It’s gotten a lot harder for first-time homebuyers to nab that dream house. The pool of smaller, affordable starter houses is low. And increasingly, first-time homebuyers are competing with investors who are buying up these homes.

Last year, investors accounted for 1 in 5 starter-priced homes, according to data released by CoreLogic on Thursday. The rate of investor purchases of starter homes has been rising and has nearly doubled since 1999.

Tonya Jones, a Realtor in metro Atlanta, says it is frustrating both for agents and for their first-time homebuying clients when they can’t compete with investors.

First-time buyers typically put down 3% to 5%, Jones said. “Then they’re walking in competing with an all-cash buyer who can close whenever that seller is ready,” she said. “Typically, a first-time homebuyer can’t work under those parameters.”

Investors have always made up a big part of the market for starter homes. But smaller investors are playing a growing role. Last year, these mom and pop investors represented 60% of investor purchases — up from 48% in 2013, CoreLogic said.

As investors snap up more properties, they’re helping drive up prices in many cities nationwide. In May, the median price of existing homes was $277,700, up 4.8% from a year earlier, the National Associations of Realtors reported Friday. For single-family homes, the median price was $280,200, up 4.6%.

Some regions saw a slowdown in home sales at the end of 2018. And last month, sales of existing homes fell 1.1% from a year ago, even as median prices marked the 87th straight month of year-over-year growth, the NAR said.

Jones, who is also a small investor, said rising prices have kept her from buying new properties.

“Investors count on appreciation,” she said. “We’re at a pretty elevated price point right now, so it’s hard to imagine price per square foot getting any higher.”

Investors tend to buy cheap homes with the goal of renovating them and putting them back on the market at a higher price, or renting them out. Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said investor buying could lead to greater wealth inequality as homeowners and investors profit and nonhomeowners are left behind.

“If first-time buyers are less capable of buying, we’ll have a strange situation where the economy could be good, but the homeownership rate will be underperforming by historical standards,” he said.

In 2018, eight of the top 10 metro areas with the highest investor purchase rates were in the Eastern half of the U.S., CoreLogic said.

The top markets for investors were Detroit, where they accounted for 27% of sales, Philadelphia at 23.3% and Memphis at 19.7%. Some cities with the least investor activity are in Ventura, Calif., and Boise, Idaho, at 4.8% each, and Oakland, Calif., at 5.1%.

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A while back, Jonah Berger was talking with a lawyer friend from Washington, D.C. The friend was lamenting the impact of social influence on his peers.

He was saying, “‘God, you know, all D.C. lawyers are the same. They make it big, and they go out and they buy a new BMW.’

And I said, ‘Don’t you drive a BMW also?’ He said, ‘oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, you know, they all drive gray ones. And I drive a blue one.'”

Our friends may not be independent thinkers, but we are…right? Not quite. Researchers have found that many of our personal preferences are heavily shaped by the whims and wishes of others.

This week, we talk with Jonah Berger about how our choices are influenced by social context. Then, Neeru Paharia takes a closer look at our behavior as consumers. She says the things we purchase send invisible signals – projecting the values we have, and the identities we want.

Additional Resources:

Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger, 2016.

“Sweatshop labor is wrong unless the shoes are cute: Cognition can both help and hurt moral motivated reasoning,” by Neeru Paharia, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Rohit Deshpandé in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, (2013).

“The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography,” by Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery, and Juliet B. Schor in Journal of Consumer Research, 2010.

Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu and Laura Kwerel. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.

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In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. “I’ll Slack you” is shorthand for sending a message via the workplace chat platform.

On Thursday, the company will take that popularity to the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares will be publicly listed for the first time.

At a starting price of $26 per share set Wednesday, Slack Technologies would be worth about $16 billion.

Instead of having a conventional initial public offering, Slack will enter into the market as a direct listing, which means the shares will simply be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most firms that pass on an IPO are widely known companies that are in good financial shape.

As Fortune explains:

“Unlike an ordinary IPO, a direct listing means the company doesn’t issue any new shares and doesn’t raise additional capital. It’s primarily a way for company insiders to sell some of their holdings to investors, while bypassing the formidable fees and requirements of using an underwriter.”

Spotify, the music-streaming company, went public as a direct listing last year.

In the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, Slack nearly doubled its revenues, to about $400 million. But it had a net loss of nearly $139 million.

As it continues to grow, Slack’s biggest hurdle will be proving to its users that it’s more than just a chat application.

Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it’s hard for people to understand why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying it for themselves. With Microsoft Teams as a major competitor, Slack is facing pressure to distinguish itself in the market.

“If the world were only composed of technologists and developers and Silicon Valley illuminati, then Slack would be far, far ahead,” Facemire says. “There is a large percentage of the population that isn’t that. This is where tools like Microsoft Teams do just as well.”

Slack’s decision to begin trading as a direct listing follows a wobbly start for Uber, which has had one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in the tech sector. Last month, the ride-hailing company reported a $1 billion loss in its first public financial report, just weeks after its IPO.

Slack, which was publicly released in 2014, stemmed from an internal chat platform created by CEO Stewart Butterfield during a failed video game development. The software was created to avoid the confusion of email and, per its acronym, provide a “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” for the team, which had people working all over North America.

Butterfield co-founded Flickr, which he sold to Yahoo for around $25 million in 2005. But despite interest from Amazon, Google and Microsoft in 2017, he held on to Slack, which continued to compete with emerging chat platforms.

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Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has given the green light for a second time to a $5.5 billion pipeline expansion that has attracted strong opposition from environmentalists and some indigenous groups.

Trudeau, an ardent supporter of green energy, has found himself defending the 620-mile Trans Mountain pipeline expansion since his government first approved it in 2016. The project is meant to bring petroleum from oil sands near Edmonton, Alberta, to tanks in Burnaby near Vancouver on Canada’s Pacific Coast.

Last year, opponents won a suit in Canada’s Federal Court of Appeals to temporarily halt the expansion, but Trudeau’s government subsequently purchased the existing 715-mile pipeline from the Canadian division of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP for about $3.5 billion in an effort to move the project ahead.

At Tuesday’s news conference in Ottawa announcing that the project was back on, Trudeau justified the move by saying the money reaped from the pipeline would be channeled back into green projects.

“We need to create wealth today so we can invest in the future,” he said. “We need resources to invest in Canadians so they can take advantage of the opportunities generated by a rapidly changing economy, here at home and around the world.”

Trudeau said the pipeline would deliver oil to the Pacific Coast for shipment to Asia, reducing Canada’s dependency on selling its petroleum to the United States.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was quoted by the CBC as calling Trudeau’s promise to funnel profits from pipeline into clean energy technology a “cynical bait-and-switch that would fool no one.”

“If you’re serious about fighting climate change, you invest public funds in renewable energy,” May said. “And there’s no guarantee that this pipeline will ever turn a profit anyway.”

The majority of First Nations communities have signed off on the expansion, but some still oppose it.

The expansion is designed to move nearly a million barrels of oil each day — triple the flow from the existing pipeline. That is expected also to significantly boost tanker traffic on Canada’s Pacific Coast from just 60 vessels a year to more than 400, according to The Associated Press.

However, opponents of the Trans Mountain expansion warn that the risks of spills will rise dramatically.

Trudeau said he expects “shovels will be in the ground” this year.

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