ENDLESS SCROLL!!! (Take 2)

Daily Data: Reddit, homes.com, banks, VC, PE, marks, gold, and so much more

In today’s dispatch, it’s endless scroll day, whereby Random Walk serves up all the various titillating bits that otherwise had no home, and don’t necessarily have anything in common.

It’s a really good day:

• Reddit!

• Homes.com on the march

• Sovereign gold rush

• VC thaw, couldn’t come soon enough

• Distressed Exchange is the new bankruptcy

• Private credit marks are dispersed

• “Banks, here! Get your banks, here!”

P.S. If you’re a free subscriber, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

It may surprise you, but this is an incredible amount of work, and well, y’know, it’s a labor of love, but you can’t put a price on love, which, in this context, is unfortunate, because then I could sell all that love, and wouldn’t need any paying subscribers at all.

Alas.

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👉👉👉Reminder to sign up for the Weekly Recap only, if daily emails is too much. Find me on twitter, for more fun. 

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Daily Data: Endless Scroll (Take 2)

Reddit IPO!

First some good news.

Reddit went public, and it’s been grand.

Random Walk doesn’t have any specific thoughts, but this is a nice chart and a great rundown of Reddit’s history (as told through its rounds of financings, which, admittedly, isn’t the most artistic angle, but hey).

Oh, Fidelity, you buy so high, and it doesn’t matter ever.

If you’ve been on the internet for a long time, then Reddit just pulls on the heartstrings a bit. It’s a holdover from the decentralized and un-SEO’ed days, when random people spent huge amounts of time creating un-professional content about various things in their various sub-cultures.

Reddit is forum-poster culture.

I don’t frequent reddit much anymore, and some say it’s been broken by the mods (and others say the mods aren’t powerful enough), and so on and so forth, around and around it goes.

Good work. Incredible achievement. Hardy congrats all around.

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Homes.com on the march

So, now that realtors can’t just force everyone to pay them for their non-services every time a house is purchased, people are wondering “what comes next?”

Some people have foretold doom for listing sites, like Zillow, who depend on that double-commission for revenue.

Others, like the rapacious Andrew Florence of Costar, and his listing pet, Homes.com, smell blood in the water.

Zillow has an enormous head start, but Homes.com’s progress isn’t nothing (via Goldman Sachs):

Homes.com had a 200% YoY increase in unique visitors to its site.

At least someone got some money’s worth from their super bowl ads.

That’s on the homebuying front.

On the rental front, Costar is making even more progress (and has been for a very long time) with their other annoying brand, Apartments.com:¹

Zillow’s lead is very slim.

What’s my point here, other than to observe the gold rush for the new-normal of brokerage?

Everyone’s forecasting Zillow’s doom, but looking at these charts, and one can’t help but get the impression that Zillow’s brand is . . . incredible?²

I mean, nothing lasts forever, but maybe people are counting the old girl out, a little prematurely. I don’t think I full appreciated how far out ahead Zillow was, especially on the house-hunting side of thing.

What’s going to be easier?

Zillow re-engineering a brokerless buying process, with idk, an fancy chatbot, or some other upstart doing that and gaining anything close to Zillow’s mindshare?³

I’m not long Zillow yet, but maybe I will be?

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Sovereign Gold Rush

Someone’s caught a gold bug.