Update 7/4/26: Deal is back, this time spend $1,250 and get $250 back. Valid until 11/30/26. Valid for properties in Anguilla, French Polynesia, Mexico, and the US. Hat tip to FM
Update 8/11/25: Offer is back, this time it’s $200 with $1,000 spend. Valid through ?? (ht Ok-Anywhere6998)
The Offer
No direct link, targeted offer
Get a one-time $180 statement credit by using your enrolled eligible Card to spend a minimum of $750 USD in one or more purchases on room rate and room charges, when you pay for your stay at participating Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts and LXR Hotels & Resorts in the US and select global properties.
Our Verdict
As always with these types of deals it’s good if you have an upcoming stay planned but not really big enough to change booking habits.
View more Amex offers here & if you have any questions about American Express offers then read this post.
Online Business management degree | What is Business Management | ቢዝነስ ማኔጅመንት ምንድን ነው?
Studying a management degree gives graduates a broad knowledge of business, finance, economics and marketing, as well as a range of practical skills and work experience, making them highly sought after by graduate employers and for graduate training schemes.
Online programs allow students to earn their bachelor’s in business management in as few as 18 months through fast-track programs. However, degree-seekers often take around four years to complete an online bachelor’s degree.
Business management definition is managing the coordination and organization of business activities. This typically includes the production of materials, money, and machines, and involves both innovation and marketing.
In a $500 billion industry still dominated by clipboards and subcontractors, the most aggressive AI deployment isn’t happening in software or finance. It’s happening inside a central Pennsylvania company that helps you remodel your bathroom from your couch — and its founder is the first to admit the technology still thinks his EBITDA is measured in millimeters.
He’s still growing at 15% to 20% per year, and your remote remodeling habit has helped him build a quiet billion-dollar business. That, and it got him a seat on the board of his favorite Pennsylvania potato chip.
The engineer who turned bathrooms into an AI lab
B.J. Werzyn graduated from Penn State in 1999 aiming for a career in aerospace engineering, until upper-level calculus convinced him he wasn’t “genetically encoded” for a lifetime of abstract math. Instead, he took that engineering mindset — mapping systems, diagnosing problems, optimizing constraints — into an unglamorous corner of the real economy: home remodeling.
In 2006, after a stint helping his family’s window and door business expand into Florida during the housing boom, Werzyn moved back to Pennsylvania, walked into a Staples, and bought a phone, a desk, and a computer. That was the start of West Shore Home, a company built from day one around a simple promise: tear apart a bathroom, rebuild it in two or three days, and leave the homeowner with “fast, easy, convenient” service instead of the horror stories the industry is known for. Over time, he mapped and systematized every step — measurements, permitting, inventory, scheduling, install — and then began replacing the paper parts with software.
Twenty years later, West Shore Home has more than 3,200 employees, including roughly 1,200 installers and 650 design consultants scattered across dozens of markets. It has completed over 334,000 installs. It generated $933 million in gross revenue in 2025, according to financial records reviewed by Fortune, and is now running at roughly a $1.15 billion gross-revenue pace — close enough for Werzyn to talk about “billion-dollar scale,” but not quite enough for a full booked billion-dollar year. The company has also brought in private equity: Leonard Green & Partners bought a 20% stake in 2020, with Werzyn retaining the remaining 80%.
In other words, this is not a software company with a handful of pilots in the physical world. It is a trades-heavy, PE-backed business that quietly decided to become an AI-native operator.
Hawkeye and Felix: computer vision in every bathroom
The centerpiece of West Shore’s AI stack is Hawkeye, a proprietary application built after Werzyn acquired a software development firm that had been creating custom digital tools for big-box players like Home Depot and Andersen Windows. Using an iPad equipped with LIDAR and computer vision, a design consultant can walk into a bathroom and, in under a minute, produce a complete 3D scan of the space.
That scan isn’t just a picture. Hawkeye converts the room into structured data: precise measurements, obstacles that need to be moved, existing fixtures and mechanicals, and other conditions that could affect installation. Those data feed directly into West Shore’s internal configure-price-quote system, a tool they call Felix. The measurements auto-populate the quote, eliminating the transcription errors and ruler mistakes that have plagued the industry for decades. Hawkeye also flags potential issues for the company’s Project Review team, contributing, according to internal figures, to a measurable increase in first-pass yield — more jobs that go from sale to scheduling without being put on hold for missing information.
By West Shore’s own count, all of its design consultants are trained on Hawkeye, and in 2026 about 70% of in-home sales appointments generated a Hawkeye scan. The figure is even higher for bathroom-specific appointments, where roughly three-quarters of visits involved the technology. Only a tiny fraction of customers — around 1,600 out of 136,000 sales appointments — declined the scan. For everyone else, a bathroom remodel now starts with a computer vision capture and a cascade of AI-assisted decisions in the background.
Supporting that infrastructure is a sizable tech organization for a construction-adjacent business: 115 employees work on West Shore’s proprietary systems, including 23 who focus exclusively on AI. They sit within an operation that otherwise looks very traditional — installers on the payroll, design consultants driving from house to house, call-center staff handling inbound inquiries.
It’s the way AI touches almost every part of the process that makes the company different.
Claude thinks EBITDA is measured in millimeters
Werzyn is unabashedly enthusiastic about what AI has done for his business. The company’s tech team has been “pretty deep” with models like Claude for everything from internal forecasting and five-year growth modeling to building real-time scheduling engines that check inventory at branch warehouses, look up crew availability, and query permitting databases at the moment a customer toggles product options on an iPad.
Yet when he talks about the technology, he doesn’t sound like someone who believes it’s infallible. “Yeah, I mean, you see little hallucinations all the time,” Werzyn said, adding, “I was having a conversation this weekend with Claude, and it was a pretty in-depth conversation around putting out forecasting and modeling for our five-year model and growth rates.” He and Claude were “deep into this conversation,” exchanging relevant feedback and throwing around adjusted EBITDA figures, “and then it says, ‘Oh, and then in fiscal year 2028, you’re going to have 260 millimeters of EBITDA.”
“It clearly knows those are dollars,” Werzyn said, still surprised that the model could understand the context and still revert to the wrong unit.
That anecdote isn’t the only glitch he’s seen. On the customer side, West Shore has developed conversational, agent-based SMS tools to follow up on leads — the kind of text-based outreach that can turn cold inquiries into booked appointments with much higher response rates than phone calls. The system performs well in tests and already generates about 10% of all appointments issued. But Werzyn’s chief AI officer has had to contend with his caution about deploying it more broadly.
His argument is simple: if even 10%–15% of customers interacting with a fully autonomous SMS agent have an experience that feels off — an appointment scheduled incorrectly, a quote that doesn’t line up, a stray hallucination in an otherwise smooth process — that’s too high a rate for a business built on trust, especially in a category where projects cost tens of thousands of dollars. The upside of scaling faster is not worth the reputational risk. So the company has chosen to keep humans in the loop at every stage, moving capabilities “left” in the process only as they prove themselves.
In practice, that means AI is running the numbers, populating forms, surfacing options, and even suggesting installation dates. But a human still visits the home, still checks the scan, still confirms the quote, and still hits “schedule.” AI is everywhere, but it doesn’t get to close the loop alone.
Scaling revenue without doubling headcount
The tension between dependence and distrust is not just philosophical. It shows up in how Werzyn thinks about jobs.
West Shore employs more than 3,200 people, including 1,209 installers, 657 design consultants, and hundreds of corporate and call-center staff. Over the past three years, the company has added roughly 600 net new jobs. Those workers operate in what economists increasingly describe as a K-shaped environment: asset owners have benefited from rising markets and pandemic-era gains, while middle-income households continue to feel squeezed by higher interest rates and elevated prices.
The housing market is still frozen by most metrics. Thirty-year mortgage rates hover well above the levels homeowners locked in during the boom; existing home sales are sluggish; and the usual remodeling cycle tied to moving — new owners buying a house and immediately upgrading bathrooms and kitchens — has stalled. Werzyn sees that dynamic in his own pipeline.
Asset-rich consumers who are staying put are investing in improvements. Middle-income and lower-income households are more cautious. But instead of a collapse, he’s seeing a shift: homeowners who aren’t moving are remodeling anyway, and they’re less likely than in previous cycles to attempt the work themselves. Weekends at the hardware store are giving way to what Werzyn calls “do-it-for-me” services — companies that show up, tear apart the room, rebuild it, and leave the house intact by Monday.
In that environment, he sees AI as a way to scale output without a one-to-one increase in payroll. If the company is running at a little over $1.1 billion in gross revenue now, he believes it can plausibly double to $2 billion with something like 6,000 employees, instead of the 7,000 it would have needed in a less automated operation. The installers, plumbers, and technicians doing the last-mile work are not replaced; the overhead required to support them is streamlined.
“Nobody’s going to replace the last mile of a home remodeling project,” he said. Robots may eventually arrive, but in his view that horizon is far away. For now, AI handles the tasks that are repetitive, data-heavy, and prone to human error — measurements, quoting, scheduling, inventory checks — while humans handle the creative, physical, and relational parts of the job.
For Werzyn, that equilibrium now extends outside the bathroom. In 2024, he joined the board of Utz Brands, giving him a front-row seat to another old-line business wrestling with new technology and shifting consumer habits. It’s a fun perk, he said, noting that with its varied pretzel and chip options, Pennsylvania is “the snack food capital of the world.”
Werzyn added that he’s proud to have been born and raised in Pennsylvania, to have attended Penn State, and to have started his own business, giving back to his community. Sitting on the board for a snack-food company that he grew up eating is a “pretty cool story,” he agreed. He noted that West Shore hasn’t just donated to the renovation of Beaver Stadium and acquired field naming rights, but also that the college has become a major pipeline for computer science and AI talent. “We probably have a Penn State intern in almost every department of the company.”
Key insight: Currency security is banking’s oldest technology problem, and today’s $100 bill still carries features that descend from the anti-counterfeiting Benjamin Franklin engineered into colonial notes by hand.
Supporting data: By the end of the Civil War, nearly one-third of all U.S. currency in circulation was counterfeit, the Secret Service estimates.
Forward look: Because no security feature stays counterfeit-proof, Treasury has made currency redesign a permanently recurring process.
Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.
Processing Content
Long before the United States had any banks, Benjamin Franklin engineered anti-counterfeiting features for paper money.
His money network printed notes with leaf patterns pressed from real leaves, colored fibers and flecks of translucent mica worked into the paper, and a dense black ink all its own — features designed to be easy to spot and hard to reproduce.
Counterfeiting these features would not just have required great effort and attention to detail; many of them rested on recipes and methods Franklin’s network kept secret.
Franklin and his network did not share how, for example, they mixed their ink. Franklin sold soot-based ink to other printers and used a special recipe for his own money.
The paper he used had its own secrets. Franklin kept his dealings with the papermaker behind his distinctive “money paper” in a separate ledger that has never been found. Historians infer that it held the confidential recipe for those colored fibers and mica flecks.
A 2023 study finally uncovered this secret by putting more than 600 notes, printed between 1709 and 1790 (bills from Franklin’s network, rival printers and counterfeiters alike), under electron microscopes and spectrometers.
The researchers found Franklin had printed the money with graphite ground from rock, not the soot most printers used. Counterfeiters, copying only what they could see, reached for an ink made from charred bone and failed to match the real thing.
The counterfeit ink carried a tell; charred bone left calcium and phosphorus in the fake notes that Franklin’s graphite lacked. Researchers used this chemical signature to sort his genuine bills from forgeries.
“Franklin was creating a multi-layered security system, much like modern banknotes rely on several complementary security features rather than a single one,” Khachatur Manukyan, a Notre Dame physicist who led the study, told American Banker.
As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, here is a look back at the parallel 250-year history of American financial technology that has yielded money that is harder to fake and bank-built machinery that moves, clears and settles it.
The sweep runs from colonial currency to instant payments, and American Banker has its own place in it. But the story begins in a messy place.
A financial system with no banks
In 1776, the United States had no banks, and hard coinage was scarce. Britain had never supplied enough of it, and it barred the colonies from minting their own.
In lieu of coins, the New World ran on a patchwork of credit and paper.
Colonial governments printed their own bills of credit, but those bills were not quite money in the modern sense. Each was a government IOU with a maturity date, when a colonist could hand it back to pay taxes.
Until redeemed, it changed hands at a discount; it was worth less than the number printed on it.
Exhibit 1A from the 2023 paper on Franklin’s anti-counterfeiting technology: A twenty-shilling Pennsylvania bill printed by Franklin on August 10, 1739.
Manukyan, et. al.
Farley Grubb, a University of Delaware economist and author of “The Continental Dollar,” likens the bills to U.S. savings bonds, which pay full value only at a future date and cash out for less before then. Colonial bills, unlike a savings bond, could be traded.
“Imagine what it would be like if our only paper money today were tradable U.S. savings bonds,” Grubb said to American Banker.
Merchants kept book credit with each other and settled long-distance debts with bills of exchange, which were paper IOUs payable by a merchant house in London.
That book credit formed long chains. A country storekeeper would extend a farmer credit for supplies against the coming harvest, then use the crop he was repaid in to clear his own debt to the merchant who stocked his shelves, according to Grubb.
It was a web of short-term credit running “in a long chain from Europe to American farmers and back again,” Grubb said. “There were no incorporations or IPOs, nor any incorporated banks in America.”
Money you could trust
Colonists’ most trustworthy coin was the Spanish milled dollar, prized for its consistent silver content and distinctive design, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
The U.S. had a sophisticated payment network built with little more than pen and paper, according to the Encyclopedia of Economic History. Franklin brought security engineering to the colonial paper money.
He was a working printer first, according to Manukyan, and many of the innovations “likely grew out of practical attempts to improve the quality and durability of printed currency while making it more difficult to counterfeit.”
The result was deliberate all the same. Franklin “systematically exploited materials, printing methods and natural patterns to create currency that was both recognizable and difficult to imitate,” Manukyan said.
A nation awash in paper
To help fund the war against Britain, the Continental Congress chartered the country’s first bank at the end of 1781, creating the Bank of North America, which opened in Philadelphia early the next year.
The Bank of North America, as it appeared at its 307 Chestnut Street address in Philadelphia.
Congress had run its own paper money into the ground. The Continental dollar, printed to fund the Revolution, was over-issued until it collapsed, yielding the phrase “not worth a Continental,” according to the Philly Fed.
The Continental dollar itself was not new technology, according to Grubb. “It was not an innovation,” he said; its design copied the bills of credit colonial legislatures had issued for decades.
What set it apart was who stood behind it. Congress could print the notes but had no power to tax anyone to redeem them, and it leaned on the states to honor pro-rated quotas they had only loosely promised to cover, Grubb said.
The lesson for a modern reader, he said, is that “‘fiscal credibility’ matters, and that not-well-thought-out large financial rule changes can be damaging and disruptive.”
The decades after independence produced what today looks like monetary chaos and a golden age for counterfeiters. Hundreds of private, state-chartered banks each printed their own notes with no single national currency.
By 1860, more than 10,000 distinct notes circulated in the U.S., and forgery flourished alongside them, according to historian Stephen Mihm, author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters.”
By the end of the Civil War, nearly one-third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit, the U.S. Secret Service estimates.
The anti-fraud technology of the age was a newsletter.
Publications called counterfeit detectors and bank-note reporters came out weekly or monthly, listing the known fakes and the discount rate at which each bank’s notes traded. Merchants would check the bulletin before taking a payment.
American Banker traces its own origins to one of these bulletins, Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter, which the New York broker John Thompson launched in 1842, a decade after he opened a Wall Street bank-note brokerage, according to Mihm.
The masthead of the April 14, 1849 edition of Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter. The front page enumerated the “latest counterfeits” and promised discount rate listings on legitimate notes.
Washington University Libraries
(Two printers, Anthony Stumpf and Charles David Steurer, bought the Thompson’s Bank Note and Commercial Reporter in 1885, dropped its old name and renamed the weekly the American Banker, according to profiles of the pair in the 1896 volume “Men of the Century.”)
Bank Note Reporter “inventoried the nation’s monetary system,” with “every bank in the United States” represented “along with the rate of discount on its notes” and “a compilation of all known counterfeits,” according to Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters.
A surviving issue of Bank Note Reporter from April 14, 1849 reads exactly that way. It carries a “Latest Counterfeits” column and a “Broken Banks” table of failing institutions and the rates at which their paper still sold.
These detectors were also deeply flawed, though. They “proved far more useful to counterfeiters than to their subscribers,” Mihm wrote, because engravers read the published descriptions of each forgery’s flaws and used them to perfect their plates.
The business could also be turned against the banks it covered. A publisher who labeled a sound bank “doubtful” could trigger a run, buy up its notes cheaply and profit, Mihm wrote.
Publishers could also squeeze the banks directly. Some solicited bribes or cheap loans in exchange for a favorable listing, threatening to brand a bank’s notes “doubtful” if it refused to pay, Mihm wrote.
The machines
The monetary chaos ended with a national currency.
The Civil War greenback, the Union’s wartime paper money, and the uniform national currency that followed swept away the world of private bank notes and put the counterfeit-detector business out of work, Mihm wrote.
An 1861 $5 Demand Note, the earliest issue of the U.S. government. The note originated the term “Greenback”.
National Numismatic Collection/National Museum of American History
The government took over the machinery of making money hard to fake.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing centralized production and became the sole producer of all U.S. currency by 1877. It built anti-counterfeiting engraving into the greenback from the start, according to the bureau’s history.
Enforcement got its own department; the U.S. Secret Service, created in 1865, hunted counterfeiters before it ever guarded a president.
Concurrently, banks rebuilt the machinery for moving, clearing and settling money, each step faster and more automated than the last. A few moments mark the path.
First, banks started meeting on a common floor at the New York Clearing House, organized in 1853, to settle the day’s checks. (Before, banks sent clerks to rival branches to do settlement in a decentralized manner.)
Starting around 1871, when Western Union began wiring money, the telegraph enabled money to move at the speed of electricity. The Federal Reserve has run a wire of its own since 1915, which grew into Fedwire.
In the 1950s, to keep paper checks from burying the back office, Bank of America and the Stanford Research Institute built a machine called ERMA to read magnetic-ink character recognition codes, or MICR codes. Those same codes are still printed along the bottom of every check today.
The pace only picked up from there. Magnetic stripes made payment cards machine-readable; Barclays piloted the automated teller machine in 1967; and electronic payment networks began moving money between banks in batches in the 1970s.
Online banking followed, climbing from servicing under 5% of consumers in 1995 to 53% by 2007, by the Federal Reserve’s measure. Banks started creating mobile apps after the first iPhone came out, also in 2007.
Franklin’s heirs
Today’s U.S. currency carries the same kind of engineered defenses that Franklin’s did: Security threads, color-shifting ink, microprinting and watermarks.
“The underlying principle has changed remarkably little,” Manukyan said of these centuries-long constants. Franklin “recognized that trust could be built into the physical properties of the currency itself, rather than relying only on printed text or artwork.”
Since 1996, the $100 note has carried a watermark of Benjamin Franklin. It’s the faint portrait that surfaces when the bill is held to the light.
Studying Franklin’s technology “made his place on today’s $100 bill feel much more meaningful,” Manukyan said. The man who engineered colonial anti-counterfeiting now helps secure the country’s largest bill.
No security feature is counterfeit-proof over time, Treasury officials told the Government Accountability Office in 1996. As such, currency redesign has become a permanent process rather than a one-time fix.
The tools have changed since Franklin’s print shop. The problem he was solving has not.
Dave: We cover a lot of data on this show because it is important, but sadly data is also imperfect. And right now the data we all know and talk about every episode of this show might be hiding the best opportunities real estate investors have right now because right now the median home price in the US is roughly flat. It’s up a little bit year over year actually, but it’s not really going anywhere exciting in either direction. But sale price doesn’t really equal what investors actually pay. And new data is coming out now that shows that home buyers and investors alike are scoring major discounts that aren’t being reflected in sales data. So today on On the Market, we’re going to talk about the opportunity to score major deals that right now are hiding in plain sight. We’re going to cover the new data, reveal important trends and talk about how you can use this information to land your next deal. Hey everyone. Welcome to On The Market. I’m Dave Meyer. Today we got a fun show because we’re talking about good news in the housing market if you’re a buyer at least and it’s actionable news that you can take advantage of almost immediately. Now of course I am a real estate investor. I’ve been doing this for 16 years. I also work in BiggerPockets. Been doing that for 10 years. But when I think about what I spend most of my time doing every single day, whether it’s for bigger pockets, my own personal investing, anything else, it’s I’m an analyst. I’ve been an investor for longer, but what I spend most of my time doing is analyzing data and information and trying to make sense of it. And something I’ve learned from being a data analyst for so long is that you can’t just take data, run some numbers and some statistics, and then call it a day and assume that everything’s right. One of the most important jobs of an analyst is to question the data and figure out if the numbers in front of you really tell the entire story. And in the housing market right now, I think the big popular numbers that we all look at all the time are not telling the whole story. Because if you listen to the show often, and if you do, thanks by the way, you probably know the housing market is pretty flat and is in what I call the great stall. If you’re new here, welcome. Now you know we’re in a very stalled housing market that I think is going to continue for the foreseeable future. But the data we use to determine these quote unquote flat prices, the median home sale price, is kind of misleading right now. It’s not always the case that it’s misleading. A lot of times it’s very accurate, but there is new evidence that the median home sale price is not telling us what I think might be the most important things for investors right now, the price they’re actually paying, the net price that actually comes out of their pocket. Now I know this can be confusing because shouldn’t the median sale price tell us the price that investors are paying? It should, yeah and often yes it does. But in buyers markets like the ones we’re in today where sellers far outpace buyers and buyers have all of the leverage, there is another major factor in play and that is concessions. You may have heard this term concessions before in a real estate context, but if you haven’t, no worries. It is not the most obvious thing. A concession and specifically in the scenario that we’re talking about in today’s market where you’re talking about seller concessions is basically things the seller gives the buyer during the negotiation, but it does not impact the actual final price. Some examples of this are putting money towards closing costs, a rate buydown or maybe even just straight up cash. And I know that seems weird. Why wouldn’t you just lower the price? But this actually happens and right now it is happening a lot. According to a new Redfin study, over 46% of US home sales in May of 2026 included a seller concession. So this is not some fringe situation that happens from time to time. Nearly half of home sales right now are including these types of concessions and is up from 43% a year earlier and is the highest share for any May, because we look at year over year data, the highest share for any May since Redfin started tracking this information in 2019. On top of that, and this should perk your ears up a little bit, but on top of that, about 15, 16% of homes that sold in May not just only had a concession, also had a price drop. So that should tell you something about the things you should be looking for. Now, before we get into that and what you should be doing, just call out here that this data, when I said it’s the highest it’s been, the data doesn’t go back that far. It only goes back to 2019, doesn’t cover the great financial crisis. But that being said, if you just think about that, half of all buyers are actually paying less than what it looks like they’re paying on paper. And if you extrapolate this a bit, it means prices in effect are probably going down, probably going down more than the median home price data suggests to us. Think about it this way. During COVID, no one, no one was getting seller concessions. You could just put some crappy home on the market and people were marching in with all cash offers, right? Why would you give a seller concession? In fact, there was buyer’s concession, right? They weren’t paying more than what is actually reported, but they were waiving contingencies like inspections and appraisals and financing and all of that. So if we look at the data we know, right, if we bring this forward back to today that sales prices are flat and that seller concessions have basically come up from nothing in the last four years and that number keeps growing. The logical conclusion is that the net price people are really paying is lower now than it was a year ago. Now again, this isn’t always true because if prices stayed flat and the number of seller concessions stayed flat, then at the end of the day, things are basically the same. But if we’re seeing flat pricing and increasing seller concessions, you have to think that the net price is actually going down. And I’m going to talk about by how much, because I have some information about how big concessions are getting right now. But before that, just want to articulate why this is happening right now. We’ve talked about the great stall, but basically we are in a strong buyer’s market. According to Redfin, we have 47% more sellers than buyers nationally. That’s big, right? We still have rates and prices pretty high relative to recent history at least. And even though inventory really isn’t growing that much despite what a lot of people say, it’s really pretty close to flat. The power in the market and just the vibes in the market have clearly shifted, right? What we see now, both from anecdotal experience, you hear it from the panel and Kathy and James and Henry are here. I see it in my own investing. See it when I sell a property. When sellers, if they get a place under contract, they want to close now. They’re not walking away for five grand more. They are willing to negotiate. They will give in on an inspection objection in ways they wouldn’t have dreamed of a couple of years ago. And this, again, for anyone looking to acquire deals should be music to your ears. We’re going to talk about how to use this to your advantage, but first I want to talk about the size of these concessions, like I said, because the amount that people are getting off and how much should really dictate how much of a strategic adjustment you should consider based on this data. Now we got to take a quick break, but I will be back with the size of those concessions right after this. Welcome back to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer. Today we’re talking about seller concessions and how they could be hiding discounts that investors should be taking advantage of. Before the break, I talked about why and how roughly half of all home sales in May at least had a seller concession. Now I want to talk about how big they are. The typical concession size right now runs roughly one and a half to 2% of sale price on average. So if you had a home that was worth 400 grand, a little bit under the national average, but let’s just use round numbers, 400 grand. We’re talking about six to $8,000 on average in concessions. That is meaningful money right there. That is a significant discount. That is all your closing costs. That’s your cash reserve. That’s part of your renovation that people are getting off right now, but the data actually gets better than that. So that number of one and a half, 2% actually represents all transactions in real estate. But if you actually look at the people who zoom in, who go in and get the concessions, the concession range is like five to 7%. The exact data is kind of hard to get. That’s kind of why I opened the show talking about sometimes data isn’t perfect. We don’t have perfect data for this. But let’s just imagine here we’re talking about even on the low end, a concession of 5%, that’s 20 grand on a $400,000 house. That is huge. 5% might not sound like a like, but this is serious money you’re saving that can go to your down payments, to loan buydowns, to prepaid expenses like things like taxes or insurance. This is real, real money. Now there are limitations on that, which we’ll get to in a little bit, but the sheer amount is very appealing. So the question then as an investor is like, what do you do about this? This data is showing us that maybe there’s more opportunity to buy out a discount than we even knew about. Well, the obvious thing that you should be doing is to negotiate concessions because for whatever psychological reason there is, people often just want their number, quote unquote. People just have this number in their mind of what they are willing to sell their house for. This is particularly true of homeowners. They just have some idea of what their home is worth maybe because their neighbors sold it a couple of years ago or they need some amount of money in their mind to make this feel worth it to them. And if they hit that number, they might just give you back some of that money in terms of concessions. It doesn’t actually make any sense logically, but at least in my experience, this happens more often. A lot of times, especially if you’re… We’ve talked about this on the show with new construction. Builders are famous for doing this, offering concessions instead of lowering the price. But this pattern has now moved beyond just new homes and new builds and is into the existing home market with just regular old sellers. So trying to negotiate for concessions is a very good strategy right now. Now I’m not saying that this is the only tool you should be using, don’t get me wrong. Of course, you got to do the math, but if you can get a concession to buy down your mortgage rate, that can and honestly is often more valuable than a nominal price reduction. If someone’s going to say, “I’ll pay down your rate 2% for the lifetime of your loan, I’ll buy all those points for you. ” Versus a 3% discount on price or a 2% discount on price, you should do that math. Look at your cashflow and see what is better. Don’t just take concessions because they’re easy. You got to use this strategically to get a mutually beneficial outcome. Now, what a seller sees as mutually beneficial, not really up to you, but if they just want their price and they’re willing to buy down your rate to cover your closing costs, they’re not going to fight you on inspection objections, that’s fine. They might feel like they’re winning. But for you, you could also feel like you’re winning because ultimately what you should be caring about here is your ROI. As an investor, yeah, you want to buy at the best price and there are trade offs with getting a concession versus lowering the actual price that you pay. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is ROI. Are you walking away with better cash flow, better equity potential, less money out of pocket because you got concessions instead of something else? That to me is well worth considering. Now there is an art to this though, because as real estate investors, we’re always trying to get the best price. And in this market, that often means offering under asking price. So you need to find the right balance. So if you wanted to buy a home for whatever, $300,000 and the list price is 350, you could offer 300, no problem with that. But what I’m saying is, and what the data tells us is that what will probably work better, at least on average in markets where there are a lot of concessions you have leverage, you may want to consider trying offering something like 315 with some concessions. Now you’re still only trying to come out of pocket total of $300,000, but try playing with these things a little bit. Lowering your price to 315, still a low ball offer, but maybe it’s more palatable to the seller than seeing 300,000. And again, it’s just psychology. It’s the same amount. They’re giving $15,000 back to you in the form of a rate buydown or closing cost or something else. But honestly, appearances matter. I know this is like the least data driven thing, but this is what’s happening right now. What we’re seeing very clearly is people are more willing to give concessions than they are willing to lower price. You need to use that to your advantage. Ask your agent. Ask your agent if they’ve seen this work and if they don’t know, you should probably find another agent. But ask your agent if they’re seeing a lot of concessions, what kind of concessions and how you should formulate a strategy. Because I think this is just a tool that should be in everyone’s tool belt right now. You should know though, when you’re thinking about how to create this balance, you got to figure out what to offer versus what to ask for in concessions, when to ask for the concessions, that kind of thing. You can’t count entirely on concession because there are actually limits and it depends on your loan type. Now, if you’re buying for cash, you can do whatever you want, but there’s also a psychological limit. There’s no legal limit to what kind of concessions if you’re buying cash. But if you offer 400,000 and want $100,000 in concessions, that’s just weird. Don’t be that weird. Just be a little bit more reasonable. Again, you’re doing this for appearances to help people feel like they’re getting a good deal, that you’re both getting a good deal, going in and asking for a hundred grand in concessions just violates that. So you have to be normal about it. Assuming most people are not paying cash for other loan types, for conventional loans, if you’re putting 10% down or less, the limit that you can get in concessions is 3% of the purchase price. So 10% down, if you’re doing low money down, 10% down or less, the limit to your concessions is 3%. Now that number goes up depending on how big of a down payment you put. If you go up put 25% down like an investor, that number goes up to 9%, right? But we’ll talk about investor properties in just a second. But like if this was a house hacked, for example, you could get up to 9% if you’re putting 25% down. Now, if you have an FHA loan, it goes up to 6%, still pretty darn good, right? 6% VA goes up to 4%, pretty good. Investment properties are kind of the problem here because they’re capped at just 2%. If you are doing a Freddie or Fannie mortgage, right? If this is a conventional mortgage, investment properties are capped at just 2% regardless of the down payment. So this can feel like an obstacle, right? You can’t get what I was talking about before, but there are two ways around this. First and foremost is that owner-occupied strategy. If you’re doing a house hack or a live and flip, you go back to those other limits that I was talking about that were higher. So if you’re putting 20% down on a conventional and living in it, even if it’s a investment property, it’s a house hack, you can get 6% concessions. That is a ton, 6%. The other thing you can do if in your market, again, you have to balance all these things. There’s no right answer for every investment, but if in your market concessions are working and that’s going to get you a great price, you might want to consider using a non-QM mortgage like a DSCR loan because although those banks might have limits themselves, there’s no hard and fast rule across DSCR loans about what the limit of concessions are. So that is negotiable and is something you can find out when you’re shopping around for a DSCR loan. So those are just some of the limits. And one more thing on that actually, because the other thing you need to know is that the limits are limited. The limits are basically on what the funds can go to. So you’re capped out for an FHA loan at 6% of concessions that go to rate buydowns, closing costs, coverage, to prepaid expenses, things like that. And you are also sometimes capped depending on the loan. Again, you’re sometimes capped about repairs. You can ask for money to go make repairs and things that come up in the inspection objection. But there is a trick around this too, because if you just have the seller go out and make those repairs, that does not count towards the limit. So if you have something under contract and you’re negotiating after you get your inspection report and you’re already, let’s say you’re doing low money down, you’ve already extracted 3% concessions that’s the most you can get, what you can do in those scenarios is negotiate for the seller to go out and do the repairs themselves. Now not all sellers are willing to do that, but this is another tool in your tool belt to increase the amount of concessions without bumping up against that limit. The seller doing repairs themself is excluded from that limitation and is not a factor. So that is another lever you can pull in these negotiations. That doesn’t work. You can always try negotiating a lower price point at that point. Because remember, this stuff, what I’m talking about, these aren’t mutually exclusive. You have to choose price cuts or concessions, right? You can have both. You have to find the right balance. What I’m suggesting to you is try this more. I think it’s going to work more right now. The data suggests it’s working more. I’ve sold two properties in the last six months. It worked on me. I sold a flip for $1.65 million, but I gave them $45,000 in concessions. I know that sounds crazy. I still made a good profit on the deal, but that’s how it was structured. That’s how it was negotiated. That’s how we got the price that we needed and the net profit that I needed to get to. That’s basically what the buyer wanted. If not, they weren’t even offering 1.6.That’s how they structured it and that got me the number I wanted so I took it. Another thing happened to me recently. I sold a duplex. I’m going to trade it out and try and buy something a little bit bigger and I got the price I wanted. It was actually a little bit above asking price. I got it above asking price and then they negotiated $10,000. It’s a much cheaper property. I sold it for like 275. They asked for $10,000 in concessions after that, but they offered above asking price. And I said, sure. So that got me below my asking price, but it was within two or $3,000. And like I said, as a seller, I was like, “You know what? I’m not putting it back on the market. Yeah, I had another offer over asking, but they’re probably going to negotiate for this too and it’s time and it’s money and it’s effort. So I’m just going to accept this concession.” It works on me as a seller. I think it’s clearly working on other sellers if half of home sells have this concession. So that’s just what I’m saying. Use this tool to your advantage. Now, how much of a concession to ask for and what you should be doing really depends on your region because there are huge differences in how big concessions are and how often concessions are being used depending on your market. So you should know this before you go into any of these negotiations. I’m going to share with you some of those regional variations right after this quick break. Stick with us. Welcome back to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer. Today we’re talking about seller concessions and how you can use this as a tool in your tool belt. Before the break, we talked about how on average people who negotiate concessions are getting five to 7% in discounts, right? That is pretty big. Now it’s going to depend on how big of a down payment you put down. It depends on your loan type, but that is pretty sizeable. That is meaningful money that can change a deal from being not worth buying to buying. And that’s what I think I’m trying to get at here is that at the headline, if you look at the sale price, a lot of deals don’t work, but think another level deeper. Think, what if I can get them to buy down my rate? Two percentage point. What if I can get them to cover all my closing costs and buy down my rate? Like does the deal work then? These are some of the things that you should be thinking about and offering because you never know what people are going to accept. Sometimes this is more palatable and sometimes it’s what makes a deal work. Now, as I said before the break, what you can offer and how big of a concession you can ask for is going to really depend on the area. So I just want to give you an example that in some areas of the countries, the percentage of sellers offering concessions is just absolutely massive. The market with the highest number of concessions in the country right now is Nashville, Tennessee with over 75%. If you’re buying a home in Nashville right now and not getting a seller concession, you’re doing something wrong. I mean, maybe something super underpriced on MLS, maybe that’s the 25%, right? They just put it under price just to get offers and then they’re not going to do concessions. But 75%, when I see that data, if I’m an agent or if I’m a real estate investor, I’m going with the concession route because every seller, hopefully the seller has been prepared by their agent, their listing agent, that they’re going to need to offer concessions. They’re probably expecting it. And if you don’t do it, they’re going to be delightfully surprised and be like, “Hey, they didn’t even ask for a concession.” So you have to work on this with your agent, figure out the right balance, but some combination of offering under asking price and asking for concessions probably going to work in Nashville. Not on every property, not every property is a deal, but in a market like that, man, that’s the bid strategy right now, right? Go after those concessions. You got a 5% in Nashville, that’s 15, $20,000. Next market up highest Charlotte, North Carolina. After that, Atlanta. These are great markets by the way. I mean, long term, you want to own property in Nashville, Charlotte, Atlanta. Those are good markets. Now they’re correcting a little bit right now, but that’s the whole point. Offer under asking, while these markets are a little bit funky, buy under asking price, get those concessions right now because these are good markets to own in if you buy a good deal using this strategy. On top of just those three, there’s Phoenix. We got Raleigh, all good markets, right? Well, if you’re curious, no. Why are these metros if they’re such good markets offering these concessions? We’ve talked about that a lot in other episodes, but I’ll quickly just remind everyone these metros, they built very aggressively. There’s a lot of supply in these markets. Demand has cooled as interest rates went up. There’s rising insurance and HOA costs. All these things, they’re squeezing buyers a little bit. So sellers have to compete. They got a lower price somehow. Some of them want that number and they’re willing to give concessions. See if they’ll do both, right? Why not? See if they’ll do both. And these markets, they’ll come back. I don’t know when. I can’t tell you when. This is generalization because there’s several markets we’re talking about, but Nashville, that’s a great market. It’s super popular. Businesses are moving there. Population growth is good. It is a strong economy and everyone is just giving stuff away in Nashville right now. I don’t mean they’re giving the homes away, but they’re giving away rate buydowns. They’re giving away concession. So go get you some. Other places to target right now. Orlando, now up to 60% concession rate that was just 38%. Meanwhile, home prices are in Orlando kind of flat. So you might be thinking in Orlando, “I’m going to wait and not buy because prices haven’t gone down.” Well, maybe they are going down just in the form of concessions. Now, the median sale price isn’t going down, which will probably help your resale value because your comps are still good and we’ll have to see what concessions do when you go and sell it. But you can get a better discount in Orlando than the data suggests or any of these markets. So go get you some. On the other end of the spectrum, don’t even try this. Don’t even try it at all in New York. 3%. You have to work pretty hard to find a concession there. San Jose, 6%. San Francisco, 15%, pretty low. It’s going to be pretty hard. There are some balanced markets in the middle. Boston, 27%, Chicago, 28%. Still worth shooting for, right? But there you have to be more careful. If I were offering in a market like Chicago or Boston, I would probably not try to offer underasking and concession, depending on the deal. Obviously, if it’s way overpriced, I would not overpay. But if Chicago, if there’s a well-priced asset, see if you can get yourself a concession. Maybe offer them their price so they feel like they’re winning, but see if you can get it in a concession. In a balanced market, that might actually work best. So this is something I would go out before you make your next offer, talk to your agent about this. And if you’re an agent, proactively go out there and talk to your investor clients about this because I think this strategy’s going to work. I’ve seen it work and I imagine I obviously don’t invest in every market. Let me know in the comments if this is working in your market, but go talk to your agent about how to use this trend, how to use what is seemingly a preference among sellers to give away concessions rather than lowering cost to your advantage because there’s absolutely ways that you can use this to your advantage and I’d love to hear in the comments how you’re doing it. So that’s our show for today and that is my advice. Add the negotiation of concessions to your tool belt. Get good at this. Work with an agent who’s good at this. It’s a great way to score discounts and boost ROI in this market. It’s certainly not a silver bullet. You still need to buy at a good price. You still need to operate well. You still need to buy great assets and great locations, but it’s a tactic that is working really well right now and is something worth considering in your own investing. Thank you all so much for watching this episode of On The Market. I’m Dave Meyer. I’ll see you next time.
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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband was involved in a hit and run on Friday in California’s wine country that left one car with “major damage,” according to local authorities, who said that the 86-year-old could face misdemeanor charges for the collision.
Paul Pelosi was driving his brown convertible in Yountville, a small town in the heart of wine country in Napa County, when he struck a legally parked car on the side of the road, briefly stopped and then drove away, Napa County Sheriff’s department said in a news release on Saturday. There were no reported injuries.
A witness saw the collision and called 911. Shortly after, sheriff’s deputies then found Paul Pelosi with severe damage to the front of his car on a nearby road roughly one quarter of a mile away. The octogenarian told officers that he knew he hit something but wasn’t sure when or what caused the damage to his car.
Paul Pelosi didn’t have any alcohol in his system at the time of the crash, according to the statement. The sheriff’s department referred Paul Pelosi to the California Department of Motor Vehicles to initiate a process that will determine whether he is able to continue driving — a process that officials say is “common” for elderly drivers.
He wasn’t arrested, and because no one was physically injured, the sheriff’s department is recommending a misdemeanor that charges Paul Pelosi with fleeing the scene of an accident.
A staffer for Congresswoman Pelosi didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Saturday afternoon.
Paul Pelosi pleaded guilty in 2022 to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence in Napa County. He was sentenced to five days in jail and three years of probation — though he only served two days in jail and received good conduct credit for two other days, leaving just one day to serve in a work program at the local courthouse.
As part of his probation, Paul Pelosi he was also required to attend a three-month drinking driver class, and install an ignition interlock device, where the driver has to provide a breath sample to prove sobriety before the engine will start. He was also ordered to pay about $5,000 in victim restitution for medical bills and lost wages and nearly $2,000 in fines.
Shortly after that crash, Paul Pelosi was attacked and severely beaten with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home in late 2022.
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Welcome to the Building Wealth with No Borders podcast with me, Lamide Elizabeth. Each episode, I’ll be bringing you guests from around the world to share their strategies on building wealth. Today, we’re back in London welcoming back our most watched guest of Season 1, Ex-Goldman Sachs High Net-worth Wealth Manager, serial property investor and developer and founder of Propelle, Ayesha Ofori.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research or speak to a qualified adviser before making investment decisions. All investing carries risk – Stocks & Shares ISAs can fall in value and past performance isn’t a guide to the future; tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances, consider doing your own research before choosing an ISA provider.
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0:00 Lingering Questions: Looking after the pennies, pension & relationships
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Four education organizations sued the Trump administration (PDF File) on June 30, alleging the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Education are unlawfully blocking nearly $1.9 billion in congressionally approved education research funding — much of which expires September 30, 2026.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the federal government’s main source of education research and statistics, funding everything from studies on reading instruction to state data systems that track student outcomes. If the money isn’t legally committed before it expires, it’s gone and the research it would have funded goes with it.
The Details
The complaint targets four pots of money:
$793 million in IES appropriations that expire September 30, 2026
$789 million in IES appropriations that expire September 30, 2027
$50 million for the Comprehensive Centers program, expiring September 30, 2026
$235 million for the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, expiring December 31, 2026
The plaintiffs (the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Knowledge Alliance, BNP Education Partners, and the 117,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association) allege OMB “misused the ‘apportionment’ process to unlawfully wrest control of education research spending from Congress.” Under the Anti-Deficiency Act, OMB must release, or “apportion,” appropriated funds before agencies can spend them.
The suit says OMB withheld hundreds of millions entirely, delayed hundreds of millions more, and attached footnotes conditioning the funds on compliance with executive orders — including Executive Order 14151 (PDF File), President Trump’s order ending federal DEI programs.
The complaint also alleges OMB kept $289.5 million parked on an “unallocated” line as of February 2026, and that the Department of Education has been a “more-than-willing participant” by agreeing to spend plans that block the funding Congress directed.
Legal Questions
The major question is whether the Executive Branch can effectively cancel spending Congress already approved by slow-walking the administrative steps needed to release it. The nine-count lawsuit argues this violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, and the Constitution’s separation of powers.
And the clock is ticking. Roughly $843 million expires on September 30, 2026, and another $235 million on December 31, 2026. The plaintiffs are asking the court to force OMB to apportion the funds and the Department to obligate them before those deadlines.
Expect a motion for preliminary relief given the timeline.
How This Connects
This is the second major legal fight over IES. As we reported earlier, a previous lawsuit challenged the administration’s dismantling of IES itself, after the administration cut roughly 90% of the agency’s staff and canceled congressionally mandated research contracts. That case attacked the capacity to do the research; this one attacks the money to fund it. Together, they will help define how much control any administration has over the future of the Department of Education — and the data students, parents, and policymakers rely on.
