What's In This Month's Edition

1. Our perspective on how generative AI results in Google Search may affect us

2. May's alternative investment news

3. New analysis and resources on fractional real estate platforms

4. Site news and commentary

‼️ TOP STORY
🤖 Google Search Generative AI - How It May Affect Us

Earlier this month, Google unveiled their plans to integrate AI into their search results page. As with many websites, we receive a large portion of our visitors from Google and other search engines.

Here's what we're thinking on how this could affect us and what we may do in response. 

The generative responses take up a lot of the screen real estate of the search results. This has an effect of pushing the traditional links much further down. If we add advertisements on top of this, it could really distance users from the actual, organic search results. 

Google already takes a single digit percentage of web traffic from snippets and features like "People also ask." The generative responses could take an even larger portion of traffic.

Specifically, we feel like informational content could be significantly devalued by the new features. Even content that is significantly more complete than simplified summaries provided by AI could be heavily impacted. Search users may be content enough with immediate answers that they don't feel compelled to research further. 

We will monitor the effects of this over the coming months. If we see significant losses in our informational traffic, our plan is to focus more on reviews, personal experience, and analysis. We will continue to host informational content for completeness, but it will not be our primary focus.

📰 LATEST NEWS & ARTICLES
Roundups

End of May

The Week Of May 14th

The Week Of May 7th

Special News

It’s Been An Exciting Time For Percent

SongVest Has A Unique New Offering With Some TLC

It’s Official – StartEngine’s SeedInvest Acquisition Just Completed

Landa Debuts Dozens Of New Properties

📚 NEW RESOURCES
Where Fractional Real Estate Offerings Have Been

We’ve plotted hundreds of fractional real estate offerings on a map. It’s now easier than ever to see where these offerings have been. We also have some commentary and analysis on different investment platforms.

Take a look here

Modeling Arrived Homes Returns

There has been a lot of discussions about what investment returns from Arrived Home’s offerings might look like. We hit the offering circular and spreadsheets this week and did our best to model things out.

Spoiler alert - returns depend significantly on what real estate appreciation looks like over the next 5-10 years.

Take a look here

Note from the future: since we performed this analysis, Arrived has updated their offering pages to provide investors much deeper insight into what returns may be like. They have also further clarified how they calculate share prices.

Updated Investment Platform Database

This month we significantly expanded the size of our list of alternative investment platforms. There's now over 50 platforms across 9 asset classes. The majority of additions were in the Real Estate and Debt / Lending / Financing asset classes.

Take a look here

🌐 SITE
Content

This month was a bit different than usual.

First, for the first time in about a year I took a couple weeks off for vacation. That was a large part of why there was a bit less content towards the end of the month.

Second, the content I did produce was very time consuming. In particular, I put a lot of time into modeling Arrived Home's returns. By pure chance they launched an updated projection system of their own a few days later.

Third, given the potential for disruption to our core content from Google Search's generative AI (see above), I am also spending more time investigating how we could better provide more advanced analytical data and content.

Outside of that, I am continuing to experiment with how to deliver news content. I've gone back-and-forth on whether to try to do roundup posts or dedicated articles. This month I tried doing a few focus articles and weekly roundups of smaller stories and developments that didn't really warrant a full article. I'm open to feedback on what people like best!

Lastly, thanks to all of the new subscribers! May set another record for the most new subscribers in a month.