna said during a May investor call. Still, the tie-up comes at an auspicious time. As USA TODAY has reported, there are deep fissures in the industry about how much control any one company should have over how real estate listings are shared publicly and who should represent buyers and sellers. At the same time, higher-for-longer mortgage rates and elevated home prices are fraying the American Dream, and making profits and margins challenging, as Kelman memorably noted in a 2024 call with analysts. USA TODAY sat down with Krishna and Kelman for one of their first joint appearances since the announcement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. USA TODAY: What does the acquisition mean for consumers in the housing market, for buyers and sellers? Varun Krishna: Today when you think about the process of buying or selling a home, the consumer sort of gets handed off from industry to industry to industry. One industry helps them with the process of searching for a home and working with a realtor, another industry helps them with the process of financing. Within that, there are industries that help them with things like title, insurance and then they get kind of handed off into the servicing business where they spend a lifetime handling things like property taxes, their monthly payments and their escrows. And the whole process is just so complicated. It takes time, it takes energy, it's expensive. What we want to do is fix that. We want to take something that is expensive, manual, and antiquated, and we just want to make it all seamless and frictionless, and ultimately create more savings and value for the Kelman: The central economic problem that people under 40 have is that they don't believe in the American Dream anymore. They can't afford a house, they get lost in the process, they get overwhelmed by the fees. They're spending half their down payment on the broker and the banker. And I do think we can fix that. USA TODAY: The start-to-finish real estate experience has been a Holy Grail for a long time. We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the , we know that homeowners , pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rocket buys Redfin. Here's what its CEOs told USA Today Sign in to access your portfolio
USA Today
09-06-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today.
Mortgage company Rocket is buying Redfin, the brokerage. Its CEOs talked with USA Today. Show Caption Hide Caption How to clean your carpet and rugs properly Rugs and carpets can trap odors. Here's how to clean them properly. ProblemSolved, Reviewed In March, Rocket, America's largest mortgage lender, announced plans to buy Redfin, a national brokerage that's spent its 20-year history trying to 'redefine' residential real estate. There are big numbers involved: Redfin's website attracts nearly 50 million views every month; Rocket says it handles more than 100,000 calls every day. The deal is worth nearly $1.75 billion. But Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies, say the consumer is at the heart of the deal. 'Homeownership is fundamentally a human business,' Krishna said during a May investor call. Still, the tie-up comes at an auspicious time. As USA TODAY has reported, there are deep fissures in the industry about how much control any one company should have over how real estate listings are shared publicly and who should represent buyers and sellers. At the same time, higher-for-longer mortgage rates and elevated home prices are fraying the American Dream, and making profits and margins challenging, as Kelman memorably noted in a 2024 call with analysts. USA TODAY sat down with Krishna and Kelman for one of their first joint appearances since the announcement. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. USA TODAY: What does the acquisition mean for consumers in the housing market, for buyers and sellers? Varun Krishna: Today when you think about the process of buying or selling a home, the consumer sort of gets handed off from industry to industry to industry. One industry helps them with the process of searching for a home and working with a realtor, another industry helps them with the process of financing. Within that, there are industries that help them with things like title, insurance and then they get kind of handed off into the servicing business where they spend a lifetime handling things like property taxes, their monthly payments and their escrows. And the whole process is just so complicated. It takes time, it takes energy, it's expensive. What we want to do is fix that. We want to take something that is expensive, manual, and antiquated, and we just want to make it all seamless and frictionless, and ultimately create more savings and value for the Kelman: The central economic problem that people under 40 have is that they don't believe in the American Dream anymore. They can't afford a house, they get lost in the process, they get overwhelmed by the fees. They're spending half their down payment on the broker and the banker. And I do think we can fix that. USA TODAY: The start-to-finish real estate experience has been a Holy Grail for a long time. We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the vast majority do have fixed-rate mortgages, we know that homeowners insurance costs are rising pretty dramatically, pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back
