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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, from summer 2020 to spring 2022, the number of active homes for sale in most housing markets plummeted as homebuyer demand quickly absorbed almost everything that came up for sale and home sellers had ultimate power. Fast-forward to the current housing market, and the places where active inventory has rebounded to 2019 levels (due to strained affordability suppressing buyer demand) are now the very places where homebuyers have gained the most power. At the end of June, national active housing inventory for sale was still -11% below June 2019 levels. However, more and more regional markets are surpassing that threshold. This list is growing: January 2025: 41 of the 200 largest metro-area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. February 2025: 44 of the 200 largest metro-area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. March 2025: 58 of the 200 largest metro-area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. April 2025: 69 of the 200 largest metro-area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. May 2025: 75 of these 200 major markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. June 2025: 78 of these 200 major markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. July 2025: 80 of these 200 major markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Now, at the latest reading for the end of August 2025, 80 of the 200 markets are above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Click to expand. While this list of housing markets that are back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels was growing through much of the year, it has stalled a little recently. The reason? Inventory growth has slowed in recent monthsmore than typical seasonality would suggestas some home sellers in soft and weak markets in the Sun Belt have thrown in the towel and delisted. (More on that in another piece.) This next table helps you see what the inventory picture in these same 80 markets looks like now and what it looked like last year. Click to expand. Among these 80 markets, youll find lots in Sun Belt markets like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained leverage, are located in Gulf Coast and Mountain West regions. Some of these areas were among the nations top pandemic boomtowns, having experienced significant home price growth during the pandemic housing boom, which stretched housing fundamentals far beyond local income levels. When pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Cape Coral, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market’s softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt. Builders in these regions are often willing to reduce net effective prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are still available. In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that demand shock, active inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight, keeping the advantage in the hands of home sellers. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic levels have experienced softer/weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months. ResiClub PRO members can find our latest inventory analysis for 800-plus metros and 3,000-plus counties here, and our latest analysis showing why the 2019 inventory comparison remains insightful here.
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Damian Kulash, guitarist and lead singer of the rock band OK Go, is also kind of a creative director. His band has become world famous for its inventive, elaborate, and absurdly complicated music videos, including its breakout dance video made on synchronized treadmills, a stop-motion video shot over the course of 21 hours, and another that was made up of 64 films playing simultaneously on 64 iPhones. By the band’s own tally, its videos have been viewed 11 billion times. It’s achieved this success by approaching the creative process in a unique way. Kulash was recently on the main stage at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York to talk about the inspiration behind these projects. Speaking to a capacity crowd, Kulash broke down the band’s process into simple terms: “The abstract version is that we look for the things in the world that make us go Ooh. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] He was being interviewed by Karl Lieberman, global chief creative officer of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The two spent a lot of time talking about their creative processes, and revealed some surprising ways a rock band can work like an ad agency. Lieberman, whose firm is known for its campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, noticed that Kulash uses an analogy for describing OK Go’s creative process that’s almost identical to his own. “Once you get an idea, you have a sandbox, you called it, and that resonates with me because I often call ideas buckets, Lieberman said. “It’s not an idea that’s fully formed, it’s more of a notion or a direction of an idea in the form of a space that can be filled with even more thinking and . . . hopefully from even more people.” Kulash says his sandbox concept is one based on play. “It’s all about discovering the thing,” he said. “We don’t start knowing it. It also allows everybody who’s involved to actually make the project better.” [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] An example he shared was the filming of one of OK Go’s most famous music videos, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which takes place in zero gravity. Aside from knowing the video would have no gravity, the band boarded the gravity-free airplane without any preconceived idea for what they’d actually do. “It was seven flights of pure play, seven flights of a rehearsal, and then six flights of actually shooting it,” Kulash said. “There is no idea until you’ve played. You have to see the thing and be like, things feel cool in zero gravity or things feel cool in slow motion, or things feel cool in stop motion.” For Kulash, play is an essential part of OK Go’s creative process, even when the band is working in partnership with a company like Apple or General Motors to help finance the project. But that doesn’t mean there’s no pressure to turn all that sandbox time into something great. Earlier this year, OK Go gave Fast Company global design editor Mark Wilson an exclusive inside look at the filming of its latest music video, “Love,” which was so technically challenging to film the band was only able to get the shot it needed on the very last try before the daylightand the budgetran out. “We’ve got a ton of skin in the game ourselves,” Kulash said. “We often pay for [the videos] ourselves, even when we have a sponsor. We can’t afford to fail at them, ever.” Plus, Kulash told the audience, the band’s got a reputation to uphold. “Can you imagine if the next OK Go video is the one that was really boring?”
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Tony Stubblebine moved Medium from losing $2.6 million monthly to achieving its first profitable month in August 2024, after 13 years of losses. The CEO, who previously founded habit-tracking company Coach.me and helped develop early Twitter, has refocused Medium on serving writers more interested in sharing their expertise than profiting from their words. For Stubblebine its about the expert economy, not just the creator economy. Known for viral productivity techniques like Interstitial Journaling and his 75-minute guide to iPhone optimization, Stubblebine has grown Medium to over one million paid subscribers while maintaining its ad-free, quality-focused approach. Now the company is launching a new app for notes and writing, called (fittingly enough) TK, in a bet that strong design will distinguish it in a crowded marketplace. Stubblebine spoke with Fast Company about why he still prefers paper notebooks for meetings, and how Medium differentiates itself from creator platforms like Substack. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Youre launching a new writing app. Why does the world need another writing tool? I had to make this case to get people inside the company excited. There are four things I want that I don’t see right now. First, the Medium design ethos matters to me. I want my words to look and feel beautiful. I was already drafting things in Medium’s editor that I never intended to publish just because I like the typography better. Second, this world of second brain apps exists, but the idea of a second brain is a mainstream concept without mainstream implementation because you have to do so much manual organization. Most people are not that organized. A messy system almost always beats a regimented system. This is a great use case for AIour view is it’s meant to elevate people, not replace them. AI can completely alleviate all the manual organization that would typically go into Roam or Obsidian. Third, theres a way to use AI as a writing assistantnot to write for you, but to do your bidding. A lot of what I publish needs citations. The other day I was writing about an old Medium program launched by founder Ev Williams. I highlighted the paragraph and said to the AI assistant: Ev wrote about this on the Medium blog in 2017. Find the link and add it. It figured out the core concept, found the link, and added it. Im easily distractedif I had to find that link myself, I would have been lost for an hour. Fourth, I’ve never seen any note-taking apps attached to a distribution network. My writing is very sensitive to the idea that you could share it and get validation and help someone else. Sometimes youre working on something and realize this could be helpful to other people. We’re excited to attach Medium’s massive network of readers to this genre of software. Youve taken a strong stance against AI training on creators work. Why? Were the only social media platform that if we can get money out of the AI companies, is planning to give 100% of it back to the creators themselves. We refused training deals with AI companies worth low single-digit millions because we heard from our writers that they felt it was unfair for companies to make money off training on the Medium network without giving anything in return. Theres still an ongoing negotiation across the industry about whether these companies will pay creators. We just supported an initiative called the Really Simple Licensing standard. We hope that gives consent and control back to the creators. How do you compete with Substack when writers can earn more there? The people who actually make the most money on writing are not charging for the writing itself. We sort of forgot in the rush to the creator economy how lucrative the expert economy is. Some of the best-paid writers on Medium are technical leaders who post twice a year, but those postings are their calling card when they go get jobs that sometimes pay upwards of a million dollars a year. The creator economy is kind of a content treadmill and doesnt always pay that well. Meanwhile, building yourself up as an expert authentically often opens up really interesting work opportunities. If you’re committed to the creator economy, you should follow a strategy of publish once, syndicate everywhere. Medium folds into that as a place to syndicate, to get additional traffic and subscribers back to your main mailing list. But if youre not in the creator economy, you’ll build an email following on Medium faster than anywhere else because you have a built-in network of people you don’t already reach. We’re much more built for that group, which is the majority of the internet. How did you engineer Medium’s turnaround? The key thing is, even if you turn around the business, you have to end up with a business that you’re proud to be running. A lot of the turnaround was in the product itself, making Medium a place where smart amateurs write regularly. Until that point, we’d either been a place where professional journalists were writing or where the new wave of content creators would write for small dollar amounts. We looked at that as paying to create more content mill stories that otherwise wouldn’t exist, and that felt bad to us. Beyond that, its run-of-the-mill business. Every dollar you spend is meant to bring back at least a dollar. If you dont have a theory on spending money, you shouldnt spend it. The startup industry was very lax about how it spent money for a while, and Medium was definitely in that boat. Just getting tighterpeople call it cost cutting, but I think of it as role clarity. Every person needed a role connected to how we work as a business. What advice do you have for technical founders transitioning to CEO? The bar for companies has gone up. It used to be build it and they will come, or you only had to be good at one or two things. Now people are so savvy about how to build a company that you really have to plot the whole business model through. Its not just can you build a better mousetrapcan you build a distribution channel? Can you build a business model where you can make money? The last company I started in 2011 was just like, I hope if I build something cool, people will use it. I came to regret that pretty quickly because I didn’t know how I was going to market it, let alone make revenue. When people come to me and say they built a better habit tracker, I tell them: I believe you, but how are you going to get people to use it? How are you going to make money? Why is this a business? If you don’t design that into the plan, good products just get abandoned because they don’t work as businesses. What does your current daily tool kit look like? I have a pretty simple work life. I’m mostly meeting with people, so I’m spending a lot of time either in Zoom or Google Meet. I typically have a paper notebook in front of me because my view on note taking during a meeting is that it’s a form of active listening. I have a strong opinion about the ideal paper notebook. We found notebooks that are landscape format, which means they’re wider rather than taller. The thing I lie about wider is that I caught myself thinking deeper about my own notes. It’s like taking the idea of writing in the margin and blowing that up. I end up with almost always three columns: raw notes as Im trying to follow along, a second column for things I need to come back to or how I want to participate in the meeting later, and this empty third column for total epiphanies. The way that form factor interacts with the way your brain works, I found fascinating. What’s your current relationship with your iPhone after writing that viral optimization guide? I still basically believe the premise of that postthat it takes 75 minutes to reconfigure your iPhone for productivity. The meta point was that these software tools are not preconfigured to make your life better. The worst offender is notifications, which should be called interruptions. If an app asked you, Is it okay for me to interrupt you mid-meeting? you’d think harder about whether thats okay. I keep basically all my notifications off unless its text messages from certain people or phone calls from my favorites, which is three people. I always try to keep in mind that the iPhone is meant to be a tool for me. My front screen is all Google utilitiesmaps, calendar. The action button is set to photos. Youve mentioned considering going even further offline. Whats your experience been with that? I did a four-month camper van trip around the U.S. and drove 9,000 miles. The thing that blows people’s minds is that I didnt listen to anything during the drive, unless I was tired. I tried to have quiet time for thinking and seeing where I was going. That was one of the happiest periods in my entire life because my brain was not buzzing all the time with brain candy that exists on your phone. If I wasnt working, I would probably opt to be nearly fully offline beyond extremely helpful things like Google Maps. Opting out seems like a good way to live for most people.
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