https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/19/shared-housing-startups-are-taking-off/

Shared housing startups are taking off

Joanna Glasner 

May 19, 2018

 Joanna Glasner is a reporter for Crunchbase.

 
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When young adults leave the parental nest, they often follow a predictable pattern. First, move in with roommates. Then graduate to a single or couple’s pad. After that comes the big purchase of a single-family home. A lawnmower might be next.

Looking at the new home construction industry, one would have good reason to presume those norms were holding steady. About two-thirds of new homes being built in the U.S. this year are single-family dwellings, complete with tidy yards and plentiful parking.


In startup-land, however, the presumptions about where housing demand is going looks a bit different. Home sharing is on the rise, along with more temporary lease options, high-touch service and smaller spaces in sought-after urban locations.

Seeking roommates and venture capital

A Crunchbase  News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.

This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia. For this article, however, we’ll focus on U.S. startups. In the chart below, we feature several that have raised recent rounds.





Notice any commonalities? Yes, the startups listed are all based in either New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, two metropolises associated with scarce, pricey housing. But while these two metro areas offer the bulk of startups’ living spaces, they’re also operating in other cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Pittsburgh.

From white picket fences to high-rise partitions

The early developers of the U.S. suburban planned communities of the 1950s and 60s weren’t just selling houses. They were selling a vision of the American Dream, complete with quarter-acre lawns, dishwashers and spacious garages.

By the same token, today’s shared housing startups are selling another vision. It’s not just about renting a room; it’s also about being part of a community, making friends and exploring a new city.

One of the slogans for HubHaus is “rent one of our rooms and find your tribe.” Founded less than three years ago, the company now manages about 80 houses in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, matching up roommates and planning group events.

Starcity pitches itself as an antidote to loneliness. “Social isolation is a growing epidemic—we solve this problem by bringing people together to create meaningful connections,” the company homepage states.

The San Francisco company also positions its model as a partial solution to housing shortages as it promotes high-density living. It claims to increase living capacity by three times the normal apartment building.

Costs and benefits

Shared housing startups are generally operating in the most expensive U.S. housing markets, so it’s difficult to categorize their offerings as cheap. That said, the cost is typically lower than a private apartment.

Mostly, the aim seems to be providing something affordable for working professionals willing to accept a smaller private living space in exchange for a choice location, easy move-in and a ready-made social network.

At Starcity, residents pay $2,000 to $2,300 a month, all expenses included, depending on length of stay. At HomeShare, which converts two-bedroom luxury flats to three-bedrooms with partitions, monthly rents start at about $1,000 and go up for larger spaces.

Shared and temporary housing startups also purport to offer some savings through flexible-term leases, typically with minimum stays of one to three months. Plus, they’re typically furnished, with no need to set up Wi-Fi or pay power bills.

Looking ahead

While it’s too soon to pick winners in the latest crop of shared and temporary housing startups, it’s not far-fetched to envision the broad market as one that could eventually attract much larger investment and valuations. After all, Airbnb has ascended to a $30 billion private market value for its marketplace of vacation and short-term rentals. And housing shortages in major cities indicate there’s plenty of demand for non-Airbnb options.

While we’re focusing here on residential-focused startups, it’s also worth noting that the trend toward temporary, flexible, high-service models has already gained a lot of traction for commercial spaces. Highly funded startups in this niche include Industrious, a provider of flexible-term, high-end office spaces, Knotel, a provider of customized workplaces, and Breather, which provides meeting and work rooms on demand. Collectively, those three companies have raised about $300 million to date.

At first glance, it may seem shared housing startups are scaling up at an off time. The millennial generation (born roughly 1980 to 1994) can no longer be stereotyped as a massive band of young folks new to “adulting.” The average member of the generation is 28, and older millennials are mid-to-late thirties. Many even own lawnmowers.

No worries. Gen Z, the group born after 1995, is another huge generation. So even if millennials age out of shared housing, demographic forecasts indicate there will plenty of twenty-somethings to rent those partitioned-off rooms.


Image Credits: Bryce Durbin /



Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/19/shared-housing-startups-are-taking-off/







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Shared housing startups are taking off

May 19, 2018 
Joanna Glasner

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor These schools graduate the most funded startup CEOs The formula behind San Francisco’s startup success When young adults leave the parental...

How [and why] I invest in startups

Ashton Kutcher

A lot of people ask me how I choose to invest in startups. I’m not proactively funding at different stages. I’m proactively funding brilliant people trying to solve hard problems.

The London Whale Guy

 

 Banks

The London Whale Guy Would Like To Have A Few Hundred Thousand Words With Jamie Dimon

By Owen Davis

Jun 19, 2017 at 2:46 PM

Bruno Iksil, the trader who rose to infamy as JPMorgan’s London Whale in 2012, has finally decided to tell his whole story. It’s not a simple tale. Nor is it a brief one. In fact – at more than 150,000 words spread across a half-dozen pdf documents uploaded to a website called the London Whale Marionette (first reported by Financial News London) – it’s longer than most novels. But if one overriding theme can be gleaned from the rambling and minimally organized welter of information Iksil has regurgitated into the web, it’s this: Jamie Dimon is a jerk.
But it takes a heroic expenditure of time and concentration to get to that conclusion. Single-spaced paragraphs that go on for pages at a time spell out a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is only loosely chronological. As Iksil writes early on:

Many readers will find the text dense and at times difficult to grasp. I apologize for that. What makes it difficult is not the underlying trading and banking universe that is pictured in the background. The real challenge is that this case is just a series of smokes and mirrors.

He later apologizes that “my English is sometimes quite clumsy.” This is true, but sometimes his diction sings. E.g., this sentence: “Who could gobble such a gross bluff?” Really, who?
In his version of the London Whale story, Iksil was a patsy, or, in a characteristic gallicism, a “marionette.” He was simply a tool for higher-ups in JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office, swallowing his own misgivings to wind and unwind massive and risky trades whose ostensible purpose was to hedge the bank’s overall risk profile but in actuality functioned as soon-to-be-verboten proprietary trades intended solely to make money. When the music stopped, he was discarded.
This much can be reasonably inferred from previous overviews of the London Whale imbroglio, including the 2013 Senate investigation and, to a lesser degree, JPMorgan’s own, somewhat exculpatory self-examination. But the full story hasn’t been understood yet, Iksil writes, thanks to a credulous press and lazy regulators:

Only a small fraction of the existing evidence on that matter is available today for the public eye through the US Senate report exhibits…. And this small fraction itself is sort of buried in the middle of 2500 pages with no thread to guide the reader.

Apparently seeking to outdo the incomprehensibility of the Senate’s muddled report, Iksil’s saga weaves together emails, court documents, press clips and personal reflections into what is either a post-modern literary masterpiece or a length demonstration of the importance of having a good editor.

Anyway, the short version is this:

The “London Whale” is a genuine scandal. It appears to be a genuine manipulation of the markets, a genuine manipulation of the bank accounts, and a genuine manipulation of the media. It may be even worse than that if the final outcome on the “London Whale” is the one that prevails today in 2017.
Contrary to public perception, the ill-fated maneuver that caused such embarrassment for Dimon et al didn’t leave JPMorgan $6.2 billion in the red, Iksil writes, but some $25 billion in the black. That’s because the synthetic credit derivative shorts that the CIO had piled into so heavily were balanced out by long positions in the investment bank. The whole thing – minus the whole losing-billions-on-a-single-position-and-paying-huge-fines part – had been planned all the way back in 2010, Iksil writes. Taken as a whole, the Whale days were actually a good time for JPMorgan:

The year 2012, far from being a catastrophe, was quite a unique successful vintage for JpMorgan since 1999 and would still look like the best one year on the record in 2017 when the tangible capital generation is considered. One would then better understand why, back in 2012, the bank simply did NOT plan to unwind the position of the ‘CIO hedge‘ in the markets…It was already positioned to make a profit on the long planned “CIO tranche book” transfer to the IB and to hedge funds. This sheds quite a different light upon the events that are described through the media coverage part before. This implies for example that the positions offsetting those of CIO were already present in the firm, valued by the IB (the Investment Bank of JpMorgan), and this suggests that the loss at CIO was not such a worry as far as the bank earnings were concerned throughout the period covering Q1 and Q2 2012. One may then rightly conclude that the losses at CIO were balanced everyday by quite equivalent known gains somewhere else inside JpMorgan. Hence nothing had been left to chance way before the rumor and the articles got to press in April 2012.

This is just the 30,000-foot view. Iksil goes into lugubrious detail about his own side of the story – the warnings he sent upper management, the browbeating he received for those warnings, his sole and fleeting interaction with Jamie (“ Iksil will reply that he is dealing day to day with the ‘nuclear wastes’ of the markets in credit”), his being told that “we manage the optics for regulators here” at the CIO, his acute case of “Burn Out” that took him out of commission during the worst of the fiasco, his unsatisfying interactions with the regulatory state, etc – but we’ll leave it to others to comb through for anything truly revelatory.
The real takeaway, I think, is this. Let’s assume that Iksil is right, that JPMorgan promoted him into a fake position so that they could later lay the blame for the CDS trading losses at his feet. The most important criterion in selecting a good patsy isn’t just whether they’ll play along at first, but whether you can count on them not to (a) blow a whistle, nor (b) prove to be a real liability when everything shakes out. That relies on believability and media savvy, among other things. So go ahead and visit www.londonwhalemarionet.monsite-orange.fr and decide for yourself whether Iksil fits the bill. 

Topics

Bruno Iksil, Jamie Dimon, London Whale, post-modern literary masterpieces, Who could gobble such a gross bluff



 Source: https://dealbreaker.com/2017/06/the-london-whale-guy-would-like-to-have-a-few-hundred-thousand-words-with-jamie-dimon/ 

Revised on May 25th 2018 (initial version June 12th 2017)
This account of the “London Whale” case is based on 5 years of continuous in-depth analysis. The study was based on the documents available in the public domain. I have cross-referenced them with my experience of the time. This is my story. It has not changed over the years...
For those who are familiar with this scandal already, they should straightaway save time and read Confidential Impunity. This text displays the genuine story based upon my account as it was done before the authorities.This is the story that Jp Morgan has always known and still concealed.
For those who are not familiar with this quite interesting scandal, they should first  read a useful Preamble. They next should read quickly but carefully what is below and then turn to official versions vs facts in order to grasp the lasting misleading representations that still appear on the public stage.
Next they should take some time to read 5 facts -5 realities- 3 dates . That is really picturing what my role has been. This is going straight in opposition to the media legend of the "London Whale". Neither the bank nor any authority involved in the subsequent investigations will make the effort to clarify what I show here. Yet as one will see the evidence is already in the public domain since March 2013. Actually some of this evidence will be redacted later on (for that purpose see
Exhibits amended US Senate report.pdf)
Some more documents below are here for the more curious readers...

the bank complaint letter jan 2016.pdf

press communication Feb 2016.pdf

What is the purpose.pdf

1. What is the purpose of this website?

The “London Whale” case is a huge trading scandal that occurred at the CIO of the US bank Jp Morgan in second quarter of 2012. It is not pictured correctly by any public report so far. There are topics that investors, employees, and the public in general should be aware of :

1. The bank Jp Morgan had long ordered the controversial trades that would cause the scandal in 2012. Whatever the loss that burdened its CIO unit, irrespective of the “element of surprise” that the bank may allege, the firm as a whole made much, much more money through the event. The senior executives knew their actions were border line though since 2010 at the latest. Some events in 2009 and early 2010 are important clues to that: the VAR reports changed in September 2009, Bill Winters was fired abruptly next, a “cushion/reserve” of $300 million was ignored by CFO in December 2009, the book had to be “killed” on the follow in January 2010, Dimon and Cavanagh came to visit CIO London but not Iksil in early March 2010, new liquidity reserve rules were enacted in late March 2010 but were next not enforced, Cavanagh the then CFO suddenly changed cap in June 2010, the CFO of CIO left 4 months later for undisclosed reasons in November 2010, right when Iksil got a “chocolate medal” promotion. Regulators sent warning letters precisely then….see not reliable
2. The senior executives chose indeed “Iksil” to work as a “screen” for them in late 2010. It was a complete setup manufactured around RWA projective but pointless modeled reductions and misleading risk reports about stress test limits breaches. The executives promoted “Iksil” without changing his role and responsibilities. They gave him quite specific paradoxical orders despite his alerts all along 2011 and 2012. They finally left his name being relentlessly placated through the media starting on April 6th 2012 as things were just getting worse and worse for them. (see2013 the morphing tales)
3. Some authorities have not performed their duty, far from it as the public reports show for those who know the case in depth. The “screen guy” complains against the UK regulator today, namely the FCA with good reasons. It may not stop at the FCA…Please have a look at the Tab "One regulator, One Bank, One Var" and read "VaR History" (see also 5 facts - 5 realities- 3 dates  and 2013 the morphing tales )
4. At the end of the day about $50 bln changed hands in the second quarter 2012 between a mass of investors and some “happy insiders”. Jp Morgan made about $25 billion or more on the event for itself as its public accounting reports show through the generation of what is called “tangible capital” or “hard capital” (10-Q and 10-K reports filed with the SEC). see Not reliable
5. One may summarize the trading scandal as: when the CIO of JP Morgan had lost $1 billion dollar, Jp Morgan as a whole had made $4 billion for itself net of its CIO loss. The Jp Morgan CIO lost in whole $6.3 billion which led to an ultimate profit at Jp Morgan of more than $25 billion in 2012. Please look at the next tab "One Regulator, One Bank, One VaR" in particular to the document "JP gains in 2012"

A full disclosure of the existing evidence should be made in the public.
click on "what is the purpose.pdf" for more details

(see official versions vs facts).

What is the “London Whale”?
The “London whale” is a trading scandal that occurred in 2012. It coupled with an accounting fraud, a massive market manipulation and a unique media manipulation. One name came under the spotlights: “Bruno Michel Iksil”. Who was he? What was he doing at Jp Morgan Bank? A clear answer never was given yet 5 years on…Was he just a “marionette” moved in the financial markets by the bank senior executives like a bait on the hook? Who could gobble such a gross bluff? The extracts below will show the ongoing confusion that has been entertained…. see the morphing tales and not reliable
Once upon a time, on the surface of things?......
click on "what is the London Whale.pdf" for more information
see also Var History andJPM gains in 2012

What is the London Whale.pdf

Some regulators (also called financial markets watchdogs) and potentially hundreds of millions of savers felt misled by Jp Morgan statements at the time of events (the bank admitted it for part in September and October 2013 paying overall a fine of about $1 bln and settling many other pending litigations with the US government for $13 Bln more). Was it such a big deal for Jp Morgan now that the CIO and its “tranche book” were dismantled as planned since late 2010? No it was not a big deal for Jp Morgan ultimately once the CIO was dead for good in July 2012. Once they understood that the US bank had never been really endangered by the well publicized losses, some investors felt rightly so that they had been stolen some of their savings after they had felt compelled to engage in panicky trades that they would not have done otherwise. Please click on the next tab called "One regulator, One Bank, One Var" next to this Tab... See also 5 facts- 5 realities- 3 dates

For those who wonder.pdf

Exhibits amended US Senate report.pdf

June 2016 project letter.pdf

Source: http://londonwhalemarionet.monsite-orange.fr/

Bill Benter at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians 2004

Bill Benter created software that analysed hundreds of racing stats and
facts.

His software was so successful he made hundreds of millions of
pounds playing races at Hong Kong. 

In this presentation to the ICCM in 2004 he discusses his software and
probabilities used for horse racing in basic terms.

Link: https://youtu.be/jJgNilIFKPo