Business

Millennials and Gen Zers are clamoring to break into the housing market. But this real estate expert says ‘not everyone should be an owner’

Published

4 months ago

October 3, 2025

Millennials and Gen Z are clamoring to break into the housing market—a feat seemingly impossible in an inflationary period with high home prices and mortgage rates. But one real estate veteran says owning a home might not be all it’s cracked up to be right now.

“If your whole thinking is like, ‘Oh, I should buy a home because I’m at that age, and I should buy a home,’ I don’t think that’s a good reason to own a home,” Amir Korangy, founder, chairman, and publisher of real estate news site The Real Deal, told Fortune. Korangy is also an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and a senior fellow and adjunct professor at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

Research this year from mortgage tech firm ServiceLink shows Gen Z and millennials have a “strong appetite for homeownership,” but many have had to abandon the American Dream owing to the cost. Mortgage rates are still in the 6% range, and home prices are 55% higher than they were at the beginning of 2020, according to the Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.

For those reasons, it’s often cheaper to rent than buy a home in today’s housing market. A June report from Realtor.com shows renting saves more than $900 per month, on average, and that renting a home continues to be more affordable than buying in 49 of the 50 largest metros in the U.S. (Pittsburgh stands out as the only exception). That’s why Korangy pushes the “freedom of renting”—especially to get more bang for your buck.

“You could rent a much nicer space for yourself than you could own one,” Korangy said. He gave the example of a wealthier buyer with a $3 million budget, and said for the same cost of buying that home, someone could rent a $5.5 million to $7 million home at the same monthly price.

“It just makes a lot more sense to rent,” he said.

There are also a lot of hidden homeownership costs like insurance, repairs, property taxes, homeowners association fees (if applicable), and landscaping and exterior upkeep.

“It’s not just the mortgage you’re paying for,” Korangy said. “There’s all this stuff that‘s being added on to it. Yes, insurance is not that much, but insurance, when it goes up … it adds up.”

Nationally, homeowners insurance prices are expected to spike 8% this year, but it’s even more expensive to insure a home in Florida and California given the greater risks of extreme weather like flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires.

Building home equity isn’t what it used to be

One of the prime reasons for homeownership is the concept of building equity. By purchasing a home, you’ll eventually build equity in that property that you can benefit from in the future when, or if, you decide to sell the home.

That was all fine and good as people watched home prices skyrocket thanks to growing demand in the aftermath of the pandemic housing boom. Purchasing a house allows owners to build wealth over time by making mortgage payments to reduce the loan principal and increase the owner’s stake in the home until, ideally, it’s owned outright. Real estate typically appreciates, which adds to the homeowner’s wealth.

But now that the market is slowly but surely correcting itself, homeowners aren’t sitting on the same pile of equity they expected in recent years. In fact, home-price appreciation has been either broadly flat or falling across the U.S.; the average American homeowner lost approximately $9,200 in equity during the past year, according to data from information services company Cotality (formerly CoreLogic).

To be sure, Leo Pond, a real estate advisor with Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty, recently told Fortune this isn’t a collapse, but “a long-term market correction.”

Korangy said as long as a person is okay with not building equity then renting would be the obvious choice.

Plus, you’re “also not connected to the market,” he said. “That means [you] can pick up and leave anytime [you] want. If anything changes for [you, you’re] not beholden to that. If something happens to the building, [you’re] not beholden to that.

“So there’s a lot of goods that come with renting, and a lot of people are taking advantage of that,” he added. “And the fact is not everybody should be an owner.”

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Business

Davos 2026: reading the signals, not the headlines

Published

8 minutes ago

January 21, 2026

Jace Porter

Davos 2026: reading the signals, not the headlines | Fortune

Louisa Loran advises boards and leadership teams on transformation and long-term value creation and currently serves on the boards of Copenhagen Business School and CataCap Private Equity. At Google, Louisa launched a billion-dollar supply chain solutions business, doubled growth in a global industry vertical, and led strategic business transformation for the company’s largest customers in EMEA—working at the forefront of AI, data, and platform innovation. At Maersk, she co-authored the strategy that redefined the brand globally and doubled its share price, helping pivot the company from traditional shipping to integrated logistics. Her career began in the luxury and FMCG space with Moët Hennessy and Diageo, where she built iconic brands and led innovation at the intersection of heritage and digital transformation.

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Business

Hotels allege predatory pricing, forced exclusivity in Trip.com antitrust probe

Published

39 minutes ago

January 21, 2026

Jace Porter

China’s hotels are welcoming record numbers of travelers, yet room rates are sinking—a paradox many operators blame on Trip.com Group Ltd.

For Gary Huang, running a five-room homestay in the scenic Huzhou hills near Shanghai was supposed to secure his family’s financial future. Instead, he and other hoteliers in China’s southeastern Zhejiang province say nightly rates have fallen to levels last seen more than a decade ago, as Trip.com’s frequent discount campaigns force them to cut prices simply to remain visible on China’s dominant booking platform.

“The promotion campaigns now are almost a daily routine,” said Huang, who asked to use his self-given English name out of concern of speaking out against Trip.com. “We have to constantly cut prices at least 15% to attract travelers. We have no choice but to go along with the price cuts.”

Trip.com has been central to China’s post-pandemic travel rebound, connecting millions of travelers with small operators like Huang. But for many hotels, visibility—and sometimes survival—comes at the expense of profits.

That dynamic is now at the heart of Beijing’s antitrust probe. Regulators allege Trip.com is abusing its market position, with analysts citing deflation across the sector as the government’s main concern. Interviews with lodging operators, industry groups and travel consultants describe a system where constant price-cutting and opaque policies are eroding profitability, even as demand rebounds.

Trip.com has said it’s cooperating with the government’s investigation. The company’s stock dove more 16% since the probe was announced a week ago.

Revenue per room—a key hotel metric—was flat across China in 2025, even as other Asian markets saw gains, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Marriott International Inc.’s revenue per room in China fell 1% most of last year, while Hilton’s China room revenue trailed its regional peers.

The company controls about 56% of China’s online travel market, according to China Trading Desk, and has grown into the world’s largest booking site. Its dominance has helped fuel domestic tourism’s recovery—nearly 5 billion trips were logged in the first three quarters of 2025—but operators say the benefits are being offset by falling room yields.

“The market has developed unevenly and innovation is lacking due to monopolistic practices,” said He Shuangquan, head of the Yunnan Provincial Tourism Homestay Industry Association that represents some 7,000 operators. “The entire online travel agency sector is stagnating in a pool of dead water.”

‘Pick-one-of-two’

The broader challenge is oversupply and cautious consumer spending. In regions like Yunnan, hotel capacity has tripled since the pandemic, just as travelers tightened budgets. Consultants note that while people are traveling more, they’re spending less—leaving hotels slashing rates to fill empty beds and posting billions in losses.

For operators like Huang, the paradox is stark: the platform that delivers customers is also accelerating the race to the bottom. The complaints center around Trip.com’s “er xuan yi,” Mandarin for pick-one-of-two exclusivity arrangements—a practice that Chinese regulators have repeatedly vowed to stamp out.

Trip.com categorizes merchants into tiers with “Special Merchants” enjoying the most visibility and traffic, Yunnan Provincial Tourism’s He said. However, these top-tier merchants are typically prohibited from listing on rival platforms like Alibaba’s Fliggy, ByteDance’s Douyin or Meituan. Merchants who aren’t bound by these exclusive arrangements report being effectively compelled to offer the lowest prices on Trip.com’s online booking platform Ctrip, or risk facing a raft of measures like lowered search rankings.

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Business

CEOs at Davos are buying into the agentic AI hype

Published

1 hour ago

January 21, 2026

Jace Porter

Good morning. The atmosphere here at the World Economic Forum in Davos is all about nervous excitement as the Trump administration descends on the normally quaint but currently chaotic ski town in the Alps.

President Donald Trump will be making remarks just a couple hours from now, and Fortune will be reporting live from USA House on the main promenade, with insights from government officials and chief executives during and immediately following the president’s conversation. Keep an eye on our livestream, here https://fortune.com/2026/01/21/ceos-davos-buy-into-the-agentic-ai-hype/.

Elsewhere around town, CEOs are setting their agendas for the year. Here’s what’s top of mind for a few of them:

This will actually be the year of agentic AI. The first time I heard the term “agentic AI” was at Davos last year. For all the hype around it, does the average CEO really know what it is or how to deploy it? And is AI good enough yet for agents to replace or even significantly assist human employees? The answer appears to be yes. Google Gemini head Demis Hassabis told me that Gemini 3 achieved some milestones that allow agentic AI to truly proliferate in terms of its capabilities. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott is also an emphatic “yes,” and says he is already using it to do things like automate his IT department (without doing layoffs, he stresses; he says he has repurposed employees instead). He thinks other CEOs are ready to do the same.

Get ready for Google glasses—for real, this time. A decade ago, Google launched its Google Glass eyewear to widespread mockery. Hassabis thinks the timing was just off; at the time there was no super app to go on the platform. AI has changed that, and Hassabis is bullish on Gemini glasses being the future form for consumer AI. Meta is betting the same thing, and OpenAI is also reportedly considering a super-device, but it doesn’t seem like either can match Gemini’s capabilities any time soon.

There’s artificial intelligence, and now there’s also “energy intelligence.” Schneider Electric CEO Olivier Blum says that nailing energy intelligence is his mission this year. By that he means he wants to capture data from various energy sources into a single “data cube,” filter it, and use agentic AI so customers can manage it all in one place to find opportunities to save power and money. “Our job is to make sure we go to the next level of energy technology to make energy more intelligent,” he told me yesterday. If he can achieve it, he sees a 7%-10% annual growth opportunity ahead.

Greenland: national panic or national security risk? I’ve heard various reactions to President Trump’s desire for a full U.S. takeover of the huge island—from outrage to vigorous support. If he does get his wish (which some here think is likely), could Europe retaliate by making life harder and more restrictive for big U.S. tech companies? That was one CEO’s consideration. Said another: “Clear-eyed people can agree that that is a national security concern. And having a national security concern is not just a U.S. concern, it’s also a NATO concern.” They were optimistic that the in-person meetings this week would help move the matter in a positive direction. You can follow all our Davos coverage—including Fortune live interviews today with Ray Dalio, Dara Khosrowshahi and more—right here.—Alyson Shontell

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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S&P 500 futures are up 0.19% this morning. The last session closed down 2.06%. STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.41% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.02% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.41%. China’s CSI 300 was up o.09%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.49%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.3%%. Bitcoin was at $89K.