11–20 of 80 posts
A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think.
Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.
You could apply clever modelling to work out what minimal set of upgrades would best increase capacity .. and then spend the next 30 years trying to get one line built. We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.
The issue is that its unsexy, not “profitable” and it requires land - not to mention that the timeframes needed will make “the next government” look better.
Our governments are recklessly short sighted, and to be fair, even if they were not, their progress would be undone by the disaffected electorate who can be easily convinced that the sitting government is spaffing money up the wall.
Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/
House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it
Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK
The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall
If their real motivation was "to fix Britain's housing crisis", brownfield sites can be converted into residential use much more quickly and easily, and there is a lot of pre-existing support to make this easier - see e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/brownfield-land-registers .
Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…
I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.
This excludes corruption based inefficiencies like the PPE scandal.
11 months, 4 pivots (of course one was to Ai) and a cash burn of ~£70,000 per month (approx $100,000) - if you can give me the details of the mark they got £744,000 from, I have a bridge to sell them.
Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…
This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population.
So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners.
Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.
You could apply clever modelling to work out what minimal set of upgrades would best increase capacity .. and then spend the next 30 years trying to get one line built. We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.
Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners ar…
> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population. So there was relative political power in the working age, and a l…
The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly.
This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.
" Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. " Nothing to do with millions of new people arriving wanting to live somewhere?
About 6% to 10% increase in housing cost due to immigration in the UK since 1990. Total increase ~150%. So marginal impact.[1] But nice populist dog whistle. 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-hou...