Time for some Zillow talk 🛌

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Time for some Zillow talk 🛌

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Hi there! Did you miss us? Well, good news: We're back! Dave is, at least. Allison is on a well-deserved vacation (even if she called me lazy last week). Let's get into it.

By David Goldman

🏡 ZILLOW TALK

Selling your house? You've got one less potential buyer.

Zillow announced it will stop buying homes through Zillow Offers for the rest of the year -- not because it doesn't want your house (it really does, and that double negative was brought to you by the never satisfied Rolling Stones). Zillow is suspending Offers because it can't always get what it wants. This Stones bit isn't working...

The company is an "iBuyer," which means it buys homes directly from sellers and then re-lists the properties after doing minor work. But like everything in 2021, the supply chain crisis is throwing a wrench in those gears, my colleague Anna Bahney reports.

The labor shortage means everyone is fighting over the same contractors (speaking of which, Barry, if you're reading this, you still owe me a quote). So Zillow is having a tough time finding people to fix up the houses it's buying.

Even if it were able to get the help it needs, the materials shortage means Zillow's homes have to sit on the market for a long time until the lumber, drywall, tiles and other products clear the bottleneck at the ports.

So Zillow is hitting pause at least until January, as it focuses on selling the homes it has already purchased -- including the 3,805 homes it bought in the second quarter.

WHAT IT MEANS

This is the ultimate 2021 crossover story, and not in a fun Flintstones-meets-the-Jetsons kind of way. It's much more of a mess, like when Beyoncé and Bruno Mars had to rescue the Super Bowl 50 halftime show from Coldplay.

The insane housing market has shown few signs of slowing down, boosting home prices to astronomical levels and lifting rents right alongside them. That has been great news for homeowners (albeit horrible news for first-time buyers), but it's also starting to feel extremely bubblicious. Once the market starts to take a turn, it could get ugly in a hurry -- remember 2007?

Economists aren't fretting the housing bubble, and Anna reports this may be more of a Zillow-specific problem than an iBuyer problem, broadly. But it's enough to give some housing pessimists dread: If buyers do, in fact, start disappearing because they can't get new homes in the state they want them, that could be a catalyst for a downturn.

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#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

$599

One sec, getting up on my soapbox...

There we are. Hi! I don't know you, but I'm guessing you have a smartphone, because how else are you reading this at 8 pm?

So Google did something pretty neat today: It introduced a new smartphone for $599. The Pixel 6, which by all accounts will have the best smartphone camera in the business and (finally) the processing power to match it, is a flagship-worthy phone at a significantly cheaper price than the iPhone or Galaxy S. Like, $200 less.

Folks, if you're going to pay $800, $900 or even $1,000 for a phone, just do your homework first. I haven't tested the Pixel 6 -- it was announced just a few hours ago -- but for the specs, $599 looks like a steal. It's not the phone for everyone, and Google has a 1% market share for a reason. Apple and Samsung make awesome products, but there's a whole world of great devices out there that don't cost an arm and a leg. And that's all the time I have...

🚢 ALL TIED UP

Wondering why that couch you ordered won't be delivered until February? And why car prices are through the roof? And why your supermarket can't seem to keep your favorite food in stock?

There's plenty of stuff -- we've made it past hoarding toilet paper and Clorox wipes -- but getting that stuff to where it needs to be is proving incredibly difficult.

Approximately 200,000 shipping containers remain on ships off the coast of Los Angeles as pandemic-related gridlock continues to disrupt the global supply chains.

"We have about two weeks' worth of work sitting at anchor right now," Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper Monday. His port is trying to unload and then prioritize the cargo that needs to move off the port as quickly as possible.

President Joe Biden tried to get ports to increase their nighttime operations, shifting to a 24/7 cycle to get goods into trucks. There's a problem, though: a shortage of truck drivers to handle that work. No cargo owners are looking to use the 3 am. to 8 a.m. window, so ports aren't yet running all night. And longer hours of operations doesn't mean that existing drivers can drive for more hours, because there are safety rules limiting how long they can drive.

But we were all just saying we needed to be less materialistic anyway, so here's our opportunity.

CNN Business' Chris Isidore has more.

🌎 QUOTE OF THE DAY

We don't see their intent changing dramatically over the next several weeks and months.

Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran said on a call with analysts that customers aren't shopping for groceries any less because prices are rising. That means Americans may be able to absorb inflation -- for now, anyway.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

💸 President Joe Biden's stimulus bill is costing you, a least for a bit. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is contributing to elevated inflation but it isn't expected to overheat the economy, a new research paper from the San Francisco Federal Reserve concludes.

🙅♀️ Years before Microsoft's board investigated a romantic relationship that founder Bill Gates had with an employee, Gates was told by fellow executives to stop inappropriately emailing with a different employee, Microsoft confirmed to CNN Business.

🌮 Taco Bell on Thursday will give away free breakfast burritos at its United States restaurants. The freebies, which run between 7 am to 11 am, serve as a reminder that breakfast has returned at roughly 90% of Taco Bell locations after being temporarily paused because of the pandemic.