BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 1 of 266)

April 17, 2024

BloodhoundBrag: FannieMae and FreddieMac are FINALLY deploying a plan we proposed in 2007…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You know how it is. The NAR had to get itself sued to death first. Inasmuch as nothing is actually changing – adamantly, nothing – that works out to be a decent deal. Rotting giants fall hard, but sic semper tyrannosauris, as we have said all along.

Here’s what’s what: Starting in 2006 or so, BloodhoundBlog started debating ways to make the contradictions of our convoluted commission scheme more transparent and fairer to both buyers and sellers.

I ended up arguing for an idea I called The Divorced Real Estate Commission. If you click the link, you can read an eBook I wrote on the subject. Or you could just read the news from FannieMae and FreddieMac, who are this week implementing the idea I came up with seventeen years ago.

The big new idea at Fannie/Freddie? It’s the middle column.

Seventeen years… And how many billions will the NAR have pissed away fighting a rear-guard action to get to where BloodhoundBlog was seventeen years ago…?

This amounts to a brag on BloodhoundBlog’s part. Out of seventy-ish contributors, only Brian Brady and I have written here lately – not very much and not very lately. Our whole server gets hammered when I blog here too frequently. But the blog of the dawgs endures, as witness. Because there is ALWAYS something to howl about.

October 26, 2023

Redfin runs out of other brokers’ agents to milk, resolves to milk its own, instead.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

How bad is your listing agent?

“There are two real estate brokerage business models: Selling houses or milking agents. Redfin yearns to discover that it can’t do either.” –Greg Swann

I’ve spent much of this month documenting how ineptly Redfin.com lists homes for sale. It wasn’t something I set out to do. I’ve been dour about them since I discovered CEO Glenn Kelman’s racist staffing policies, but I had never paid any attention to them with regard to real estate. They have mattered nothing to my business: I’ve never had a Redfin showing, never shown a Redfin listing.

But I was simply amazed by what I found. Just as with iBuying and the carrying costs of owning non-producing housing, every experienced broker knew that salaried agents would not produce. But even so, I was unprepared for what I found: Multiple bone-headed deal-killing errors in each listing, with those errors repeated in listing after listing. Since the MLS listing is the gatekeeper to showing and every succeeding step in the purchase process, if the listing repels the buyer, the home cannot sell.

And they don’t. Many listings Close over 90 days, some over 180. They have a lot of Cancelled and Expired listings, as well, with many of those at huge DOMs. Strangely, a significant number of these sellers relist. Having already lost six months and 20% of the property’s value, why not truly go for broke?

Oh. Nevermind.

So after only 18 years of insisting that salaried agents are better, Redfin now proposes to become a split shop. The splits are crap, but that kinda doesn’t matter, taking account that the commissions are already cut to the quick, thus to market to people who think saving 1.5% on commission makes losing six months and 20% of the property’s value worthwhile.

And that would be the real problem. Redfin makes a point of not understanding real estate, so their plan is to recruit an agent who no longer exists – the top producer. The team leaders and rainmakers who actually sell homes are working at 95% to 100% splits – but the Read more

November 22, 2022

Get up. Get Out. Get Contacts. Get Paid.

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

If you are following my journey, we moved to Tampa/St Pete FL last year.  We still have a home in San Diego but spend most of the year in Florida. The reasons are plentiful but, when COVID lockdowns hit, it gave me a chance to start a new “product line” (commercial real estate loans) in a new location.  The move isn’t without challenges.  Although I can lend nationwide, most folks want to work with a local lender unless they have a prior personal relationship.

How did I parachute into Florida and build up a profitable mortgage brokerage business in 15 months?

1- I worked my inactive client database.
2- I added Florida agents, whom I met at industry happy hours, to my weekly email list
3- I try call 5 inactive clients and 5 agents daily.  Few people answer their phones now so I usually end up leaving messages.

Last year started off really well.  Our Florida purchase volume was about half of our California purchase volume.  My goal for 2022 was to have our Florida volume to exceed of our California volume. 2022 was shaping up well until St Patrick’s Day-volume got weaker through Memorial Day, then even weaker by Labor Day, then it damned near dried up through now (Thanksgiving).

A month ago, I decided to try something different.  Calling agents and inactive clients is still a daily discipline but it gets depressing when few calls are answered.  I decided to do some “in-person canvassing”, one day each week, to meet business owners in and around St Petersburg.  Pinellas County is a hodgepodge of independent businesses so I decided to make a goal of having 25 conversations each day, each time I went out.

First, I went to the charming seaside village of Dunedin.  The local Chamber of Commerce gave me a map of 145 businesses within one square mile.  I met:

-8 real estate agents,
-6 bar/pub/restaurant owners, and
-13 shop owners.

16 of those people owned a home and 2 owned investment properties.  12 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter.  4 of them said they would like to own investment properties.

Last week, I visited Read more

July 13, 2022

#OpenDoor shows the world how the #iBuyer idea will die: Death by Days-on-Market.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If a slacker employee was mysteriously transformed into a house for sale…”

Ask any old-timer in real estate what’s wrong with the iBuyer idea and he’ll tell you right away:

“What happens when the market turns?”

It would be charitable to argue that the iBuyers actually thought this mishegoss would work. Perhaps that’s so: They’re flippers, except they are very bad at every part of the flipping process. And they’re pawnbrokers – buyers of last resort – except they buy first, not last, paying top-dollar for the honor, then cling to their assets like precious prodigal sons.

Brokering real estate works for almost nobody, but it only works because the broker does not own the asset. Owning non-producing assets as “investments” is insane. It can only work if you buy at deep, deep discounts – like flippers and pawnbrokers do, and like OpenDoor apparently cannot do.

So: Closed Sale Price compared to Original List Price, on average: April -$9,537, May -$16,935, June -$31,698.

Those are from Phoenix. Perhaps they’re doing better in other cities, but this is their primal market and ground zero for all things iBuyer. I think we’re seeing how they work.

The trend on Days-on-Market is not great, and I would expect it to get a lot worse: April 41, May 40, June 48. By June the market had well and truly turned, but in April they should have been moving everything in single-digit DOMs. That they were not – and that they score so few winners in pricing, amidst so many huge losers – tells you how they will do, going forward.

The problem, as I have been saying for years, is that even if they bought right, which they don’t, and even if they rehabbed and marketed right, which they don’t, they would still own the “investments” far too long, resulting in killer carrying costs.

The delusion in iBuying emerged from two ploys from the Federal government, suppressing interest rates for home-buyers and also for Wall Street. Yippee! Practically-free money to buy assets that seem only to go up in price…

Ahem.

Imputed losses per “investment” will get uglier by the day – Read more

June 11, 2022

In two years, this will be the news: “Glut of unsold houses.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Sticks and stones might make a home, but money makes all the difference…

I live in a world in sticks: Everywhere I look, I see domiciles in progress: Single-family, huge multi-family projects – and the strange hybrid of single-family apartment communities, tiny single-story houses packed cheek-by-jowl, like little Legos affixed to a concrete carpet.

This is all Trump, so you know. Four or five years ago, investors decided that not only would right about now be a good time for new housing, the times would still be good for cashing in on opportunities planned for five years out.

You may think them unwise, but risk is what makes horse races. Moreover, had Trump retained the presidency, the bets would have paid off handsomely.

Things may be different where you are. It’s very easy to build in Arizona, compared to other places. Even so, you have your Trump-promise investments – in sticks, in stone, in steel – and you will have the opportunity to see how things work out locally.

I am beyond dour, for what that’s worth. We are on the cusp of global famine, and how tight belts will get in America remains to be seen. From borrower activity, we know the market has well and truly turned, and yet I suspect people still in the market are underestimating how bad things will get.

Will prices go down? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Since Reagan gifted us with Volker, we’ve treated housing prices as a bellwether to market trends – in real estate and everywhere. That will be a lot less useful as the market tries to find dry land, when it is awash in funds that are 80% newly-counterfeited. The tale going forward will be told by Days-on-Market – from single- to double- to triple-digits.

And yet: Isn’t there a housing shortage? There is here. How about Seattle? No one there will tell us, but the Great George Floyd Migration created housing shortages mostly where bus lines don’t run, leaving locales well-served by rioter-movers hugely vacant. We can expect rent-seekers to fill the most-vacant of that housing with Fiasco Joe’s illegal immigrants – Read more

June 8, 2022

Why won’t people move?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The housing market is “stuck”. Higher mortgage rates and the fear of higher property taxes cause Boomers and Millennials to “hunker down” rather than move to new homes. Reverse mortgages might offer a solution to this problem. Today,  2 out of 3 Baby Boomers are rejecting retirement communities and “aging in place”:

Today, 66% of this population report that they plan to age in place. Little changed from 2016, when 63% said the same. Given their reported financial gains in the past five years, however, they may be more equipped to do so.

When asked when they expect to move next, 27% feel confident they would move again, while 36% believe they will not move and 37% simply don’t know. These data suggest this population is in no rush to leave their current homes.

Regardless of their plans to move or age in place, 66% of survey respondents say they expect their home to need some degree of renovations to make the space livable for the long term if they were to age in place. Between personal savings and longer-term retirement and investment accounts, those who think they would need renovations to age in place say they are confident they could afford them.

This is both a problem and opportunity for real estate agents and brokers.  Boomers own many of the “move-up” homes their children covet but can’t afford.  Millennials might love to sell their $500,000 homes, and trade up to a $700,000 home but are locked in to sub 3% mortgage rates in a 5.5% mortgage rate environment.    Let me break down the sticker shock the millennials are facing:

Millennial family buys a home for $350K, in 2016, with a 4.75% FHA mortgage rate and a monthly PITI of $2400.  In 2021, they refinanced that mortgage to a 2.75% conventional loan with a monthly PITI of $1700, retaining over $200K in equity (which could be used for a down payment on a $700,000 home.  There are two problems today:  that $700,000 home is now $800,000 and mortgage rates are at 5.5%.  If they sold their smaller homes, used their home equity as a down Read more

May 15, 2022

2023 Housing Bubble or 2024 Real Estate Boom?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Zillow “creates” digital home valuations and The Fed “creates” digital currency so it’s not like we are dealing with credible institutions BUT:

The Dallas Fed is worried that housing is overvalued.

Our evidence points to abnormal U.S. housing market behavior for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s. Reasons for concern are clear in certain economic indicators—the price-to-rent ratio, in particular, and the price-to-income ratio—which show signs that 2021 house prices appear increasingly out of step with fundamentals.

Zillow predicts continued housing price appreciation

No, and in fact, the expectation of another crash could contribute to keeping homes so unaffordable. Builders have been firing on all cylinders, and with more homes under construction than any time since 1973, they understandably feel exposed in the event of a housing downturn. If they trim their construction plans out of caution, we will miss out on one of the best hopes we have for net new inventory on the market, and the inventory crunch that’s helped push prices up will persist for longer than expected.

Pick your poison but keep these two things in mind:  The Fed created this housing “boom” and Zillow executives aren’t practicing what its economists are preaching

May 6, 2022

Don’t drop that listing price just yet!

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Southern California, agents are telling me that homebuyer enthusiasm has dropped quickly.  More homes are on caravan and some are starting to reduce listing prices to get the home sold.  Tampa Bay area agents are whispering the same.  And while the US Home Price Index rose 2%, year over year, we see price reductions in over 30% of the cities across the country.

This is no surprise to me.  Mortgage rates doubled in the past 6 months with a big move upwards in the past 60 days.  That, combined with the rapid increase in home prices since the pandemic started has severely impacted housing affordability.  With less buyers buying, and sellers looking for unrealistic prices, agents are pleading with sellers to drop their listing price.  You can offer your seller a couple of options BEFORE you drop that price:

1- If the home is secured with a low-interest VA or FHA mortgage, you can highlight that those loans are assumable in the marketing remarks.  This Safety Harbor listing offers an assumable loan, at 2.25%–half of what most lenders are offer today.
2- Offering a seller-buydown of the mortgage rate could save the seller some money.  I run through the numbers of a seller-buydown in this video.  This is a great response to a low offer.

I will be hosting a Realtor Happy Hour, in St Pete Beach, FL, on Thursday May 12, 2022.
I am hosting an Agents Helping Agents event, in Tampa, FL, on Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
Stay tuned if you are in San Diego.  I will be hosting an Agents Helping Agents event in mid June.

April 14, 2022

Lenders can help Realtors get offers accepted in a competitive market

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Most buyers find themselves in a multiple offer situation in today’s market.  While the highest price often wins the home, other factors come into play–some buyers are waiving appraisal, loan, and even inspection contingencies.  Selling agents who want to protect their buyers, while affording them an “edge” against competing offers, are encouraging listing agents to contact the lender directly.

We think you can be more proactive than that.  Here are five tips for Realtors about how to use a great lender to get your offer accepted:

1- Use a reputable mortgage broker, not a lender.  (see why here) Both the originator and the mortgage company should have review pages, whether they are on Yelp, LinkedIn, or Lending Tree.

2- Use a loan officer with exceptional communication skills.  If you want to test those skills, call him/her.  If he or she doesn’t answer the phone, leave a voicemail and send a brief text.  If you don’t get a text back or return call within an hour, you have the wrong guy or gal.  That includes weekends.  YOU work on weekends; so should loan officers.  You should expect the originator to be responsive, Monday through Friday, 830AM to 7PM and 12PM to 5PM on Saturdays and Sundays

3- Make sure your buyer is pre-approved rather than pre-qualified.  This means that the credit has been pulled, income and assets were analyzed and verified, and the file has DU approval findings in it.  The pre-approval letter should address all of those issues in the body of the letter.

4- Have the originator call the listing agent and offer to do the following:  speak with an originator the listing agent trusts, to review the loan approval or, if desired, speak directly to the seller.  The originator should speak frankly and honestly about the contingency removals iin the contract and explain which ones might be difficult to meet.  Be wary of the originator who makes promises which he/she knows can’t be kept.  Underwriting approval time is easily determined but the originator has little to no control over the appraiser.

5- Have a plan to deal with a low appraisal and have the originator Read more

April 11, 2022

Am I charging enough rent for my investment property?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website
I don’t need to tell you that housing inventory is tight. Buyer agents are having a hard time earning a living today while listing agents are finding more and more competition.
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One thing you can do is to prospect out-of-state investors and offer one free service for them– comparable rent analysis. Rents are rapidly rising and most investors aren’t keeping up with the market.
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Many out-of-state investors are former residents; they lived here, moved to another state, and hold the property as an investment. While some Realtors are focused on telling homeowners and investors what their property is worth, hardly any are speaking with investors about what they could be earning from their home.
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I subscribe to two services to help me offer my expertise to investors:
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Rentometer offers a quick, easy, report, which you can generate with your branding, showing the comparable rents for the property. It costs less than $100 annually.
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A more proactive approach is to subscribe to Homebot. Homebot keeps you in touch with past clients and prospects by sending them a monthly homeowners digest, showing them data on property valuation, rent estimates, AirBnB analysis, potential homeowners equity, possible move-up potential, and a whole bunch more. It’s VERY sticky– My Homebot email open rate is north of 70%. Homebot offers real estate agents a free version and the full service costs about $25/month. You must be sponsored by a lender to subscribe to the free or upgraded version so, if you want to see how it works, just hit reply and ask me to sponsor you.
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Out-of-state investors have made money on their property and may want to sell for two reasons: they want out real estate as an investment OR they want to invest in another area with a higher capitalization rate. You can grab their attention by offering something other agents won’t offer– a comparable rental analysis. After you perform the analysis, you can keep that data, and your name in front of them, every single month. That is going to earn YOU more listings
April 1, 2022

This Realtor found his buyer a property with no multiple offers

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website
Are you representing buyers right now? It’s hard…REALLY hard right now. You show 8-10 homes on the weekend, your buyers get excited about one of those homes, you make an offer on Sunday night, a seller multiple counter-offer comes out Monday night, your buyer offers a price which is above their comfort zone on Tuesday, and they find out Wednesday that they didn’t get the home.
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Rinse and repeat. For weeks.
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Maybe the buyers get more aggressive and ultimately get an offer accepted but often, they just give up and say “it’s too hard right now”. Even worse, YOU give up.
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Realtor Cameron Hodge is one of my favorite new agents. He is licensed in both CA And FL and he hustles hard. I often finance his buyers and we were working with a zero-down VA buyer. He showed the buyers homes for three weeks, made 3-4 offers, and lost out.

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The buyer gave up but Cameron didn’t give up on him.
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Cameron drove the neighborhoods looking for FSBO signs…and he found one.. right around the corner from a home they just lost to a higher bidder. Cameron banged on the door, spoke with the seller, scheduled a buyer tour…and tied the home up, with an accepted offer, a day BEFORE the buyer toured the home.
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Right before the offer was accepted, another offer came in but Cameron asked the seller how his buyer could win the deal. He discovered that the seller didn’t want to perform what amounted to a couple thousand dollar repair. The buyer assumed that responsibility and entered escrow.
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Debra and I funded the loan for this buyer. The house appraised HIGHER than the contract price, the repair wasn’t required by the appraiser (but still needs to be done), and the transaction closed about two weeks ago.
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Don’t believe me. Let Cameron tell you all about it in this video (starts at 2:55 and ends at 10:00)
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If you subscribe to my weekly emails, you have heard how worried I am about the future of real estate brokerage, I implored you to shift your efforts to listings. To do that, you are going to have to talk Read more
November 27, 2021

Overnight News: What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ya think it's easy?

“How sad would it be to be the only puppy in the litter?”

Software gets better by versions, we are promised, but viruses do nothing but weaken: It’s actual evolution in action as highly-lethal strains do not propagate in time, while insufficiently-contagious strains do not propagate at all. The strains that survive tend to be more contagious but less virulent – and evolution gifted us long ago with the surefire solution to contagious respiratory diseases: The Nyquil trifecta – coughing, sneezing, runny nose – means stay away. How simple is that?

So what to make of the new Moronic strain of CoronaVirus? If you swear it’s more virulent, I want to know if it’s software. But if instead you tell me that the objective is to hide inflation by crippling demand, ideally long enough to steal the next election, you will have landed in a place where your claims make sense to me: The entire purpose of the virus is political – and plausibly genocidal.

We are as gods? Nonsense. We are far beyond gods. What god, be he ever so potent, would deliberately undermine his own nature? What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

In other news:

Zero Hedge: A Scared Nu World: Here’s What We Know About The COVID “Omicron” Strain.

City Journal: Guaranteed Murder: From Waukesha to New York, lax bail assures homicides.

Jim Brovard: The Biden Crackdown on Thought Crimes.

November 26, 2021

Overnight News: Get woke, go broke? Ain’t that America?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ya think it's easy?

“Why is the ‘Dog Show’ more people than dogs?”

We watched network TV yesterday, briefly. Cathleen loves the parade, and she and Cleo were both thrilled by the dog show. Miss Chioux likes barking, running and, especially, running preceded by barking.

Fun to see from the commercials that all American families are black, and all black families are possessed of a scruffy male adult who dances madly and pretends that’s fathering. Amazing to watch American commerce shit all over the money – in pursuit of what, exactly? Paychecks for white voiceover actresses must be down by 90%, post-George-Floyd-sobriety-day, but is anyone measuring the consequences at the cash register of everything being sold by hectoring black women issuing treacly nursery rhymes?

If there is any such thing as a science of marketing, its iron law for the 21st century is simply this: Get woke, go broke. None so deserving. None too soon.

In other news:

American Thinker: Leaving California.

Newsweek: Salvation Army’s Donors Withdraw Support in Response to Racial ‘Wokeness’ Initiative.

Zero Hedge: ESPN Hemorrhaging Subscribers, Down To 76 Million As Disney Scrambles To Stem Tide.

November 25, 2021

Overnight News: Health care to be thankful for: Finding a doctor you can trust.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ya think it's easy?

“I like the vet. He knows how to play rough.”

I go to a free-market doctor: Cash-and-carry is the ideal, but if you want to get your insurance company involved, you’ll be doing all the paperwork. He has zero employees, an out-of-the-way office and a shrine to Charleton Heston in the waiting room.

That would be health care for the self-employed – self-insured for all but catastrophes – but I would go to him, anyway. I trust him to see reality for what it is and not to lie to me about it. He may be the only doctor I will ever see again.

Certainly I am done with all vaccines. Whatever the net lethality of the COVID vaccine turns out to be, it is by now obvious that anyone who presumes to speak in an “official” capacity about public health is a liar pursuing unknown objectives.

Nice going, dipwads. Your reputation was nothing but good, and now it’s shit – probably never to recover.

Meanwhile: Find a doctor you can trust. Otherwise, you’re on your own…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Home Prices Hit a New All-Time High, Giving Sellers Much to be Thankful For.

Seth Barron: Voting Is For Citizens: New York City’s latest effort to extend the franchise to legal permanent residents would devalue citizenship and dilute the power of the vote.

John Daniel Davidson: Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie: The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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