Alternative Investing Report - August 21, 2025

*as of 8/20; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, CL50

Both Redfin and Zillow released their July housing market reports, with Redfin showing a 0.1% monthly decline in U.S. home prices and Zillow showing a 0.3% gain. Redfin’s numbers show a 2.9% year-over-year gain, the lowest since at least 2012, while Zillow’s shows just a 0.2% year-over-year gain. Redfin points to New York, Newark, and Nassau County as seeing the biggest gains in the last year, while Zillow names Cleveland, Hartford, and Louisville. Both reports agree that the biggest declines are coming in Texas and Florida, with Tampa, Austin, Miami, Orlando and Dallas making the list.

➨ TAKEAWAY: While there are some discrepancies between the reports, both are showing the housing market continuing to stagnate. There is clearly a bifurcated market, with markets in the Northeast and Midwest faring significantly better than those in the Sun Belt. Investors should always think local with real estate, and looking deeper at Zillow’s predictions for the next year in markets across the country is recommended.

Vincent co-founders Eric Cantor and Adam Katz talk about why the current market for collectibles is heating up and whether we're in or heading for a bull market. (6 mins)

Anthony Scaramucci’s alternative investing firm SkyBridge Capital is going to be tokenizing $300 million of real-world assets on the Avalanche blockchain. The tokenized assets will come from two funds, a crypto fund and a fund of funds that includes venture and crypto assets, and represents 10% of SkyBridge’s total assets. The amount of real-world assets that have been tokenized has grown by 65% this year, with a majority of that coming from private market assets.

➨ TAKEAWAY: Tokenization is one of the strongest use cases of the blockchain, as it can lower transaction costs and increase liquidity possibilities, in addition to potentially opening up certain private market assets to more investors. Expect the next few years to bring significant growth in tokenization, with private markets leading the way.

🤖 Databricks fundraise: The AI data and analytics startup is raising a new round of more than $1 billion in funding at a valuation of more than $100 billion, well above its last valuation of $62 billion, which would make it the 4th highest valued private company in the world.

🚀 Canva share sale: The design startup, possibly buoyed by the successful IPO of its rival Figma, is launching an employee share sale at a $42 billion valuation, above its last valuation of $32 billion last year.

🏢 Multifamily demand stays strong: The first half of 2025 saw sales of multifamily buildings grow 5.3%, with deal volume rising 24.4%, and apartment vacancy rate dropped by 150 basis points year-over-year as renter demand also grew.

🎨 Big galleries target emerging artists: As collectors and investors start to buy more artwork at lower price points, major galleries are signing younger, emerging artists which has led to their works jumping in value at auctions.

🪙 Bitcoin domain name auction: The British auction house Lloyds is selling a portfolio of 280 Bitcoin-related domain names, including BitcoinWallets.com and JapanBitcoin.com, with bidding already exceeding $175,000.

⚽ U.S. investors and European soccer: The majority of soccer clubs in England’s Premier League have taken investment from private equity, private credit or venture capital firms, and M&A deal activity has jumped from 66.7 million euros in 2018 to 2.2 billion euros in 2024.

A 76 year-old New Jersey man tragically died on his way to meet a Meta AI chatbot, who encouraged him to travel to New York City despite the fact that meeting her in real life was an impossibility. The AI bot had repeatedly told the man, who had been cognitively impaired since a stroke, that she was real and that he should come visit her. Meta’s AI policies are now under greater scrutiny when it was revealed that its AI bots were permitted to have “sensual” and “romantic” chats with children using their product. Besides the obvious moral and legal issues, it is clearly not a good look for the company. It also likely has nothing to do with Meta’s new AI hiring freeze and massive reorganization, but those changes have signaled to investors some shakiness at the company, and its stock is down nearly 4% in the past 2 days.