Hey there weekday warriors,

I’m excited to announce a brand-new newsletter I’ve been working on.

Pocket List is a free weekly newsletter for residential real estate investors (think: multi-family, single-family, flippers, wholesalers, etc.), with two goals:

1. Make you smarter about real estate

2. Help you make (more) money

You can expect news & insights about the residential real estate market. PLUS, every week, we give away a FREE pocket listing to anyone interested.

You can subscribe below with ONE CLICK.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE SHAMELESS PLUGGING… My newsletter agency (yes, I can help you or your company build the next TWC) was selected as one of Sparkloop’s certified partners. You can check out my profile here if the idea of working with me has you going from six to midnight.

Keep on snapping necks and cashing checks,

- tyler

+ US stocks “finished lower on Friday, notching a second consecutive losing week for Wall Street, as investors weighed the impact of hot inflation prints on the Federal Reserve's policy decision next week.” (Reuters)

+ The 10-year Treasury yield was “little changed on Friday as investors considered the outlook for interest rates after inflation data released Thursday came in higher than expected." (CNBC)

+ Oil prices “dipped on Friday, a day after topping $85 a barrel for the first time since November, but prices were expected to finish more than 3% higher for the week on rising demand from U.S. refiners completing planned overhauls.” (Reuters)

+ Bitcoin “had the most volatile weekend in a year slipping as low as $64,550 after reaching a new all-time high of $72,760 on Thursday.” (Cryptoslate)

+ The three most talked about stocks on WallStreetBets in the past 24 hours were: 1) Nvidia -0.1% 2) MicroStrategy +6.2% 3) C3.ai -0.6%

The market moves you need to know about…

+ Sike! Just a day after it looked like the end was near for Fisker, the EV maker said it hired advisors to facilitate a strategic partnership with a major automaker… not to help with a bankruptcy filing. Shares jumped 12.7% on the news.

+ Curaleaf (and pretty much every other multi-state operator cannabis stock) mooned after the Vice President urged the DEA to reclassify the devil’s lettuce. CURLF was 21.8% higher.

+ HashiCorp (spoiler: not a weed company) mooned 12.3% after hours on news that it was exploring a sale.

Sh*t just got real

It’s time to pour one out for everyone who graduated from a multi-level marketing scheme to try their luck as a real estate agent…

You see, the real estate game done changed on Friday.

The National Association of Realtors agreed to a $418M settlement with groups of butt hurt home sellers that claim it’s been conspiring to f*ck over everyone for decades. Spoiler: it has.

The claim is that by forcing sellers to pay their broker and the buyer’s broker a standard commission in the 5-6% range, they’ve been driving up the cost of housing.

Friendly reminder: the current industry standard is that the seller pays both their broker and the buyer’s broker.

In addition to writing a Publisher’s Clearing House-sized check, the NAR, which represents more than 1M realtors, has agreed to a bunch of new industry standards, including…

• Buyers’ brokers will enter into a direct agreement with buyers (read: the fee won’t be set by the seller in all cases). This could mean that more buyers will go it alone or just have a lawyer review the deal vs. hiring an agent.

• Agent’s compensation won’t appear on listing portals. This will ensure buyers’ agents don’t choose listings to show their clients based on how much they can make.

But hey, it could have been worse…

The National Associate of Realtors kinda got away with murder. You see, this deal settled a $1.8B antitrust verdict handed down in Missouri last year… plus a bunch of others across the country.

To be fair, there’s a chance the DOJ decides this deal doesn’t go far enough, and they could reject NAR’s offer.

The fallout…

This might seem obvious… but there’s a very real chance that commissions drop and the real estate game will be flipped on its head. Analysts believe that real estate commissions could fall by as much as 30% in the coming years.

Oh, and that means there’s about to be a bloodbath in the real estate industry. The number of agents could drop by more than 60% over the same period…

Tyler’s take… Let’s check in on Zillow, shall we?

Shares fell 13% on Friday, and this could end up being more of a sh*tshow than that iBuying experiment. You see, Zillow doesn’t make its money from you scrolling through houses you can’t afford. It gets paid by agents purchasing leads and marketing their listings. With smaller commissions, those budgets will dry up.

“The Water Coolest for Real Estate”

… is probably the best way to describe the Pocket List newsletter.

If the Pocket List looks and feels a lot like The Water Coolest, that’s because I write it…

I partnered with a legend of residential real estate investing game to build a newsletter that aims to keep investors updated on the industry and help them make more money.

Every Thursday, you’ll get…

• All the industry news and updates you need to know

• The latest trends and what they mean for you

• Tips to help you make more money

• A FREE pocketing listing

You can subscribe below with ONE CLICK.

+ Imagine getting fined every time you lie at work.

Tim Cook got spit-roasted by a bunch of investors. Apple reached a $490M settlement with the group of shareholders after Tim Apple made some shady comments about sales in China (or lack thereof).

So where did Tim go wrong? Well, in late 2018 he told investors that Apple would face pressure in Brazil, Russia, India, and Turkey. He made sure to point out China was not part of the problem. Then, in early 2019, the iPhone maker slashed its sales estimates by ~$9B, citing US-China relations fraying.

Shares crumbled after Apple said it had a China issue. And, it turns out, that pisses off stockholders.

+ You: “The pandemic was the worst thing that’s ever happened to the human race.”

McDonald’s: “Hold my beer.”

On Friday morning, McDonald’s was hit with a major “system failure” that caused disruptions and closures across the world. Most of the issues impacted stores in the UK, Australia, and Japan (spoiler: Japan is a huge market). Although some outages were reported in the US. Probably just McFlurry machine complaints…

McD’s promised it wasn’t a cybersecurity event, which is good news… because your McDonald’s order history getting leaked might be a worse fate than being exposed in the Ashley Madison hack.

+ The good news for Reddit is that its IPO is reportedly 4-5x oversubscribed, meaning it should easily reach the top end of its $31-$34 price per share range when it goes public Wednesday. The bad news? The FTC is kicking the tires on Reddit’s data licensing practices (read: the company selling its user-created content to the likes of Google and OpenAI to train its large language models).

+ I’m sure there are worse career moves. But I can’t think of any. Stephen Scherr took over as CEO of Hertz ~2 years, after a three-decade career at Goldman that culminated with him being named CFO…

On Friday, Stephen “stepped down” from his position at the car rental company. Why? Well, it probably had to do with having orchestrated a shift to EVs which unraveled spectacularly.

+ Today in “you can’t make this sh*t up”… a Boeing jet flying from San Francisco to Oregon lost a pretty large panel mid-flight. To be fair, it wasn’t a door plug, and no one was hurt… except (presumably) Boeing shareholders.

Here's what I'm keeping an eye on today...

+ Nvidia hosts GTC 2024 (think: Apple’s developers’ conference, but chips only). Of course, the only thing anyone cares about is CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote. And more importantly, if he has any major announcements…

Here’s today’s question…

Last week, Costco’s outgoing CFO indicated the $1.50 hot dog combo is “probably safe for a while.” So…

Oh, and…

Does this look like the face of a guy you should take financial advice from?

No, it’s the face of an individual who is financially irresponsible/dumb enough to be talked into spending money on a family photo shoot that he could have just done with his iPhone. So, act accordingly...

This is not financial advice. Nothing in this newsletter is an investment recommendation. All content is created for entertainment, educational, or informational purposes only. Do your own research, or do yourself a favor and hire a professional