Hey there 👋
This week's newsletter will be different from previous weeks. I wanted to do something more personal. Instead of sharing a 2000-word essay on a technology topic, I want to share with you a few sources and things that I’ve learned this week and distill them into a summary so that you can save time learning new things.
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Let's get into it.
🏡 The Real Estate 3.0
As the year ends, I have been thinking about what kinds of investment I should focus on in 2023. So far, my portfolio has been stock-heavy - and I was very fortunate to ride the bull wave in early 2022.
Real estate has always been a mystery to me. One of the reasons is that it requires an upfront cost to purchase a property, and only some have a lot of cash sitting around in their bank account. Moreover, buying a house is very long and complicated - the pre-approval stage, the offer stage, and the escrow stage. Lastly, owning a property is becoming harder and harder. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 70 percent of Americans believe young adults have a harder time buying a home than previous generations.
Therefore, I have been doing a lot of research on investing and the future of the real estate business. I stumbled upon an article from NFX mentioning that we are going through another revolution in the real estate business - the ownership revolution, called Real Estate 3.0.
We are going into another transformation era in Real Estate.
Real estate 1.0 is the information revolution of real estate. Before that was the lack of information about buying and selling a home. Companies like Trulia, Zillow, and even Redfin disrupted the real estate business by making real estate data easily accessible to everyone. We can easily find available listings online and see the property's history and the current house price - all through the internet.
Once buyers and sellers could easily find a home online, they encountered another problem - buying a house is very complicated.
To buy a single property, you must go through multiple lenders and escrow officers. The barrier to buying a house is high. Thus, comes real estate 2.0 - the transaction revolution. Companies like Open-door and Offerpad are working to speed up and clean up the selling process.
Real estate 3.0 is to solve the problem of owning real estate. Many companies are trying to expand the definition of "ownership."
What if, instead of owning an entire home, you could own a piece of one?
What if, instead of paying rent forever, your rent payments earned you a fraction of your house (or your business' property)?
What if you could own slices of other people's homes as an asset and sell them as easily as you would a share of GOOG on the NASDAQ?
🗣 How to Be More Opinionated During Meetings
One feedback I received from my manager was that I need to be more opinionated during meetings. Imagine you must justify every action you do every day as a software engineer.
Being opinionated can be hard because it can often lead to arguments. It depends on how you see it - arguments can be good or stressful.
How do you voice your opinion during a meeting?
Start small - start by commenting on someone else's statement.
For instance, someone in the team proposed to put the interface in a single repository instead of multiple to avoid DRY. You can comment on that statement by saying, "I think putting it in a single repository makes sense." or "I like your idea of putting all interfaces in a single repository."
Commenting on something makes the meeting more engaging and shows that you are listening. You will be productive and add value to the meeting.
In addition, you can also preview the meeting agenda and prepare a few questions beforehand to stay grounded during the meeting.
Lastly, if you encounter a counter-argument during a meeting that derails the entire meeting in a different direction, you can always suggest, "Let's discuss this more offline." Making offline discussion, 1:1, instead of discussing with ten people in the meeting can help you think clearly and be prepared to counter-argue with the other person.
Here are three actionable steps that you can take to be more opinionated:
Start Small. Comment or compliment someone else's statement during meetings.
Prepare your questions or comments before the meetings. Look at the slide deck, and prepare two questions to ask the leader of the meeting.
Reroute the discussion offline when facing a difficult counter-argument.
That's it for now!
Please use this feedback form if you found this newsletter helpful. In addition, my DM is open if you have any questions about this article or general questions about Scala, functional programming, or software engineering.
Thanks for reading!
Chat soon,
Edward
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