Alex Nicoll

Hiring skilled construction workers is hard with no centralized way for employers to match jobs with the right people. Skillit plans to change that.

Domatic’s product could make it much easier, and cheaper, to speed up the adoption of carbon-saving smart-building technology.

Companies from Homeward to Ribbon, aka “power buyers,” boomed when competition for homes was fierce. They told us how they’re managing the downturn.

The single-family rental market, a popular playground of Wall Street landlords in 2020 and 2021, has been in a deep-freeze for the last year. Rising borrowing costs and a shakier housing market halted most transactions, leaving idle much of the $110 billion raised to buy homes.But the optimism was never broken.Even though some Wall Street firms were busier selling than buying in the early days of 2023, the mood among the investors, brokers, and property managers that feed off the more than $4 tr…

Online mortgage lender Better Home & Finance started trading on Thursday after merging with blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. The stock, which trades on the Nasdaq stock market under the ticker symbol BETR, dropped more than 90% at the opening bell.The stock dropped so quickly that trading was halted four times before 10:00 a.m.But CEO Vishal Garg, known for brutally laying off hundreds of employees via Zoom, insists he has a plan. He’d better — no pun intended. When the deal was firs…

Two days before its highly anticipated stock-market debut, top executives of mortgage startup Better, including CEO Vishal Garg, held an all-hands meeting to celebrate with staff. The stock debut, the result of a long-delayed SPAC merger, would give the company access to $565 million in capital, which Garg, had said would be used to improve the company as it waits for mortgage demand to pick up. Staff were treated to a bubbly toast and assured that the company was finally at the right size to be…

The real-estate buying spree of the last several years may be waning, but there are still plenty of opportunities for multi-family-home investors. Only now, the best deals aren’t in the Sunbelt region but rather along the Eastern coast. At least that’s the view of Matt Frazier, CEO and cofounder of Jones Street Investment Partners, a multifamily investor with roughly $2 billion in assets under management. Frazier thinks the best opportunities have shifted from southern cities like Austin, Texas,…

With interest rates high and financing hard to come by, there are a lot of doomsday predictions around office towers, multifamily apartments, and other commercial real estate. But just as the pandemic led to a wave of migration from overpopulated cities to the Sunbelt, today’s real estate market also has a mix of winners and losers.To better understand the state of the commercial real estate market, look no further than a recent credit-reporting agency Moody’s report. Not surprisingly, it found…

Now may be the time to shop for an office lease.This may seem counterintuitive at a time when most employers are taking a wait-and-see approach to their office needs to account for a rise in remote work, a stagnating economy, and rising interest rates.But Insider’s reporting shows that this is precisely why some office landlords are rolling out the red carpet for prospective tenants. As office vacancies soar to record highs in some markets, office landlords often have no choice but to find new a…

Rising interest rates have slammed the breaks on America’s housing market, with home sales down 15.4% year-over-year in September, according to the National Association of Realtors.But one segment of the housing market is still humming along, with annual sales actually up 33.9% from last September, according to the Census Bureau. Newly built homes now make up nearly one-third of all homes listed, a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors.Homebuilders’ success lies in part…

Keyway has always been a software company — just not in the way it is now.The company’s original business plan was to help hedge funds and other large investors put money into small but profitable real-estate deals by finding ways to get them done more efficiently using technology. “It takes the same amount of time and effort to close a $5 million deal and a $100 million deal, so the biggest players are just looking at large deals,” Matias Recchia, cofounder and CEO of Keyway, told Insider.The…

Vince Toye leads two affordable-housing businesses for JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank, in its offices hundreds of feet up the Manhattan skyline. Growing up in a small Virginia town as one of seven kids raised by a single mother, he never expected to reach these heights.For the first few years of his life, his mother rented single-family homes in a segregated town until she was able to purchase a home; they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. Toye was the first person in his…

It has been a dark year for commercial real estate investors. Deals have slowed to nearly a halt; defaults are growing even “healthy” asset classes like apartments, and high borrowing costs are pushing values down across the board.For Ben Miller, CEO and cofounder of online investing platform Fundrise, however, it’s about to be the best time to buy. The reasoning is simple, he told Business Insider. When interest rates go up, real estate prices fall, and when interest rates go down, the prices r…

Adam Neumann has been busy since leaving WeWork, the coworking company he founded, and then quit amid scrutiny over his leadership.Since then, he’s launched two separate startups: FlowCarbon, which promises to use crypto and carbon offsets to help fight climate change, and Flow, an apartment rental startup that promises to give tenants a better experience and a sense of ownership, through, among other things, plunging their own toilets.Publicly launched in 2022 but built with assets from Neumann…

In the 1980s, Rudy Giuliani, then the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, led a three-year sting operation, dubbed “Operation Closing Bell,” aimed at drug trafficking on Wall Street. It resulted in more than a dozen financial-firm employees, including stockbrokers and a senior partner, being rounded up on charges of illicit dealing in cocaine, including in exchange for stock.Undercover agents who worked the case estimated that roughly 90% of the people they encountered in Manhattan’s Financial…

In his 1987 classic, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” author Tom Wolfe used the phrase “Masters of the universe” to refer to the world of sell-side traders. Today, that phrase might be best applied to the dealmakers who run the $12 trillion world of private equity.With Blackstone reaching its goal of $1 trillion assets under management, and Apollo well above $600 billion under management, the business of buying companies to operate on behalf of investors continues to gain momentum. Consider: In 2022,…

President Joe Biden’s former boss, ex-President Barack Obama, used to say that his favorite American president was Abraham Lincoln, who kept the nation from splintering during the Civil War. But, on this Presidents Day, Biden may have a reason to show Lincoln some gratitude.Indeed, Lincoln, the country’s 16th commander in chief, pardoned Biden’s great-great-grandfather, US Army employee Moses J. Robinette, after he was caught up in an altercation on a Union Army base in 1864, according to a Wash…

In a landmark ruling in Alabama that’s left the future of in vitro fertilization in the state in jeopardy, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court pointed to a verse from the Book of Genesis in explaining why frozen embryos are people — and said that a person could be punished if they’re destroyed.“Man’s creation in God’s image is the basis of the general prohibition on the intentional taking of human life,” Tom Parker, the chief justice, wrote in an opinion published last week, referenci…

Well-timed greed is a long-standing American tradition.Warren Buffett is famous for saying, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” But before Buffett, there was J. Paul Getty, an oil tycoon and the patriarch of the Getty family who got his start buying shares of distressed oil companies during the Great Depression. And in the aftermath of the mortgage meltdown of 2008, while foreclosures were piling up, a new generation of well-capitalized players — from Blac…

It’s been a bleak time for real estate. Rising interest rates have slammed the brakes on deals, and many real-estate companies have cut staff as revenues slowed.Until recently, Avenue One, a startup that uses technology to help large investors like KKR and Global Atlantic buy and sell homes to rent, appeared immune to to the slowdown. Founded in 2020 by real-estate executives Ryan Stroker and William Martiner, Avenue One was profitable by early 2021, company officials told Business Insider. By M…