This week’s readings offer a fascinating dive into the interplay between AI and real estate, showcasing innovations like RealPage’s AI-enhanced platform and Buena’s tech-driven property management transformation in Germany. Additionally, we explore Spain’s economic shifts, the cultural heritage of the Vaqueiros de Alzada, and emerging AI models shaping crime prevention and geospatial analysis.
AI
- ‘Model2Vec as a Fasttext Alternative’: Model2Vec emerges as a promising alternative to fasttext, bringing enhanced performance in various tasks, except for WordSim where fasttext excels. While fasttext trains classifiers faster, Model2Vec processes significantly more samples per second. A Model2Vec model is notably smaller in disk size, and both methods can benefit from compression. Experiments reveal Model2Vec’s superior performance across tasks, challenging those using fasttext to consider Model2Vec’s advantages despite fasttext’s efficiency in lexical similarity tasks.
- ‘AI Factories Access Modes’: The European Commission outlines how AI Factories provide tailored supercomputing access to AI startups and industry in Europe, aiding in developing large-scale AI models and fostering AI adoption across the EU. Different access modes cater to varying needs: Playground access for entry-level users, Fast Lane for those familiar with HPC needing up to 50,000 GPU hours, and Large Scale for demands exceeding this. AI startups benefit from free innovation access, while other industries can opt for pay-per-use services.
- ‘TimeScope: How Long Can Your Video Large Multimodal Model Go?’: TimeScope is an open-source benchmark by Hugging Face, measuring vision-language models’ ability to understand long videos, ranging from one minute to eight hours. It evaluates localized retrieval, information synthesis, and fine-grained temporal perception by embedding short clips, or “needles,” into videos. Despite advances in multimodal AI, many models struggle with true temporal comprehension beyond surface-level retrieval. TimeScope reveals model limitations and shows that scaling parameters alone doesn’t extend temporal horizons. Notably, Gemini 2.5-Pro excels in maintaining accuracy on videos longer than an hour, while Qwen 2.5-VL and others face trade-offs in different tasks.
- ‘Manual De Defensa Algorítmica’: “Manual De Defensa Algorítmica” by Esther Paniagua highlights the pervasive use of algorithms and AI in decision-making processes in various sectors in Spain, from housing and medical tests to fraud detection. Paniagua emphasizes the importance of understanding, questioning, and demanding transparency from these systems to ensure fair treatment and protect individual rights. The author outlines the environmental and social impacts of AI, urging organizations to prioritize ethical design and transparency while advocating for stronger regulations and offering practical tools for accountability.
- ‘RealPage Acquires Rexera to Accelerate AI Innovation in Real Estate Operations’: RealPage, a global leader in AI-enabled software for the real estate industry, has acquired Rexera to enhance AI innovation in real estate operations. By integrating Rexera’s agentic AI with HomeWiseDocs’ HOA platform, RealPage is creating a nationwide platform that streamlines real estate transactions with enhanced speed and precision. This initiative addresses manual challenges like HOA document retrieval and mortgage payoffs, improving efficiency for industry professionals.
- ‘MMEarth Examples’: MMEarth harnesses extensive unlabelled Earth observation data to form a diverse multi-modal pretraining dataset using data from 1.2 million global locations. The approach leverages geographic and temporal pairing of different modalities, requiring minimal human labor. The proposed Multi-Pretext Masked Autoencoder (MP-MAE) employs the ConvNeXt V2 architecture, outperforming traditional MAEs by utilizing various multi-modal pretext tasks, improving representations for optical satellite images significantly in various tasks like image classification and semantic segmentation. MMEarth incorporates data from 12 modalities over 14 biomes, sampled between 2017-2020, to enhance data diversity and label efficiency, offering a robust solution for global applications.
- ‘Masked Geospatial Modeling: Teaching ML/AI Models to Understand Spatial Relationships’: The article by John Collins explores the concept of Masked Geospatial Modeling (MGM), drawing parallels to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) used in training Large Language Models (LLMs). While MLM helps LLMs understand text by predicting masked words based on context, MGM aims to train models to predict masked geospatial entities using their spatial surroundings. Collins emphasizes the need for geometric encoding, like Multi-Point Proximity encoding, to represent geospatial objects as vectors of consistent size. By utilizing a transformer architecture, MGM captures spatial relationships similar to how LLMs process textual meanings. The model’s success in understanding spatial concepts like connectivity and proximity suggests a promising future for geospatial analysis using transformer-based systems.
- ‘Buena Raises €49M to Digitise Property Management Through AI-Powered Rollups’: Buena, a German PropTech startup, has secured 49 million euros in funding, including a Series A round led by GV with additional investors. The company, which has seen revenue growth of over 500% in 2024, is revolutionizing Germany’s property management industry using AI-powered technologies. Buena’s platform automates routine tasks, enabling property managers to focus on complex issues. With over 60,000 units managed, Buena is eyeing international expansion to address fragmented markets and outdated technology in real estate management.
Economics
- ‘Economía española en el 2T25: expansión dentro de lo previsto’: In the second quarter of 2025, Spain’s economy expanded by 0.7%, aligning with BBVA Research’s predictions, driven by private consumption and investment. Domestic demand contributed significantly to GDP growth, offsetting a slight negative impact from external demand. Private consumption exceeded expectations with a 0.8% rise, outweighing a 0.1% decline in public consumption. Investment also outperformed forecasts, growing by 1.6%. Exports and imports rose more than anticipated, while labor productivity improved slightly in terms of hours worked but remained flat when considering full-time equivalent jobs.
- ‘What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime | the New Yorker’: Malcolm Gladwell, in his New Yorker article, reviews Jens Ludwig’s book “Unforgiving Places,” critiquing common misconceptions about violent crime. Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, applies Daniel Kahneman’s cognitive theory of System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (analytical) thinking to crime, highlighting a crucial error: the focus on instrumental violence instead of expressive violence. He argues that crime is often place-related instead of people-centered, with environments influencing behavior. Initiatives like Philadelphia’s vacant-lot program show that community improvements can notably reduce crime by increasing informal social controls. Ludwig advocates for less reliance on incarceration and gun-control debates, suggesting solutions like behavioral programs and improving neighborhood conditions to curb violence.
Real estate
- ‘El Esfuerzo Para Comprar O Alquilar Vivienda Creció en El Segundo Trimestre’: In the second quarter of 2025, the financial burden on households to buy or rent a home increased significantly, with home purchase requiring 24% of household income and rent 38%, according to a study by idealista. The rising costs are attributed to scarce housing supply and subsequent price hikes. Regions like Barcelona and Palma demand the highest rental income shares, exacerbating the crisis. Idealista’s Francisco Iñareta emphasizes the need for decisive measures to stabilize the market and promote its recovery.
- ‘La ‘Edad De Oro’ De La Vivienda Turística en Asturias: Su Presencia Crece Un 58% Desde 2020’: The tourist housing sector in Asturias has experienced significant growth, with a 58% increase since 2020, reaching 7,697 units by May 2025, according to the REGIOlab of the University of Oviedo. Nationally, Spain had 381,837 tourist homes in May 2025, a 19% rise since 2020. This trend in Asturias surpasses the national average. The study notes an intensified demand for short-term rentals, spurred by digital platforms and diverse tourist offerings, despite recent regulatory changes.
- ‘There’s No Such Thing as a House Price’: The concept of a fixed “house price” is misleading because purchasing a home is unlike buying typical market goods. Unlike straightforward supply-demand pricing, house prices are influenced by emotional and personal factors like safety, identity, and status, making them deeply irrational. Homes are unique and imbued with personal attachments, affecting buyers’ decisions beyond logical calculations. Factors like timing, mood, and even weather conditions can distort perceptions of value, resulting in a highly subjective and unpredictable market.
- ‘Read This Before You Start Your Property Search’: Before starting a property search, securing a Mortgage in Principle (MiP) is essential as it proves your purchasing capability and is often required to make offers or even view properties. A mortgage broker can help acquire an MiP and assist with complex income situations such as self-employment or bonuses. While some lenders may suggest a 5% deposit, a 10% deposit is typically the minimum needed to be taken seriously by sellers. Despite “location, location, location” being crucial, it doesn’t always account for price differences between similar homes.
Culture
- ‘Vaqueiros De Alzada, Los Vikingos Asturianos’: The article from ABC.es explores the unique community of the “Vaqueiros de Alzada,” a distinct ethnic group in Asturias, Spain. These people are known for their nomadic lifestyle, moving to highland pastures each spring, living in traditional stone houses called “cabanas de teito.” They have endured social isolation akin to other marginalized groups such as the gypsies and remain endogamic with origins speculated to be Viking or Celtic. Often distinguished by surnames like Berdasco or Gayo, their community extends beyond Asturias, with some descendants in León, Galicia, and even emigrated to America. Despite historical disdain from sedentary locals who envied their free way of life, the Vaqueiros maintain their transient tradition, centered around cattle raising and migration between Belmonte and Somiedo valleys.