Author: Greg Swann (page 11 of 209)

One of my favorite Christmastime frauds, perhaps by-now socially-distanced out of existence, is the wrapped-gift bucket-brigade: On the local TV news, hundreds of ‘volunteers’ in ugly sweaters are scrunched into a wide-angle shot in which they are shown passing wrapped gifts, one to another – as if there were any reason for such anti-productivity except the “news” coverage.

That’s charity theater, and it’s not the last thing I hate about organized charity. As always with me, trim the outliers and carry them off, if you like: The people most-adept at attracting charity are hurt rather than helped by it – and the people most-interested in bestowing charity are hurt rather than helped by it. We are self-made, all of us, each of us, since there is no contrary to internal self-motivation – this being true of all living things, not just us. The best help you can offer any stranger is to get out of his way – and you could do a lot of that.

But my contempt for charity theater has its own special home in the housing biz: Habitat For Humanity, which painstakingly builds new homes, one at a time, for poor people it carefully segregates from the ‘volunteers’ – amateurs operating straight outta the labor-theory-of-value playbook: If I worked on it, it must be valuable.

Ahem.

The labor that goes into one of those houses, split into four-hour blocks of handyman time, could help hundreds of families, all in one day, not just one family at a time. Even better, it would put the ‘volunteers’ into actual contact with their putative beneficiaries and/or presumptive victims – who might, in due course, become true friends.

A new garbage disposal for an old sink is not as showy as a brand new house, but it’s a great big deal if you’ve never had one: A couple hundred bucks plus labor for an instant hygiene-booster/odor-killer for everyone nearby. That would be improved habitability for real human beings. What it wouldn’t be is a phony virtue display all dressed up for the cameras.

In other news:

CNBC: Read more

The secret to flipping houses is suckering the seller. True fact.

If you do rehab or upgrades, you may recoup about double your outlay. That’s a profit margin, but not much of one. There are no more sucker-bait buyers, so you can’t sell high. So the big bucks come from buying low.

I expect there are very few homeowners who sold to flippers – or to iBuyers, who actually should be called eFlippers – in 2021 who do not regret their choice, having watched their neighbors do so much better by listing.

The good news is that ordinary flippers and eFlippers have to pay more and more, just to be able to buy anything. The eFlippers, in particular, have convinced themselves that they are suddenly good at real estate, because they can actually move inventory in a whirlwind of demand.

Has that whirlwind died down? We’ll see. But if it has, real flippers will find it easier to buy low – while the eFlippers will find out what it’s like to work in real estate.

In other news:

Redfin.com: iBuyer Home Purchases Inch Back Toward Pre-Pandemic Levels.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates jump back up to 3.02%.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homebuying Demand Slipped Below 2020 Levels for the First Time This Year.

City Journal: Stop Extending the Eviction Moratorium: It’s a heavy burden both for landlords and for tenants who play by the rules.

Housing Wire: Biden renews foreclosure ban.

Julie Kelly: Deprogramming of January 6 Defendants Is Underway.

Christopher Rufo: Exposed: The Washington Post’s attempt to smear me and my work on critical race theory fails spectacularly.

The surge in sales of fee-simple suburban housing and the bonanza in sales of firearms and ammunition have marched together in lockstep since George Floyd socialized his self-destruction. This is the truth the real estate press won’t tell, but both housing and guns sales over the past year were driven – hugely – by the riots the mainstream media lied about for them.

But that marriage may be over. Slow Joe Biden announced yesterday that the Ruling Class will use fighter jets and nuclear weapons, if necessary, to sustain its dominance. That’s going to sell a lot of guns and ammo, but I cannot imagine what it will do to the housing market. More of the same? That’s a safe bet, since – ‘when in danger or in doubt’ – a flight to safety is more about the flight than the ultimate safety.

But the great thing about having an addlepated wreck as “president” is that he can’t keep Marxism’s secrets: Grasshoppers hate Ants more than anything else on earth. Should the Ants come to realize that despoliation today means extermination tomorrow – and should they resist – they are to be vaporized.

Consent of the governed? Not so much…

In other news:

Housing Wire: New home sales fall to lowest pace in a year.

CNBC: You can now choose and design a newly built home and put it in your shopping cart, as big builders launch virtual homebuying.

Andrea Widburg: California’ Marin County is seeing the return of the NIMBYs.

Housing Wire: Supreme Court finds FHFA structure unconstitutional. Appropriate. Now do CFPB.

“They spray-painted all over our building – in our own incomprehensible jargon!”

The quote is a joke, but, alas, the news story is not. If that’s not a fake hate crime, bill me for one edible hat. If instead it turns out to be a fund-raiser, try to cultivate some wisdom from your wishful thinking.

I don’t care for hate crime laws, since they seek to police thought instead of action, and since, as here, they engender fake hate crimes – which should only be understood as actual hate crimes against the fictionalized villains.

Bah! The one thing we can count on, as every species of corruption proliferates, is that no one will call bullshit on any fake hate crime – since to do so would both undermine the thought police and spotlight how rare non-fake hate crimes are. Get away from big cities and universities and there are none of either.

The funny thing about these stunts is how invested people become in denying the obvious. Just that much could be cured with a betting site: If you insist the “hate crime” described in the story is not fake – bet against me. Your bet is your vote on the probity of the claimants, where mine is a vote for a statistically-demonstrable pattern of maliciously tendentious behavior. So, please: Bet against me.

I love me them ‘Faye’ names, and FayeKate.com is available. If someone smarter than me builds it, I will come. I can’t imagine the payouts will be that great, betting the odds on 19-1 propositions, but the statistical reporting over time will be edifying: People actually do learn better, if there are consequences for being in error.

Why are there so many fake hate crimes? Because, so far, it seems to be paying off. In this instance, the evil awful spray paint is held to be emblematic of ever-so-much worse hatred, the evidence for which, alas, is unavailable for inspection – but which, nevertheless, can be at least partially-palliated by PayPal. “Nothing happened, Read more

I work for investors world-wide, so I’m nobody’s “neighborhood specialist.” Even so, I’ve done 23 deals in Coldwater Springs – a golf-centric master-planned community in the near-southwest quadrant of The Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun. Half of the properties we manage are in there.

I was a skeptic, at first. I was bearish on everything south of the I-10 in Avondale – and that kind of “redlining” is not wrong for investors: Values will lag if there are already too many rentals in the area. This is nothing but economics, so it might be kinder to call it “greenlining.” Regardless, Coldwater Springs not only enriched the community, it has pulled up its entire corner of town.

This is ongoing, first with better-heeled new subdivisions in competition nearby, then with commercial development along Van Buren Street and Avondale Boulevard, and now with a new freeway exit, a coming-soon fire station and easy access to the best charter school in the state.

Coldwater Springs is a bet that continues to pay off. If you’d like to own a piece of it, I have an investor opportunity going on the MLS on Thursday. Occupied by wonderful tenants, under lease until 1/31/2022 and eager to renew, the house is the 1524sf Lavender floorplan – very popular, consistently punches above its weight – on a premium corner lot. I hate to lose the house and the tenants, but we’ll be in the neighborhood for another twenty years, at least.

In other news:

CNBC: May existing home sales drop for a fourth straight month as affordability squeezes buyers out.

The New York Post: Most big cities have become more racially segregated: study.

Daniel Greenfield: The Small Secessions of the New Civil War: Neighborhoods secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states.

Brad Polumbo: We Just Got Even More Proof that Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired.

Joel Kotkin: The battle between the two Americas.

Time-sharing real estate brokerage Pacaso made The Daily Mail, America’s last reliable news source. They’re also in The Wall Street Journal, but that link is paywalled.

Both stories are about efforts in Napa Valley to keep the carpet-bagging time-sharing interlopers out, but my own interest today is broader:

Why is Pacaso, a very small boutique time-share real estate brokerage, capitalized at $90 million, said to be worth $1 billion? What turns ninety dollars into a thousand bucks?

Ballyhoo, perhaps? In the Daily Mail article, Pacaso admits to having sold 200 time-shared units, to date. Each unit is one eighth of a time-shared house so Pacaso’s nationwide internet startup time-share real estate brokerage has sold the equivalent of 25 houses, so far.

Much more than I would have guessed, for what that’s worth. But even assuming I am wrong about all known organisms and their unwillingness to share with strangers, Pacaso’s total market consists of a fraction of the one-percent. Even if people actually liked sharing intimate things, Pacaso’s pitch is to a niche of a niche.

Not that they pitch well, anyway. Using CEO Austin Allison as TV spokesmodel was a mistake. His arguments are defensive – sharing time in a home with strangers is definitely not time-sharing! – and his affect autistic. Nerds are impressed by nerds. Everyone else can change a tire and get a date without staff support.

The internet angle seems specious to me, too. No form of real estate flipping requires the internet – as the other iBuyers have already discovered. Accordingly, Pacaso’s web site and smartphone app end up being a national wishbook for underfunded looky-loos – which is exactly what they brag about in their statistics, web site visitors, not sales.

The big lawsuits won’t be over neighborhood concerns – nor over the use of the term “time-share” to describe Pacaso’s time-share business model – but over the vigorish – the secret sauce in the management contracts that makes investors think their ninety bucks can be traded for a thousand of your dollars.

Pacaso’s time-shares Read more

What to make of marketing? One business after another has thrown Claude Hopkins, et seq., under the bus – in pursuit of what, exactly?

None more daft than Victoria’s Secret, surely. They have elected to reflect their actual clientele, rather than the aspirational impulses of the mates of those matronly mini-manatees. In consequence, they will beat the rest of the mall to bankruptcy by a wide-assed margin.

Especially brilliant of them to blow up their business on Father’s Day weekend. In households where this move is celebrated, I expect dad won’t be getting a steak or that other Father’s Day treat, either.

Lingerie is tits and ass, and who doesn’t know that? Real estate is kids and dogs. Never doubt it – and never forget it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: House flipping hits lowest level since 2000.

The New York Post: ‘Exodus of the rich’ to Florida threatens disaster for NYC.

Housing Wire: Juneteenth holiday sparks chaos for lenders, LOs.

CNBC: Invitation Homes CEO says he’s not worried about a housing bubble despite price spikes. Here’s why.

John McWhorter: You Are Not A Racist To Criticize Critical Race Theory.

Andrew Sullivan: Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It.

Donald Trump: A Plan to Get Divisive & Radical Theories Out of Our Schools.

Christopher Rufo: The Child Soldiers of Portland: Public schools are training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries.

Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog I have been socializing since Thanksgiving, is with us all weekend – a huge treat for me. What’s more, there will be a new Willie story for Father’s Day, and she’s in it. Under her own name, too.

I love this dog and she loves me, and that’s the first thing that’s first, but I love to study her, too, and I have had time with her like with no other dog. She has disabused me of any number of academic claims about animal behavior, while teaching me a great deal about the mammal-brain origins of thinking-brain obsessions. Expect to see more of her in Willie stories, because she’s funny.

Meanwhile, she both commands attention and rewards it, as do I with her, so I’m off to play with my little buddy.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices still rising in Phoenix, Austin, Sacramento.

CNBC: Mortgage rates shoot higher after Fed Chairman Powell’s comments.

Housing Wire: New home sales fall due to low inventory and high prices.

The Denver Channel: Colorado Springs house deemed ‘little slice of hell’ by realtor selling for $590,000 cash.

Jack Posobiec: Entire Portland Police Rapid Response Team Resigns After Officer Indicted for Breaking Up Antifa Riot.

The New York Post: Thieves now mock the rule of law in ‘progressive’ cities like San Francisco.

City Journal: Critical Race Theory and Academic Freedom.

Charles Murray: Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America.

Larry Elder: Father’s Day: Fatherlessness Is America’s Top Domestic Problem.

There is privilege in being born an American, granted, and, as discussed, there is great privilege in being born a native speaker of English. And I am persistently aware of the privilege that accrues to people lucky enough to be educated under the Union Jack.

That American public school education sucks is suddenly news, but, alas, it is not new. Schooling is now awful and racist, where before it was just awful – “progressively” so since the 1880s, when the de facto Jesuit curriculum was supplanted by various flavors of social engineering, mainly Marxist in origin.

Union Jack privilege owes to the inertia of ineptitude: Henry the Eighth swiped the Church of Rome in England, then operated it as if nothing but the signage had changed. For centuries Great Britain built wonderful Jesuitical schools everywhere it went – fortuitously ditching the Jesuits but keeping the curriculum unchanged.

In consequence, the children of the victims of “the colonizers” are the best-educated ordinary people on Earth. They are deeply and widely read, and they are adept at reason because they did a lot of demanding homework – knowing that their work would be checked and challenged.

The “privilege” granted freely to schoolchildren all over the world, wherever the Union Jack flies, costs ten grand or more a year in the U.S. – and you’re more likely to find it at Presbyterian or Lutheran schools than in Catholic parishes, by now.

Worth grailing for, regardless: That kind of education – the kind Loyola wanted for everyone – is an inestimable head-start in life.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue their fall, to 2.93%.

Redfin.com: More Than 31% of Homebuyers Are Looking to Move to Another Metro, With Pandemic-Driven Migration Pushing Up Prices in Popular Destinations. Good lord, give it a rest! Why did the pandemic sell so many guns?

Business Insider: Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they’ll run out of people to employ, according to a new report.

Joel Kotkin: The Killing of Kern County.

City Journal: The Golden State’s Progressive Anti-Housing Warriors: Left-wing interest groups are often Read more

I took back a rental home two weeks ago today, rehabbed it in twelve days and started showings for a new lease last night.

That’s not news, just my job. What was newsworthy for me was one touring party: Dad, mom, four kids – and if there was 18 months between any two of them, I’d be amazed. They looked like what I call a Testudo family, too: Everyone following dad’s example of shielding out the outside world.

None of that matters for real estate purposes – but I’m a suburban real estate broker and real estate is kids and dogs. Plus which, I am fascinated by the future portents of our contemporary wars on both fatherhood and fecundity.

The future belongs to the people who show up for it. Your grandmother was an adult surrounded by six kids. Your grandchild is a kid surrounded by six adults. The fathers who breed propitiously – abundantly and wisely – are the authors of the future of humanity.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: REVEALED: ‘Airbnb has secretive ‘black box’ team paying out $50 million a year to keep disaster stays out of press and gives staff blank checks to help rape victims and clean-up dismembered human remains’.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment drops to 10-month low, as construction costs drive prices higher.

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications increase as 30-year rate falls.

CNBC: Rents for single-family homes just saw the largest gains in nearly 15 years.

CNBC: Producer prices climb 6.6% in May on annual basis, largest 12-month increase on record.

City Journal: What’s Keeping Women Out of the Workforce?

City Journal: Getting Back to Business: Supporters of our free-enterprise system should beware those who would use government to overhaul it.

Peachy Keenan: Critical Conspiracy Theory: In This House We Believe: In Nothing.

Someone once told me that people savor meat because they like the taste of fear. I don’t know if that was supposed to put me off my feed, but it didn’t. I’m perfectly willing to credit the proposition, accepting it as a fortuitous genetic adaptation: We relish the food we thrive on. Big duh.

Odysseus is beefing about bugs in dog food today, and those weak, meek, short, frail, skinny, mousy people are always yammering on that one protein is just as good as another – but this is obviously not so. We get more from meat than its proteins, and that something more may be the literally-ruminative flavor of savage predation – paleo-drool-bait.

Whatever. We are meat-eaters – omnivores who dine on his contributions and hers: Meat and anything else, otherwise. Likewise our pets. Dogs eat what we eat because that’s why paleo-mom let them stay indoors in the first place – to eat our garbage before the bugs get to it. Cats eat meat and fish – period.

People who would cause a pet to be born only to torment it for life with a virtue-signaling diet are instantly suspect, in my estimation. People who would inflict that kind of diet on their fellow men are monsters.

In other news:

Stephen Moore: The Insurrection in Chicago.

The Daily Mail: The blue state exodus: How Americans fled New York and California for Republican states of Arizona, Idaho and the Sun Belt to escape lockdowns and skyrocketing crime.

SFGate.com: Boise could be the next hot spot in the Bay Area tech exodus. But resentment is growing.

USA Today: Bug infestations, tent-lined streets: California’s homelessness crisis is at a tipping point. Will a $12B plan put a dent in it?

City Journal: Don’t Universalize Housing Vouchers.

A recession might be awful, but it’s not all bad: The cause of the downturn will be poor investment choices, usually, and trimming those weeds makes the whole garden healthier, just by itself. But the downturn will also incentivize and spotlight better ideas, with the result that the economy emerges from the recession not just richer but wiser.

These are two of the things that happened last year. I can’t tell you which business closures were not awful – all of them were to the owners and staff – but I can tell you that many of those firms were de facto Coronavirus patients, anyway: Already dying of something else. Meanwhile, a lot of ships got tightened up and a lot of new ideas got traction.

We know we’re headed for inflation: What was one-dollar-one-donut is now a two-buck commitment – shooting for five. The thing to watch for, going forward, is better, cheaper donuts.

We screwed-up big-time last year – and yet no one in America missed a meal. “There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” said Smith, and in that we are lucky. But there are riches in recessions, too. We can but pray that the productivity gains we can so far barely glimpse will outpace the Treasury’s printing presses.

In other news:

Victoria Taft: The Number of Small Businesses Destroyed by COVID Lockdowns Will ASTOUND You.

The Daily Mail: Police retirements have soared 45 PERCENT since BLM protests erupted and Atlanta homicides have surged another 60 percent up from historic high in 2020 after 200 cops quit.

Zero Hedge: Lumber Prices Record Biggest Weekly Drop Ever As Supply Increases.

Even now, tho’ we are not the America that was, it is the very luckiest of fates to have been born here. We wax and wane as pretend friends of liberty, but it remains that someone like me is unpersecuted, at least so far, which would be true in no other country on the planet, not for all of human history.

But an even better privilege than being born an American is to be born – anywhere – to English-speaking parents. Chaucer’s tongue is not just the actual lingua franca of our frantic planet, it has linguistic carte blanche everywhere.

There was a time when French truly was a contender as the international language, as was Latin before that. But English eats everything. It feasted upon Latin at six different gorgings, and it absorbs by rapine serendipity everything it desires from every other language.

Our grammar is easy, compared to Latin, and our nouns and adjectives are all very-memorably genderless. But we have more irregular verbs than other languages have verbs altogether, and our spelling rules are apparently contrived solely to frustrate. To learn English as a baby is to blow raspberries in garbled Shakespeare. To learn it as an adult – to encapsulate all the Earth within the moon that is any other language – is functionally impossible.

True fluency in English-as-a-second-language is a genius tell, but even then smoothly-flowing discursive prose is out of reach for all but the Joseph Conrads of this polyglot world: If you were not born swimming in these waters, they will always seem acrid and cold to you. That would be “systemic linguisticism” – the imposter syndrome that becomes ever-more-obvious the more you try to explain it.

Yes, I am smug, but I am right to be smug: I was born awash in the world’s richest currency: English, the language of much of the best of humanity’s past – and of all of its future.

If you really want to see the world for all that it is, take the time Read more

I told my wife that Pacaso is bragging about having a million visitors to their web site since they launched last October. She is web- but not dev-savvy. Even so, her instant retort: “What’s the bounce rate?”

You lead with your best card. Pacaso isn’t bragging about sales, nor even about significant web-engagement with one-percenters, its sole client base. Instead, it’s touting a meaningless gawker stat – in a press release about a change to the iBuyer’s pay-plan.

That last bit matters: Pay-plans change when business models underperform, with the goal being either to squeeze out more juice per deal or simply to juice more deals – ideally at no cost. Pacaso’s bold new incentive is the latter kind: They will gladly pay you someday in stock that may or may not have any value for a – closed – lead today.

This is me noodging founder Spencer Rascoff on LinkedIn – a place where anyone can ask hard questions and no one does:

I figured out where the web traffic is coming from. Your enemies seem likely to proliferate.

Are the homes on the web site all of those you have purchased, so far? I count twenty available properties. Are there more?

How many closed end-user sales have you made to date? Fewer than a hundred? Fewer than twenty?

Every good salesman knows to sniff around when the pay-plan changes. I thought you were wrong – about the fundamental nature of all known organisms – on day zero. Has the marketplace proved me a fool? Or are you trading promises of future equity for leads?

Capitalized to $90 million, claims to be be worth a billion, claims to be profitable – but again Pacaso only brags about web site visitors.

None of this has ever smelled right to me: Organisms-as-such – not just people, not just mammals – share happily only within their own storgic groups: Pack, clan, kin-group. Storge is Greek; it denotes the enduring love of families, among the distinguishable types of love. Absent storgic love, the shared use and enjoyment of anything will Read more