👀 Your neighbor’s mortgage rate is public

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Welcome to your Thursday, {{first_name | friend}}. Remember when printing felt as essential as coffee and Wi-Fi? The home office printer sure had its era of chewing paper and demanding yellow ink for a black-and-white form. 

Then came shared docs, e-signatures and “I’ll just send the link.” Poor printers, they’re fading into existance.

🖨️ By roughly how much have printed pages dropped since 2020? A) About 5%, B) About 20%, C) About 40% or D) 100%? Make a guess and keep reading, the answer is waiting for you at the end.

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⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Most people open Zillow to drool over a kitchen they’ll never own. Fine. But the people who actually win at real estate ignore the pretty photos and head straight for the boring tabs. 

That’s where the money hides. And one overlooked number tells you more than any Zestimate.

Pull up an address on Homes.com, scroll down towards the end of the listing and sometimes you’ll see the owner’s mortgage: how much they borrowed, what they still owe and their interest rate. It’s not a glitch. Mortgage liens are public record, sitting in plain sight. 

So why does a stranger’s rate matter? 

Because in today’s frozen market, it tells you whether they’ll ever sell. Roughly 80% of mortgage holders sit below 6%, and a third locked in between 3% and 4% during the pandemic. Someone with a 2.7% rate is going nowhere. Trading it for a 6.5% loan would nearly double their payment on the same house. But someone who panic-bought at 7% in 2023? That’s a motivated seller waiting to happen.

Here’s your wow moment. 

By early 2026, for the first time, more Americans held a mortgage above 6% than below 3%. The cheap-money era tipped over. More owners are quietly itching to move, and that hidden rate is your tell.

Redfin hands you another one. Check Time on Redfin and the price-drop history. A dream home sitting 112 days with two cuts? That seller is ready to deal.

Everything you dug up on your neighbor, a stranger can dig up on you. Your purchase price, your tax history, even interior photos from an old listing that never came down. 

Redfin got bought in 2025 by Rocket, America’s largest mortgage lender. Rocket then bought the biggest loan servicer, too. One company now sits on the home-search data and roughly 10 million mortgages.

So lock it down. Claim your home on Zillow to control what shows and bury the details you’d rather hide. Ask the real estate sites to pull old interior photos. Knowledge cuts both ways, so use yours.

The boring tabs are where the gold is. It’s all legal. It’s hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone savvy like you to click.

🤣 Why did the real estate agent hide his license? He wanted to be a secret agent. (Speaking of snooping.)

📩 Send this to someone who is house-hunting in this market and needs every edge they can get. Use the handy links below.

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(Starts at 1:03) A woman was about to hand her debit cards to a fake Wells Fargo banker. Until someone came to the rescue and saved her. Her hero? Michael the Uber driver. It’s your faith in humanity story for the day.

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🚨 Fake utility call: How annoying is this? Imagine your phone ringing before dinner, and a serious voice says your electricity is getting shut off today unless you pay up. That stomach drop is the business model. The FTC says scammers are posing as gas, electric and water companies, demanding instant payment by gift card or crypto. Classic scammer starter pack. Real utilities don’t do that. Hang up, breathe and call the number on your actual bill.

Dashboard distraction tantrums: Don’t you miss when the most annoying thing your car screen did was showing the wrong time after daylight saving? A new survey of over 92,000 owners after 90 days with 2025 vehicles found that people aren’t happy with their new car’s touch screens. In short, they’re getting cooked by infotainment and phone connectivity, especially Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Infotainment was the nastiest problem bucket, around 42 issues per 100 cars. EVs and plug-ins scored worse than gas cars.

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Six-phone circus: Get this. Apple might release six iPhones next year. According to a leak, the early batch includes the iPhone Air 2, iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e, likely by March. September 2027 gets the 20th anniversary toys: two iPhone 19 Pro models and a wide foldable Ultra 2. This fall may be unusually light, with only iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and Ultra expected. You’ve got options. Want budget? There’s an e. Want skinny? Air. Want status? Pro. Want to feel financially assaulted? Buy now.

🛞 Training wheels era: This sounds like an on-site internship. Apptronik, the Texas startup backed by Google and Mercedes, opened Robot Park to train Apollo humanoids (paywall link) on conveyor loading, toy sorting and other boring jobs humans resent. Most are still remotely guided, because the missing ingredient is real-world data. The company is betting that wheels hit factories first, legs come later. Apptronik raised about $1 billion to train bots. Basically mechanized kindergarten, but the tuition is venture capital. 

After 30 years in tech, Christina got laid off. She didn’t sulk. She dusted off her entrepreneur cape and built her own AI consulting company.

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⚡️ 3-second tech genius: ChatGPT and Claude both have free “voice mode,” so you can ask questions like a normal conversation. I use it to brainstorm ideas before I lose the thought or for emails I don’t want to draft from scratch. Open a new chat and tap Use Voice near the prompt box. It’ll all be typed out when you’re done.

⌨️ One-thumb typing: Larger phones make one-handed typing awkward. On iPhone, touch and hold the globe icon on the keyboard, then pick the left or right keyboard icon. On Android, open the keyboard, tap the three dots, then One-handed keyboard. FYI, this only shifts the keyboard. It doesn’t shrink the whole screen.

👀 Google shuffled your privacy controls: New settings showed up for Search history and Google Play personalization. Instead of one big Web & App Activity switch, you get separate controls for what Google saves and what it uses for recommendations. Go to myaccount.google.com > Data & privacy > Personalization settings. Review what’s on. Turn off what feels nosy.

📚 Kindle catch-up button: Amazon’s new Story So Far feature is rolling out to newer Kindles and the Kindle app on iPhone/iPad. Perfect when you return to a book and think, “Who is this character again, and why are they mad?” Update first. Then press and hold a book > Read Recap, or while reading, tap the 3-dot menu > Story So Far.

🔎 Banish Bing results: Searching for a file on your Windows PC and getting web results instead? Annoying. Microsoft is testing a way to turn that off, so Search sticks to your local stuff. Go to Settings > Privacy & security > Search when it appears. It’s Windows Insiders only for now. Sign up here.

Turns out the ’90s weren’t just bad for jeans. They were also bad for surviving SUV crashes.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety smashed a 1996 Chevy Blazer into a 2026 Blazer, and the new one took it like a champ. Its front end crumpled, cabin stayed intact and the dummy could’ve walked away with bruises.

The old Blazer folded like a barbecue lawn chair. Dashboard in the lap, steering column invading personal space, airbag uppercutting the dummy’s head clean off. Progress is real. Nostalgia needs a seat belt.

Check out the full impact here.

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🔜 Tomorrow: Sci-fi used to feel like fantasy. Now it feels like a product road map. I’m breaking down movies that predicted our world, from chatbots and video calls to surveillance tech and screen addiction. They’re funny, creepy and way too accurate.

Coming up in tomorrow’s trivia, the Coney Island spectacle that proves America can turn even a hot dog into an extreme sport.

The answer: B) About 20%. HP’s CEO admits printed pages are about 80% of what they were six years ago. I thought it’d be much worse. 

The real grim reaper isn’t people leaving the office. It’s the cloud. Once your documents live in a shared link anyone can edit, comment on and sign, the printer just sits there waiting for work that never comes.

So HP did what nobody asked for: turned ink into a subscription called Instant Ink. The cheapest plan is $1.79 a month, every month, for as few as 10 pages. Print nothing, you still pay. And cancel? HP can remotely brick the cartridges sitting in your printer. 

Print less, pay forever or lose your ink. I used to like HP products. Such a shame.

The printer’s been sitting in the corner, quietly muttering: Someday my prints will come.

What you learned today: Your neighbor’s mortgage rate is sitting in public view, and now you know how to read it before they even list. Fake utility calls are designed to make your stomach drop, so you hang up. Apple plans a six-phone 2027, and yes, one is called Ultra. New car touch screens are losing the battle against drivers. A 1996 SUV got absolutely humbled by its 2026 self. Your iPhone keyboard shrinks to one thumb length on command. And an Uber driver did more for one woman’s financial safety than her bank did. Not a bad Thursday.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, EUDELE, IIHS

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