A new report says the average national asking rent fell four per cent in July compared with last year and now stands at $2,037.
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A prospect once booked a call with me and opened by quoting something I had written in an article two years earlier. I had never met her. She had searched my name, read three or four things, decided I was credible and only then filled out the form. By the time we spoke, the hard part of the sale was already over. She had sold herself, using nothing but what she found on Google.
That is the part of the buying process most founders never see, and it is the part that increasingly decides everything. People do their homework long before they talk to you. Gartner’s research found that most buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, spending the bulk of their time researching on their own and only a sliver of it talking to a seller. The real pitch is happening on a search results page you are not even in the room for.
Think about your own behavior. Before you hire a contractor, try a new tool or sign a contract, you type the name into Google. What comes back shapes your decision before a single conversation happens. Your buyers are doing the exact same thing to you, and your own name will get searched far more often than your company’s will.
Here is what makes this so high-stakes: you do not control the room, but you do control much of what is in it. If a prospect searches you and finds a thoughtful article you wrote, a clean profile, a real photo and a couple of credible third-party mentions, they walk into the call already leaning yes. If they find nothing, or worse, a stale profile and one unflattering result, you start the conversation in a hole you may never climb out of.
I have learned to treat my own search results as a landing page I did not design but absolutely own the contents of. The goal is simple. When someone searches my name, the first screen should answer three questions fast: Is this person real, are they credible and do they understand my problem?
The first thing I protect is the basics. A current photo that looks like me, a profile that states plainly what I do and who I help and consistent details across every platform. Buyers are quietly checking whether the story adds up. When your title says one thing in one place and something else on your website, that small mismatch plants a seed of doubt at the exact moment you want certainty.
The second thing is evidence of expertise I did not pay for. Articles I have written, places I have been quoted, talks and interviews. This is where earned media quietly does its heaviest lifting. A buyer instinctively trusts a byline in a publication or a quote in a story, because someone other than you decided you were worth featuring. That third-party stamp is the whole point.
The third thing is recency. A brilliant article from five years ago followed by silence reads like a business that peaked and faded. You do not need to publish constantly, but you need enough recent signal that a searcher believes you are active and relevant today. A steady trickle beats an old flood.
You do not need to be famous to win here. You need to be deliberate. Start by searching your own name in an incognito window and reading the first screen the way a skeptical buyer would. Be honest about what it says about you.
Then fill the gaps on assets you control. Your profile, your About page and your professional bios are easy to optimize and tend to rank well for your own name. Make them current, specific and human. If there is a thin spot, write something useful in your field and get it published somewhere with authority, even a niche industry outlet. One credible byline can outrank a lot of noise.
If something outdated dominates your results, the fix is rarely to fight it head-on. It is to publish enough strong, relevant material that the better results rise and push the weak ones down the page. Search visibility rewards consistency, and the same discipline that helps customers find you also helps the right results outrank the wrong ones. Managing your online reputation is ongoing work, not a one-time cleanup.
The shift to make is mental. Stop thinking of your search results as vanity and start treating them as the first sales conversation, the one that happens whether you show up or not. Every credible thing a prospect finds is a small yes banked before you ever speak. Every gap is a doubt you will have to overcome later, if you even get the chance. Your next customer is searching your name today. Make sure what they find does the selling for you.
A prospect once booked a call with me and opened by quoting something I had written in an article two years earlier. I had never met her. She had searched my name, read three or four things, decided I was credible and only then filled out the form. By the time we spoke, the hard part of the sale was already over. She had sold herself, using nothing but what she found on Google.
That is the part of the buying process most founders never see, and it is the part that increasingly decides everything. People do their homework long before they talk to you. Gartner’s research found that most buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, spending the bulk of their time researching on their own and only a sliver of it talking to a seller. The real pitch is happening on a search results page you are not even in the room for.
Think about your own behavior. Before you hire a contractor, try a new tool or sign a contract, you type the name into Google. What comes back shapes your decision before a single conversation happens. Your buyers are doing the exact same thing to you, and your own name will get searched far more often than your company’s will.
Student Defense sent public records requests to 24 public colleges and universities in the spring of 2026, asking whether their undergraduate admissions offices have policies governing the use of artificial intelligence.
According to the report (PDF File) from the group’s SHAPE AI Initiative, not one responding school produced a policy. Twenty of the 24 institutions replied (a list that includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, UT Austin, Ohio State, and Michigan State) even as AI tools spread through the admissions process itself.
Training was just as thin. Zero institutions produced AI training materials specific to admissions staff. One school sent materials aimed only at enrollment management employees, and one disclosed it already uses AI to pull high school course data and recalculate applicant GPAs — a use case admissions offices are adopting faster than applicants realize.
Admissions decisions are, in the report’s words, “high-stakes, individualized, and legally sensitive.” Without office-specific rules, AI can introduce bias, create errors, and skew who gets admitted, with no clear accountability when it does.
Several schools pointed to campus-wide AI policies, but the report says those don’t address admissions-specific risks.
The governance gap lands at a bad time: Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 38%, with doubts about AI a growing part of the story.
Student Defense (whose chief counsel Dan Zibel spoke with The College Investor about AI in admissions earlier this year) wants every institution to adopt a formal AI policy and training program for admissions staff. Its suggestions include:
The recommendations build on their Student AI Bill of Rights and its “Dos and Don’ts” reports on application evaluation and recruitment.
The findings match what The College Investor found when it contacted 24 colleges directly about their AI application policies: only one school (an Ivy) reported having a formal AI policy, and 16 never responded at all.
The double standard is hard to miss. Colleges warn applicants about using AI on essays, yet most can’t produce a single rule governing their own use of the same technology.
Student Defense says more SHAPE AI papers are coming in the next few months. A July 2026 NASFAA task force report found the same policy gap in financial aid offices, where AI-driven fraud has already cost the aid system over $1 billion.
Families need to continue to watch whether major public universities adopt admissions AI policies before the 2026-27 application cycle opens this fall.
Don’t Miss These Other Stories:
Editor: Colin Graves
The post Berkeley, UCLA, Ohio State Among 24 Colleges With No AI Admissions Policy, Report Finds appeared first on The College Investor.
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Bear markets: Investors don’t like them, but understandably so. Not only do they last roughly a (miserable) year, on average, but numbers from Stifel suggest that since 1932, the average bear market has dragged the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.62%) down 35% from peak to trough. Yikes.
Yet experienced investors know they’re going to happen sooner or later — once about every five years (again, on average), though certainly not with anywhere near that predictable a cadence. Regardless, it’s tempting to try to simply sidestep bear markets by being out of the market altogether when they happen.
For the vast majority of investors, though, such a strategy may end up doing more harm than good. Here’s why.
From a distance, it often looks like the stock market makes enough sense to actively navigate it. As veteran investors can attest, however, that’s not the case once you’re in it. It’s unpredictable from one day to the next. The only way to win is by not trying to predict the near-term ebb and flow. You have to think long-term, when stocks’ values become much clearer.
But ironically, most investors’ total long-term gains ultimately stem from a relatively small number of single-day gains.
Data from mutual fund company Hartford puts things in perspective: The growth of a $10,000 investment made in an S&P 500 index fund in 1996 would be worth more than $192,000 by 2025, if you had simply left it alone that whole time. Not bad. However, even if you’d just stayed out of the market for its best 10 days during this period, your investment would have only grown to a little over $85,000. That’s less than half of what you’d have by just doing nothing.
Here’s the rub: Since 1996, nearly half of the market’s very best one-day gains happened during a bear market, when few people would have been willing to even entertain the idea of jumping back in for a big one-day score. Never mind the unlikelihood of knowing when those single-day surges might materialize.
Image source: Getty Images.
But will avoiding the really bad days that tend to take shape during bear markets offset the downside of missing out on the dramatically bullish ones? Even if you could successfully predict them ahead of time — which you can’t — there may be little benefit in doing so. Based on data from Morningstar, wealth management firm Smith+Howard reports that between 1950 and 2020, most of the S&P 500’s 15 worst daily losses were more than undone a year later. Specifically, the average daily loss for these 15 days was a stunning 8.8%. However, in all but one case (in 2008), the index was up by double digits within 12 months of that awful day’s close.
All of this raises the question: Why do investors try to avoid these steep but usually short-lived setbacks? Though not knowing could prove destructive to your portfolio, the answer might be tough to hear: It’s ego. Market-timers believe they can accurately identify the market’s tops and bottoms, but they can’t. The vast majority of the time, the market has a knack for fooling almost everyone.
But there’s good news. Once you accept that there are things you can’t possibly know about the market, managing a portfolio becomes easier — you’ll limit your actions to those you know you can successfully manage.
Chief among these is maintaining a well-diversified portfolio, with many different stocks spanning several sectors. While part of the purpose is to ensure you have some exposure to a bull market’s biggest winners at any given time, there’s upside going the other direction as well. That is, a diversified portfolio is likely to lose less net value overall when a bear market takes hold.
That still isn’t fun. However, it does make it easier to stick with quality stocks when you need to own them most. That’s at the beginning of a new bull market, which no one ever really knows is coming until well after it’s underway. As Hartford Funds highlights, more than one-fourth of the S&P 500’s 50 biggest single-day gains took shape in just the first two months of new bull markets, when most investors are too timid to trust that the market has made its ultimate bottom. Hartford adds that since 1928, new bull markets have gained an average of 13.6% in their first month and more than 25% in their first three months.
Gains (recovered or otherwise) are just too big and too important to risk leaving on the table.
The bottom line: Just stay the course by owning quality stocks worth owning before, during, and after bear markets. Attempting to navigate the market’s unpredictable ebbs and flows has undermined the portfolios of too many investors who were certain that they could do what few people can — but were wrong.
All five of the publicly traded title insurance underwriters recorded higher net income year-over-year, or in Old Republic’s case, higher pretax operating income.
But the reaction to those results by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods was a mixed bag. It was also a
KBW follows three of the companies; its analysts reduced future earnings estimates and the stock rating on Stewart Information Services. They also cut the estimates and price target at Fidelity National Financial, but not the stock rating.
Meanwhile, on First American Financial, KBW increased both the earnings estimates and its price target; it already rates this stock at outperform.
But even with the lackluster second quarter in home sales activity, the four largest underwriters all reported higher direct open order counts versus the comparable periods.
After the quarter ended, Radian Group announced a deal to
Through various sales and mergers, Lennar holds
Here is how the publicly traded title underwriters performed in the second quarter:
Newly released complaints describe surprise prescription renewals and rejected refunds. The company had already set aside $15 million over the FTC investigation.
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