Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1110

Mary Meeker – who is a partner in the VC firm Kleiner Perkins – just recently released her annual Internet Trends report. 

I’ve pasted the table of contents above so you can quickly decide if you’d like to spend your time going through it. The entire report is over 350 slides.

If you can’t see the embedded slideshow below or if you’d like to access the reports from previous years, click here .

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Internet Trends 2017 Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Last month Zillow.com launched a new feature called “Instant Offers.” Press real estate can be found  here .

It is:

“…a way for homeowners to sell their homes quickly by providing them with offers from investors and a comparative market analysis (CMA) from a local real estate agent, as an estimate for what the home might fetch on the open market.

Here is a bit more about how it works:

“To participate in Zillow Instant Offers, verified homeowners interested in receiving investor offers confirm information about the home (number of bedrooms, square footage, etc.), highlight any updates and provide several photos of the home. From there, select investors who buy homes in the area can present their offers alongside the CMA from a local real estate agent. Any investor offers and the CMA will include an overview of fees associated with each option, to enable sellers to make an informed apples-to-apples comparison.”

When I first saw the headline, I thought they were copying Opendoor . But it’s not the same model. They aren’t buying the homes, like Opendoor, they are simply working to coordinate an “instant” transaction. Still, I’m sure that Opendoor provided at least some of the impetus for this feature.

Of course, the most interesting question with these online real estate platforms is: Will they disrupt real estate agents? Mike Delprete wrote a great post about this in the wake of Zillow’s announcement.

But ultimately he concludes something that I have felt strongly for years:

“So, while real estate sites are best positioned to disrupt the real estate industry by displacing agents, they’re also the least likely to do so, because agents are their biggest customers and source of revenue.”

The irony.

About 70% of Zillow’s revenue comes from real estate agents. So it seems unlikely that they – at least currently – will be the ones that turn the tables on agents. 

Some real estate platforms have started diversifying their revenue streams for probably this exact reason. But who knows, it may be a new entrant, rather than an incumbent, who pulls this off. 

There’s an argument going around these days that rural America is the new inner city . That is, rural America has replaced inner cities as the geographies facing the greatest socioeconomic challenges. 

In fact, it’s time for the stigma associated with the term “inner city” to disappear – if it hasn’t already. Blight no longer seems to be the concern. Instead, the concern is that our inner cities are becoming exclusive enclaves for the rich .

The United States Department of Agriculture recently published data on educational attainment within rural areas . And since education is one of the biggest drivers of economic prosperity, it’s valuable to look at this data. 

The first thing to note is that while educational attainment within rural areas is increasing, it still lags urban areas:

The second thing to note is that even with the same level of higher education, the labor market will generally pay you more if you live in an urban area:

However, the spread between rural-urban increases as you move up the education ladder. With less than a school diploma, there isn’t much difference. But with a graduate or professional degree, there’s about a ~35% increase in earnings, on average, according to the above chart.

So it should come as no surprise that many smart and educated people are choosing to live in urban areas. They should make more money.

All charts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.