🏠 Throw pottery w/ Seth Rogen & stop pre-rinsing your dishes

Single this Valentine's Day? Buy your own "Flowers" (a la Miley Cyrus) — and while you're at it, buy your own house, too! 🏠

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, single women across the country are more likely to own a home on their own than single men. The gender pay gap still very much exists (women earn 83.1 cents for every dollar a man pockets), BUT women are making more solo moves in the housing market.

In the U.S., single women own almost 11 million homes while single men only account for about 8 million 😬.

🎶 Anything you can do I can do better... sing it with us!

SPILLING THE (REAL)TEA

It's happeninggg... 30-year fixed-rate mortgages fell to 6.09 percent this week. Economists are predicting even lower rates this spring and summer, dipping close to 5.5%. 

How can fewer people + more apartments = higher rent? After a mass exodus from New York City during the pandemic, a recent rental rebound in Manhattan is mysteriously hard to explain.

Costco wants to make sure you NEVER have to leave. So, they have plans to propose an 800-apartment build above a store in South Los Angeles, making it convenient for residents to ride the elevator every time they have a craving.

Thousands of Puerto Rican rental properties may be deleted from Airbnb. A bill proposed in November could ban a majority of the short-term rentals on the island.

TIP OF THE WEEK

You probably do one of these five things to save money on your energy bill — but really, you're just wasting your time (and maybe even making it worse).

1. Pre-rinsing your dishes. Dishwashers today are designed to tackle food scraps.

2. Changing your refrigerator temp. Your fridge was made with insulation, air seals, and airflow in mind. Messing with it is just going to end up with you tossing out frostbit foods.

3. Switching your thermostat. Investing in a programmable thermostat will save you more in the long run than constantly turning it up-and-down, or on-and-off, ever could.

4. Washing your clothes with hot water. Your laundry detergent is strong enough to clean your clothes without you having to boil them. (AND, if you're washing on hot, fabrics could shrink, which means replacing your wardrobe.)

5. Not upgrading appliances. Those ancient relics on your countertop are silently draining energy. Anything over 15 or 20 years old has GTG.

WHAT'S BREWING

📚 What we're reading: Pamela Anderson. Love, Pamela — her long awaited memoir — released this week.

👀 What we're watching: Pamela Anderson. Yes, her memoir and documentary, "Pamela: A Love Story" on Netflix, came out on the same day.

🎧 What we're listening to: Designing Your Life on Audible. It's is a game-changer for anyone who is feeling stuck in their current situation and are looking for a new way to approach their personal and professional goals. It's written by two Stanford professors and teaches you to approach life like a designer. We've been loving the Designing Your Life audiobook, but for those who like to take notes and work through the exercises, we highly recommend purchasing the physical book.

🛒 What we're adding to our shopping cart: Set your alarm. ⏰ Tickets for Beyonce's Renaissance Tour go on sale tomorrow.

A STAR-STUDDED STAY

That was a weird dream! We went to this Hollywood Hills mansion, and Seth Rogen there — and he was making pottery?

Nope, wasn't a dream, and it's a bookable experience on Airbnb — but only three one-night stays will be available starting Feb. 7 at 10 a.m. on a first-come, first-served basis.

WOMEN OF THE HOUSE

Melissa Lipe, a Seattle-based mother-of-two, owns a vacation rental property in Hawaii called The Nene Nest. She shared with us her candid take on the challenges of operating a rental property from thousands of miles away.

How was buying this home different from buying your personal residence in Seattle?

The crazy part for me was when we bought a couple homes in the Seattle area, every time there's been a bidding war, and you often offer with an escalator, and you're just expecting it to be a battle of sorts to win the home. When we went to buy this one, we asked the realtor, ‘How do we do this? What kind of escalator do we put in?’ And he just started laughing at us and said, ‘We don't put an escalator, and I don't know why you think you need to do that.’ It was easier for us to purchase a home in Hawaii than it ever had been in the Seattle area.

You manage the property and run all of the bookings, but do you have a team that’s on the ground locally?

We have an awesome cleaning crew. She has a little bit of a hybrid role because she lives down the road, which is really important to me, so if ever anybody needs anything she jumps on that for me. She's also the cleaner, so she comes and does that as well. Then we have a landscape crew, and those are really the two major people that we employ there to help us.

Do you have any advice for finding the right people to work with?

Finding them was all through local referrals. I didn't Google or use any of that; it was really important to me that somebody could tell me that these were trustworthy, upstanding, going-to-show-up people because if they don't show up, I'm in big trouble. The other thing is that I just really wanted people who were OK with me over-communicating because I have to ask a lot of questions since I'm not there.

Where did the name for The Nene Nest come from?

Like most rental homes on Kauai, people name them. [The former owner] had named it and I can't even spell this because it was called ‘Camo-Willy’ cottage, and I was looking everywhere, in a Hawaiian dictionary, and I thought, ‘Why do I not know this word, what is this word?’ We had kept in touch, and so finally I went to her and said, ‘What is this word? I can't find it,’ and she said, ‘That's because it's not a word; it's my two kids’ names and I combined them.’ I thought, ‘Well, I can't market that, so I changed the name to Nene; it’s the state bird of Hawaii, it's like a Hawaiian goose.

What makes The Nene House special?

It's 152 steps to the ocean. It's actually on the west side of Hawaii, which in Hawaii it rains, but the west side is the driest side. It's sunny there most of the year and rarely rains. What really sells the home is just the overall vibe. It's a really authentic, Hawaiian cottage that's just been updated, and when you stay there, you just feel like you're at home and very local, and it's definitely not touristy.