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Full Steam Ahead for Washington, DC-area Real Estate Investors

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The Washington DC real estate market had a record-breaking summer season, despite Covid-19 restrictions. In July 2020, the average listing price of a home in the DC area reached a ten-year high, setting a 13% increase from 2019.  In other words, if last year you purchased a property for $200K, today you will have almost 27K in additional equity. Your net worth will be 27K higher just by going with the flow and enjoying the appreciation the DMV area has to offer

If you are a rehabber flipping homes for profit, you are not just going with the flow. The name of the game is to put a home under contract with a price that is below market and to build substantial equity by renovating it. As Maryland hard money lenders, we have a fast and hard rule for our clients: do not count on appreciation when determining the after-repair value of your deal. The additional profits you make due to that appreciation is gravy on top of the sweat equity you build by rehabbing a dilapidated home.

Still, the annual appreciation our area enjoys is a tremendous tailwind. It’s also unique to our area.

The DC-area real estate market, remarkably, experiences such tailwind year after year, pandemic be damned. It has been displaying appreciation for the last ten years, with the average prices rising from $374,000 in July 2010 to a mind-blowing $470,000 in 2020.

This year, the record appreciation rates are, at least to some extent, are the result of the limited supply of homes on the market. We are fortunate to live, work, and invest in the affluent market. Many households have levels of savings to weather financial storms or have dependable federal and state government jobs. Instead of dropping their asking prices at first sight of the market instability, they would better remove their listing to wait till more opportune times.

It is what has happened when the Coronavirus lockdown measures first hit out area in March 2020. Uncertain of its impact on the economy, sellers held off on listing their properties, reducing the already limited supply. Yet, for a brief time, the demand has also dwindled as buyers, especially real estate investors, eyed the market wearily. For sellers who had to sell at the height of uncertainty, the only way to do it was to lower their prices.

A number of real estate investors had enough faith in the stability of the DC real estate to put properties under contract past spring. As a result of their risk-tolerance, they were able to snatch some incredible deals. Unsurprisingly, the majority of those deals came from the wholesale channel. The wholesalers had to reassign the contracts and, since few willing investors were available, were forced to offer deep discounts. Yet, that pause was a brief anomolity in an otherwise bustling and healthy market. By summer 2020, the DC real estate market picked up the pace by 7%. The new listings were are up by more than 20%. Real estate investing also keeps up its face. “We had an increased demand for our loans,” – says Kyle Sennott, Managing Partner at New Funding Resources, a private lender who works with real estate investors in the DC area. “While many conventional and hard money lenders tightened their guidelines or paused lending, we are going full-steam ahead.”

Dan Smith is probably best known for his writing skill, which was adapted into news articles. He earned degree in Literature from Chicago University. He published his first book while an English instructor. After that he published 8 books in his career. He has more than six years’ experience in publication. And now he works as a writer of news on Apsters Media website which is related to news analysis from entertainment and technology industry.

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Intel has Optimized 500 Artificial Intelligence Models for Core Ultra Processors

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“An important milestone has been reached in Intel’s efforts to establish itself as the leading chip supplier for AI PCs: the company announced that over 500 AI models have been optimized for its Core Ultra processors.”

The AI models, according to the Santa Clara, California-based company, cover “more than 20 categories of AI, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection, and computer vision,” as of Wednesday. These models are available from industry partners Hugging Face, PyTorch, ONNX Model Zoo, and OpenVINO Model Zoo.

These include Google’s Bert natural language understanding model, Microsoft’s Phi-2 small language model, Meta’s Llama large language model, OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition model, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 text-to-image generation model, and the Mistral language model.

Models “form the backbone of AI-enhanced software features like object removal, image super resolution, or text summarization,” according to Intel, which highlights the significance of its optimization work. It further stated that the models are compatible with the Core Ultra’s neural processing unit (NPU), GPU, and CPU.

According to the company, “the breadth of user-facing AI features that can be brought to market and the number of enabled/optimized models are directly correlated.” It is impossible to design a feature without a model. The feature cannot operate at its peak efficiency without runtime optimization.

The semiconductor giant is in an arms race with rivals AMD and Qualcomm to not only provide the best processors for AI PCs but also to enable compelling software experiences with the goal of creating greater demand for their respective products.

Along with the AI model optimization project, Intel has been developing over 300 AI-powered features for PCs with Core Ultra processors in collaboration with more than 100 independent software vendors (ISVs). In December, the company released its Core Ultra lineup; this is being done as part of its AI PC Acceleration Program, which was started a few months prior.

The company stated that the work it has done to establish AI PCs as a new device category and the investments it has made in client AI processing, framework optimizations, AI tools like OpenVINO, and other related areas have made its software enablement work possible.

Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of AI and technical marketing in Intel’s Client Computing Group, said in a statement, “This unmatched selection reflects our commitment to building not only the PC industry’s most robust toolchain for AI developers, but a rock-solid foundation AI software users can implicitly trust.”

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Conduent and Microsoft Collaborate to Use AI to Increase Business Efficiency

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AI-Powered Strategic Alliance for Improved Business Operations

Conduent, a provider of business services, recently announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. The purpose of this partnership is to lead the way in generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications in important industries. The partnership’s primary goals are to use AI to transform healthcare administration, improve customer support, and strengthen fraud detection systems.

Boosting Cloud-Based Secure AI Adoption

Conduent’s clients will be able to take advantage of a secure cloud environment at a faster rate thanks to the synergy between Conduent and Microsoft. Three generative AI pilot programs are presently being developed by the alliance, one of which aims to efficiently extract data from medical documents. The goal of this project is to use Microsoft’s Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI Service to expedite the resolution process.

AI’s Strong Effect on the Growth of Small Businesses

The applications of AI go beyond the healthcare sector and include small businesses, where AI is thought to be a growth accelerator. AI has many uses, from enhancing customer service to automating marketing campaigns to expand its market reach. Particularly tailored AI solutions are being developed for small businesses, taking into account their unique resource limitations, making advanced AI tools more accessible to them.

Businesses with limited resources can now benefit from AI models developed by companies like Microsoft, which has garnered attention and given them a competitive advantage in the market. Supporters of these scaled models emphasize how easy it is to integrate, how affordable, and how little data these models require—all of which are advantageous for most companies that handle large volumes of sensitive data.

Conduent and Microsoft’s partnership is a big step toward bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into conventional business models, optimizing workflows, and establishing new benchmarks for customer and client interaction.

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A positive mindset, steering positive financial change, meet Oz Clement Knight

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Oz Clement Knight pushes boundaries as a top financial educator and entrepreneur, inspiring lives worldwide.

It is sometimes not just about feeling passionate about working in a particular field; it is more than that for a few rare professionals and business owners who strive for excellence daily, besides feeling passionate about all they choose to lay their hands on. When we saw the rise of Oz Clement Knight, who has been in the financial sector for several decades, we understood how a person needs to surrender to his aspirations and goals in life to push boundaries and steer positive change.

Oz Clement Knight is all about this and beyond. At every step in his journey, he has proved why he deserves to be called a leader in the financial realm, for he has stayed committed to taking his clients to the financial success they wish to achieve and, in the process, has reached the forefront of the industry.

He has been pioneering financial success for others through two incredible ventures, namely OHL Ventures Fund LLC and Ozmarq Holdings Ltd. The former is a Delaware series limited liability company to make venture capital and growth equity investments in diverse leading seed stage, early stage, and developmental stage and later stage private companies, with companies engaged in social media, social media, life sciences, and clean tech businesses. Through the fund, he promises to create returns for investors by helping them identify and invest in potential leading-edge companies that can later provide them with massive returns.

The latter serves as the Manager of the fund that will establish a series of funds for purchasing securities of a portfolio company/companies from a secondary source, making a separate and distinctive investment directly in a portfolio company/companies, and/or investing in the interests of investment funds, special purpose vehicles, or other entities whose portfolios consist of one or more portfolio companies.

With his years of experience and knowledge in private wealth management, investment banking, and capital markets, the financial educator, who loves spreading his knowledge among others, especially the youngsters in the field, has ensured that he offers financial services that cater to the individual needs of his clients, eventually empowering them to navigate the varied financial complexities in their journey to reach financial success.

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