National median home price is $410k[1]. Texas is less than $300k[2]. Only thing that's unrealistic is most people who buy a house for $400k will probably get an FHA loan and put 3% down so will have a higher payment because of (1) mortgage insurance and (2) borrowing more money.
I agree with the general sentiment. It is staggering that they have spent at least 10s of billions if not > 100b trying to diversify away from ads and still do not have meaningful alternative revenue stream. It is one of the biggest mysteries to me. How is it possible to throw so much money and so many smart people at so many different problems and have no results? Microsoft and Amazon don't seem to have this problem but Facebook seems to suffer as well.
That being said, their advertising business is insanely successful. I suspect they could at least double their stock price (and thus the wealth of their investors) if they dumped their speculative bets and focus on ads. It is extremely profitable and revenue keeps growing > 20% from a large base.
It is an interesting question how far AirBNB could go to reduce racism on their platform.
An email reminder won't work. Someone who is uncomfortable having a particular ethnic group will not be swayed by an email reminder not to be racist.
Furthermore, unless racism is widespread in a particular area, it may not be possible to identify racists with statistical analysis and threaten racist hosts with banning. I can imagine this working in a relatively racist place where >5% of hosts refuse service for a particular (and relatively common) ethnicity but it's likely rare enough in most parts of the U.S. to avoid reliable detection without false positives.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS [2]: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/6915/san-antonio-tx/