High-profile bank failures offer lessons worth sharing with your clients and customers.

Influencer marketing brings exposure, brand visibility and personal connection to small businesses, and it can boost revenue at minimal cost, industry experts say. Suggestions include seeking micro-influencers whose audience aligns with the business' market, cultivating long-term relationships with incentives or discounts, and offering opportunities for the influencer to tell personal stories.

REALTORS® have a special responsibility to speak up and advocate for policies that keep the real estate market healthy. Listen to Drive With NAR to learn what you can do to support greater housing options for your clients.

Home buyers flock to new builds in an effort to find more options amid persistently low inventory.

Using persona-based data within programmatic ad buys can help brands deliver ads to consumers based on interests and behaviors to generate higher returns that then can be bolstered by lookalike audiences, dynamic creative optimization and a test-and-learn approach, writes Mario Carrasco, ThinkNow principal. Also consider combining persona and zero-party data to enhance personalized experiences, "increase customer loyalty and improve customer lifetime value," Carrasco writes.

Some outdated ideas about safety practices in the real estate profession may make you more vulnerable in the course of your work.

Age is often the forgotten component in diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, writes Chronus' Sara Rahmani, who urges employers to challenge generational stereotypes and bring workers of different ages and experience levels together. Rahmani explains three types of mentoring that can help to promote age diversity: reverse, flash and career.

The inability of people to afford housing is also driving an increase in the number of abandoned pets, as many landlords do not allow pets, Annoula Wylderich writes.

The National Association of REALTORS®, the National Association of Home Builders and the Mortgage Bankers Association have sent a joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court ahead of its hearing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's constitutionality, making the point that ruling against it would have severe repercussions for them. Expressing a wish "to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences that a decision drawing those rules into doubt could have on the mortgage and real-estate markets," the brief states that a move that would affect current CFPB regulations "could lead to immediate and intense disruption to the housing market, harming both consumers and the broader economy."

Top leaders in the financial industry, including executives from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, are actively warning U.S. government officials that companies and the economy will start experiencing damage from the debt-ceiling impasse well in advance of any potential default. Meanwhile, the industry continues to prepare for a possible delay in payment on Treasury securities, with one banking trade group spokesman commenting: "It's never happened, so we don't know to what degree the markets will be impacted."