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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While homebuyers and home sellers still see headlines about the housing market being a sellers market and national home prices reaching all-time highs, a deeper look reveals that several regional housing markets have shifted, giving homebuyers some power. 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. 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 hold the most power. At the end of January 2025, national active inventory for sale was still 25% below January 2019 levels. However, more and more regional markets are surpassing that threshold. Among the nations 200 largest metro area housing markets, 41 markets ended January 2025 with more active homes for sale than they had in pre-pandemic January 2019. These are the places where homebuyers will be able to find the most leverage or market balance in 2025. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained leverage, are located in Gulf Coast and Mountain West regions. These areas were home to many of the nations top pandemic boomtowns, which experienced significant home price growth during the pandemic housing boom, which stretched housing fundamentals far beyond local income levels. When pandemic-fueled migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market 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 prices or make 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=0;r
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Picture this: Youre driving on a crowded highway, preparing to change lanes and pass a tractor-trailer. As you check your mirrors, a loud chime on your cars infotainment screen rings out. Its Google Maps, asking whether a stalled car is still on the shoulder, as other drivers have reported. A prompt appearsYes or Norequiring a response within seconds. Your already taxed brain now has another decision to process, all while youre moving at 60 miles per hour. Scenarios like this became possible last summer, when Google overhauled its popular navigation app. Since then, drivers using Google Maps frequently receive prompts to confirm an incident, such as a police vehicle or stalled car, that other users have flagged. These prompts are announced with a chime as well as text and a timer that consume the bottom chunk of the app display. If there is a way to turn off this incident verification feature, I havent found it. (A Google spokesperson did not respond when I asked.) These prompts can be annoying to drivers who find them intrusive. More troublingly, experts in UX and human factors worry that they will cause distraction that leads to crashes. If the request happens on a stretch of road where there isn’t that much one going around you, its probably not a problem, said Birsen Donmez, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Toronto who researches distracted driving. But if it pops up when you know your turn is coming up and you really need to focus, it could confuse you and divert your attention. Thats an unsettling problem for the hundreds of millions of people who use Google Maps, as well as for everyone who shares the road with them. ‘This is an irrelevant piece of information’ Google has dominated navigation since launching Maps in February 2005. Though competitors have appearedApple, MapQuest, and TomTom GO among themnone has come close to matching Googles user base. In 2013, Google solidified its lead by acquiring the Israeli startup Waze, whose crowdsourced traffic and incident reporting technology later shaped key features of Maps even though it remained a separate app. Today, Google Maps guides far more journeys than other wayfinding tools. According to a 2024 MarketWatch analysis, 70% of U.S. drivers used Google Maps, compared to just 25% for both Waze and Apple Maps. MapQuest, once ubiquitous, is no longer a market leader but still had 17 million regular users as of 2022. But for the first time in years, Google Maps now faces a credible threat. Fully recovered from an inauspicious 2012 launch, Apple Maps is now a vastly improved service that has garnered praise for design elements like object-based instructions (Turn left after the next traffic light) that can seem more intuitive than Google Maps directions (In 500 feet, turn left). Meanwhile, the iPhonewhich features Apple Maps as its defaulthas been grabbing market share from Android. With competition with Apple Maps intensifying, Google unveiled major revisions to its mapping tool last summer. Google Maps had already invited users to submit information about observed traffic incidents, which the company would then share with other drivers. Now, with its new update, the company announced, other drivers can confirm the incident with just a tap. What that means in practice is that drivers frequently hear a chime as a question appears on their infotainment screen, such as Stalled vehicle reported 51 minutes ago from Google Maps drivers. Is this still there? A countdown progress bar pushes drivers to quickly tap a Yes or No button. It makes you feel like you have to respond or get it off of your screen, said Kate Moran, vice president for research and content at Nielsen Norman Group, a UX advisory practice. After a few seconds the prompt disappears, either because the driver answered the question or because the timer hit zero. Innocuous though it may seem, demanding just a tap can be dangerously distracting, University of Torontos Donmez said, because infotainment touchscreens inevitably require users to look away from the roadway ahead. She added that inexperienced or elderly drivers are more likely to struggle to suppress irrelevant stimulus. Donmez is particularly concerned by the urgency of Google Maps requests for confirmation. Drivers typically modulate their distraction engagement based on whats coming up on the road, and thats why crashes dont happen, she said. For instance, many drivers instinctively wait until after completing a lane change before they select a new podcast or adjust the air conditioning. But Google Mapss chime and countdown progress bar are designed to demand immediate attention, regardless of road conditions. Defenders of Google Mapss new UX might note that Waze, the other navigation app owned by Alphabet, has long asked users to confirm past reports of traffic incidents. But that doesnt mean Wazes design is safe. In a 2019 paper, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers noted that Waze is dangerous to not only the driver but also to nearby drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists. When I asked how Google Maps evaluated the safety of its UX update before rolling it out, a corporate spokesperson replied in an email, We take safety very seriously and regularly test our features for driver distraction. According to a corporate blog post, Google Mapss new UX has been distributed globally. The company does not appear to have offered users an option to turn off the verification prompts or limit them to specific types of incidents. One user asked on the Google Maps Community forum how to disable the still there? questions while driving, but that query went unanswered. Notably, many of the incidents flagged by Google Maps are unrelated to traffic safety, such as vehicles on the shoulder that passingdrivers often encounter without second thought. Most of the time this is an irrelevant piece of information for safety, Donmez said. Given their potential for annoyance as well as distraction, these prompts shouldnt be inescapable, she said. Some drivers may find the feature useful, she said, but they should have the ability to easily override it. Moran agreed. Its not that the intention behind the feature is bad, but the way it’s been implemented is the problem, she told me. A good experience would be allowing people to say, Dont prompt me with these dialogues anymore. But even better would be to require people to opt in. Instead of turning it on by default, allow people who might be more excited about being in the Google community to say yes, Ill answer these questions and proactively provide data. Instead, all Google Maps users are now being peppered with verification requests, whether they like it or not. ‘It could just be a lack of foresight’ As to why Google Maps changed its UX to request user confirmations, Moran suggests the company probably wants to build a more current dataset of road conditions. If you really want to know if something is still on the road, the fastest way to get that information is to ask the person driving by, she said. But there is another possibility: The prompts unavoidable and aggressive design may be the brainchild of project managers instructed to increase user engagement by any means necessary. People who make UX product decisions are often under lots of pressure to achieve short-sighted, short-term metrics, Moran said. It could just be a lack of foresight that this was going to be distracting or annoying. (Google Maps did not respond to questions about its reasons for demanding that all users confirm road conditions). For now, at least, Google Maps users are stuck with its new UX. It is too soon to know whether the design will increase crashes, but the threat is real, particularly given the apps huge user base. Road safety advocates have already expressed concern about distraction due to increasingly complex infotainment systems, as automakers strive to offer the flashiest designs (even though many car owners find touchscreens woefully inferior to the knobs and dials they replaced). In a 2022 study, researchers at Drexel University concluded that the comparatively simple infotainment systems of the early 2010s were already a statistically significant risk factor for crashes. Yet, infotainment systems remain unregulated in the U.S. In 2012, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued voluntary guidance proposing maximum thresholds for the time drivers must look away from the road to accomplish an infotainment task, but within a few years automakers were routinely violating it. They have paid no penalty for doing so. With the Trump administration reflexively hostile to regulations, new federal safeguards pertaining to navigation tools or infotainment systems are unlikely. Still, Moran thinks that lawsuits involving crashes caused by distracted driving might force Google Maps to change course. The first time I noticed this new feature, I thought Wow, Im surprised their legal team is okay with this, she said. Alternatively, the markets invisible hand might render its own verdict about Googles UX design: Its users can always switch to Apple.
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In a 2014 commencement address at her alma mater Dartmouth College, TV writer and producer Shonda Rhimes told students, Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath- and storytime at home. Her comments are true reflections of what work-life balance is, says Janna Koretz, clinical psychologist and founder of Azimuth, a Boston-based provider of therapy services. When people think about balance, they think about it feeling good and being the right amount of everything, she says. I thinkespecially moment to momentthat doesn’t exist. Instead, we should be thinking about how to successfully integrate [the] two things so that most of the time they’re possible. To find the right blend, you need to examine your work life and determine where its negatively impacting your personal life. Koretz shares four common signs: Your identity is too tied to work To know if your work is infringing on your personal life, consider how you would respond if someone asked, Tell me about yourself? Can you say things that arent about work? asks Koretz. A lot of times, [people] can’t come up with anything. They feel, I don’t know who I am, especially if theyve lost their job, and don’t have anything else. If your job becomes your sole identity, its likely crowded out or replaced important things in your personal life. You feel guilty about other commitments Feeling guilty that you’re not doing enough in other realms is another sign that work is creeping into your personal life. For example, you may feel guilty that you have to pick up your kids because you have a lot of work waiting for you back at the office, says Koretz. Its not feeling guilty all the time, but guilty about the choices you’re making, whether they be personal or professional, she says. You’re avoiding small tasks When people think about burnout, they usually think about being exhausted. While Koretz says thats a big part of it, another aspect is avoidance. Avoidance and irritability go hand in hand during burnout, says Koretz. If you are avoiding small tasks at home, such as walking the dog, or at work, such as responding to emails, it could indicate that you dont have enough emotional energy. If there’s too much of this in your life, it’s getting in the way, says Koretz. Life becomes all about little irritants. They grate on you and become a chip on your shoulder. You feel disconnected In addition to avoiding small tasks, you may start disconnecting from activities and interests you normally enjoy, which could be another sign that your emotional energy is drained. You may also feel emotionally disconnected from the people in your life. A lot of people talk about living in a ‘roommate stage’ with their significant other, says Koretz. While people can go through ebbs and flows, its about not knowing what’s going on with your friends, not feeling like you have friends, or not feeling like you can call them with your worries because you haven’t spent a lot of time with them lately. Spending time with friends and hobbies is about finding joy and having more baskets for your eggs, explains Koretz. We are very tribal, social beings; its biological, she says. A World Health Organization study on older adults found that loneliness contributed significantly to cognitive decline and depression and death. How to correct the problem If you recognize yourself, Koretz suggests asking yourself, Why am I unhappy? Go beyond the general reasons, such as feeling like you have too much work to do and dig a little further. Identify your core beliefs and values to make sure your job is still aligned with them. While your work doesnt have to be meaningful 100% of the time, you shouldnt feel like a cog in the wheel all the time, either. A lot of people are doing work that isn’t meaningful to them and that contributes to overwhelm, says Koretz. What motivates people, what brings them joy, is finding meaning. Once you understand what is meaningful to you, make a plan to design your life around it. Koretz says it doesn’t have to be executed right away, nor do you have to make giant strides. Identify small steps you can take and create a career map, figuring out whats possible and when it makes sense. For example, you may decide to keep your high paying job until you pay off your student loans in five years. Knowing something isnt forever can make it easier to bear, which Koretz likens to how doctors get through the burdensome schedule of the residency or fellowship stage. Burnout can be due to feeling stuck, says Koretz. When you realize you can get out and you have tangible steps, you can become excited about where youre heading, and that changes the dynamic so you can be better at integrating your personal and work life.
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