Marriott International has reached an agreement to acquire the select-service lifestyle brand citizenM for $355 million. The citizenM global portfolio currently consists of 36 open hotels comprising 8,544 rooms across more than 20 cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific.
Short-Term Rentals
In 2024, bookings priced between $1,000 and $1,500 per night grew 15% from 2023, while rentals below $1,000 grew by 6%.
Homeowners Insurance
Homeowner insurance premiums increased about 33% on average from 2020 to 2023. The more likely a home is considered to have a higher disaster risk, the more those homeowners pay — about $500 more per year in 2023 than those who don't live in a place considered a high-risk disaster area.
Chicago Vacancy
Office utilization in River North is about 48% of its 2019 level. That compares with an average of 55% in Chicago’s central business district and 62% nationally.
FL Condos
The costs associated with owning a Florida condo have exploded. A combination of insurance increases, special assessments and limited financing options have elevated costs and sparked a wave of sales, flooding the market and straining prices. Condo prices in the state of Florida overall have fallen between 1% and 6% each month annually since July 2024.
Household Wealth
A household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars. In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average $450,000 per household, per year.
DJIA
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932. The S&P 500’s performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928.
Financial Services Surplus
While the U.S. may import more manufactured goods than it exports, it runs a large trade surplus in financial services. The overall U.S. trade surplus for financial services in 2024 was about $130 billion.
AI Trip Planning
While Google remains the top way travelers prepare for their trips, a growing subset of consumers is turning to artificial intelligence to help them research and plan out their stays. Specifically, they’re experimenting with AI platforms known as large language models, or LLMs. The most popular of these platforms are ChatGPT, Gemini and Llama. Travelers can ask these LLMs to create a travel itinerary for them, and they can add details to their requests to further narrow their results.
Options Volume
Some 49 million options contracts changed hands each day in 2024, up from 19 million contracts in 2019. And as the size of the market has grown, individual investors’ slice of it has, too: They made up 29% of all options activity at the end of last year, up from 23% at the beginning of 2020.