STATS of the Week: “Valentimes” Facts & Fun

• Total Valentine’s Day spending was projected to approach $26 billion — the second-highest year on record — and per-person spending was expected to come in around $193, according to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights and Analytics’ annual survey.

The stay in and grill out (steaks) tradition continued at our house, where we saved on babysitting expense (our second child was originally due on Valentine’s!) and tipping, but lost out on people watching.

• About one in 14 U.S. adults (7%) reported that they’ve broken up with someone on Valentine’s Day, according to early 2020 YouGov research.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a broken heart on Valentine’s, but I did break a crown. Last year on 2-14, in fact. The culprit for the tooth troubles was crackers, not candy.

• Sixty-four percent of men do not make plans in advance for a romantic Valentine’s Day with their better and always remembering halves, a Tennessee newspaper reported referencing a trivia site. I wonder what percentage flat-out forgets…

I don’t remember the birthdays of friends’ kids all that well, but there’s one I can’t forget. My high school and college classmate wrote in 2006: “So I only got [my wife] a card for Valentine’s Day. Good thing she was too busy having a baby to notice.” Happy Birthday to Jake!

• Women buy around 85 percent of all Valentines, according to one (vague) source.

That might (but might not) explain my father’s rustiness in the card-choosing category. True fact: He and my mother bought each other the same dog-themed card this Valentine’s Day. The key difference was that my mom bought the dollar store card to be from their dog!!

• What’s in a name? Many Latin American countries call Valentine’s el día de los enamorados (day of lovers) or día del amor y la amistad (day of love and friendship), according to Good Housekeeping.

To save time, our friends, the Valentines, would use an alias when booking dinner reservations on Valentine’s Day. I wish their nom de restaurant was something like Clive & Juliana Bixby or the George P. Burdells, but it was more strategically uncreative and basic.

Getting Real Estate

Memorial Day Weekend is the busiest summer holiday for real estate activity, studies have shown, and historically May has been the best month to sell a house. The month was quite a busy one for real estate writing as well.

As opposed to the assignment that required whittling down 2,200 words of email surveys and one phone interview to a ~500-word blog, your humble scribe will provide you with only some notable quotables from my six national real estate blog posts in May:

• “You can’t replace an electrician with a robot.”

A director of construction asserted when discussing the challenges facing the construction industry. Delayed during normal days, contractors face increased pressures due to the supply chain slowdown. And automation can only help so much.

• “The top trend is that in 2021 retail took off again.”

A brokerage managing director told me when discussing a retail sector that has had to cope with e-commerce and a global pandemic in the past decade. Would you have guessed that 87% of consumer sales happened on site within brick-and-mortar stores in the third quarter of 2021?

• “In the short term: bleak.”

A brokerage VP described urban retail this way. Downtown stores are struggling due to many residents moving out of central business districts during COVID-19 in search of less dense areas in which to live and many office workers not having returned to their workplaces yet.

• “Determining what your office should look and feel like should be based on the focused interactions of people, place and space.”

What Will the Future of Work Look Like? My source, the head of client experience and EVP in global occupier services, had this to say and more about the post-pandemic office environment.

• “The key lesson in the last three years is that it’s almost impossible to predict what’s right around the corner, including macro-geopolitical shocks.” 

A Moody’s Analytics senior director shared with me his version of ‘ya never know’ when talking about how commercial real estate firms are increasingly striving to leverage data analytics “to distinguish insights from all the noise.”