In today's edition:
If you read the title and immediately thought of Nelly, please raise your hand (and hopefully that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of your workday). If you thought we misspelled "E.T.", please raise your hand. Now that you have self-identified your demographic, it's time to update your reference: EI = "Embodied Intelligence".
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like this happened fast. Just when I was getting comfortable with AI in my daily life, a new two-letter acronym wave has started. Instead of being stuck behind text, EI puts AI into the physical world. AI can tell you how to fold a shirt; EI can fold the shirt. AI is trained on data; EI is trained on experience in physical space. This has been making a lot of noise lately (the so-called ChatGPT moment for robotics), and after seeing how the 'basic' AI tools have changed our lives, it's time to start imagining the next leap.
The spring selling season was supposed to be the comeback of the housing market. It isn't - at least not yet. Existing home sales fell 3.6% month-over-month in March and 1% year-over-year, landing at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million - the slowest March pace since 2009. NAR revised its 2026 forecast from a 14% increase in existing home sales down to just 4%. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun noted that the market remains in a prolonged slump even as home prices continue to reach record highs. Inventory is up - about a four-month supply - but that could shrink quickly if buyer activity picks back up. The 30-year fixed rate, which briefly touched below 6% in late February, has since climbed back toward 6.46%.
Inflation jumped in March, and the headline number looks alarming: CPI rose 0.9% for the month, pushing the annual rate to 3.3% - up from 2.4% in February and the highest reading since April 2024. The culprit is almost entirely energy. Gasoline surged 21.2%, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the monthly increase, driven by the Iran conflict's disruption to oil markets. Strip that out and the story changes: core CPI - excluding food and energy - rose just 0.2% for the month and 2.6% year-over-year, slightly below forecast. A ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran took hold in mid-April, and energy prices have begun to moderate. The Fed is widely expected to look past the March spike, but rate cuts remain unlikely through the rest of 2026.
89-10. That's how the Senate voted last month on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. At its core, the bill is a sweeping attempt to address housing affordability by cutting federal regulations that make it harder and more expensive to build, while also restricting large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes - a provision titled, "Homes are for people, not corporations."
The bill is now stalled in the House, where both Republican and Democratic members say the Senate version either overreaches or misses priorities the House version addressed. Worth noting: the House passed its own version 390-9 in February.
Buried inside the broader package are a handful of targeted provisions worth watching: making federal disaster recovery housing aid permanent, creating a pilot repair grant program for low-income homeowners, and reforms that could keep an estimated 400,000 rural families from losing housing assistance as certain USDA mortgage provisions expire.
New section alert! In this spirit of learning from each other, Lab Notes is a quick look at one recent change a real Property Manager made: what happened and what was the impact. If you have something worth sharing, reply and tell us about it and we can feature you in a future edition!
Penny Smith-Horton & Joel Daniels from KSN Property Management (Savannah, GA)
KSN implemented Vendoroo, an AI maintenance coordinator, to handle tenant work orders, triage requests, and dispatch vendors automatically.
Joel put it simply: "It's hard to tell you're not talking to a human being." But the bigger shift wasn't about the AI… it was about Penny. With routine work orders handled, she spends more time on high-level decisions. As Joel framed it: "I don't see Vendoroo as replacing a human being; it leverages human beings and makes them more valuable."
That's how much single-family rents grew year-over-year in February 2026, according to Cotality's latest Single-Family Rent Index - one-third of the pre-2020 historical average of 3.3%, and part of a trend that has now run for more than six consecutive months.
The national number doesn't tell the whole story: 40 of the 50 largest metros posted slower growth than a year ago, 18 recorded outright declines, and low-priced rentals grew just 0.4%. Rents haven't fallen — they're still up 32% since 2020 — but the pace of growth has slowed to its lowest point in 15 years.
Kori Covrigaru and Vanessa Anderson (CEO of ShowMojo) co-authored a piece in this month's REI INK that's worth a read if you're thinking about leasing velocity in a softer market. The short version: professional photography increases leads per listing by 80%, and operators using leasing automation are holding conversion rates steady while the rest of the market slips. The data comes from 2,500 listings over 21 months. Check it out here.
The Beaker is a bi-weekly briefing from PlanOmatic on the economy, housing, and the forces shaping both. Have something we should cover? Reply to this email.
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