Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends: 3 Takeaways for Real Estate

One of my favorite research rituals is the annual release by Mary Meeker of her Internet Trends Report, the latest of which was issued on June 1. Meeker was catapulted into the financing world spotlight as the lead manager at Morgan Stanley for Netscape's IPO in 1995. Later that year, she and Chris DePuy at Morgan published The Internet Trends, and it quickly became the definitive digest of the current state of the Internet, as well as discerning big-picture trends.

Meeker would go on to serve as a research analyst for another notable Morgan Stanley IPO in 2004: Google. Today, Meeker is a partner with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and continues to publish the most definitive annual report on the Internet. Like Warren Buffett's annual letter to shareholders, it has become one of my annual must-reads.

Presented in a slideshow format, this year's report – available in a PDF here – is over 200 pages long and is packed with economic, cultural, business and technology data that is so comprehensive, it is mind numbing. So here's my attempt to extract just three key takeaways that should be of particular interest to the real estate industry. In truth, there are dozens more, but this is an attempt to show that the full consumption of this report is worth the chore.

Trend: Global aging

Global birth rates are down (39% decline since 1960) and global life expectancy is up (36% increase since 1960). This is true in the U.S., as illustrated by these charts from the report:

Takeaway: This is a huge demographic trend in the U.S. that will have a long-lasting impact on real estate, from the types of homes we are building, to where we are building them. Initially, we are entering the early stages of an era when Millennials are going to have to buy Baby Boomer homes as the Boomers downsize and the Millennials build families because Millennials are aging, and starting to have more children too.