Working with Hands, and the Future of Real Estate

If you’ve not yet subscribed to Nest Realty’s podcast, Sweat the Details, I’m comfortable saying you’re missing out. We just put out our 18th episode, with Jessica Lautz with the NAR, and it’s darn good. What follows is a response from a client to the previous one, with Danushka Nanayakkara from the National Association of Homebuilders.

If you ever have feedback, comments, etc that you’d like to us to respond to in the podcast, send me a voice memo from your phone. It’s easy. My email address is jim AT NestRealty.com.

Highlights from Danushka’s Podcast

From the Nest blog

You can listen to the podcast here (archived: 2023), and subscribe to the podcast here. (archived: 2024)

• Discussion of the economic cycle
• Regionality of the expansion and the slowdown. There is no national norm right now.
• The important numbers to keep your eyes on, and how does the trade war impacts jobs and inflation.
• Unemployment rates and job creation numbers.
• Employment productivity in new construction and modular homes
• Labor shortages, layoffs, and the future of construction jobs
• Zoning change to drive housing policy

We hope you’ll join us for the next episode of Sweat the Details (archived: 2024). 

The Comment

(bolding mine)

Hey Jim, that was a very interesting podcast also because economics isn’t really something that I look at isolated as a science much.

I think some of the biggest takeaways for me from this podcast is also the significance of science and the insights and that they need to have some sort of a human oversight, because what struck me was the numbers about productivity, the comparison of overall productivity with regards to comparison to the housing market. And that that number as a sort of a naked fact is looked at as a goal to go toward.

But that the other aspects of what that means on a human level impacted by automatization and for instance, that that isn’t taken into the equation. And the other thing also that strikes me, there was mention of the stigma that’s associated with prefab homes but it’s also, or more so I feel the stigma of working with your hands as opposed to having a four year college degree and working academically. I think that’s distinctly like that in the US and it’s very, very sad and it’s a shame.

I know there are fabulous degrees that are sort of a combination of technical degrees whilst also apprenticeships in both in the UK and in Germany and they are excellent. They create very skilled labor and those people, they can live a respectable life because it’s not only about livelihood but it’s also about your position within society. I think that it all sort of ties down to that self-definition and to education. I think currently the trend is doing a disservice to our youngsters for sure.

Client: What you said about affordability is also I think a very, very good point and a sign that there’s just … everything is so incredibly relative and both the value of labor done by a person that spends also however many hours a day working.

Yeah. So thank you for sharing.