Author: Greg Swann (page 12 of 209)

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

If you pursue the comments on Pedro Robinson’s article, linked below, you’ll see me prophesying on every rooted thing.

If you read me here, you know my take: The Ants who can work from home are fleeing everything Grasshopper as fast as they can. Gun sales are slowing, so that may imply that the Ant flight to safety is abating, but the trend will continue – much as every other disruptive influence in real estate will continue: Malls will die, taking cinemas with them, and, assuming the Marxists don’t devour the gig economy, the relative value of car-focused commercial real estate will continue to decline.

With one exception: Low-rise office complexes surrounded by their own parking lots have a bright future, I expect.

The reason is simple: Security is now the boss’s job. It used to be the police who kept the bad guys away from the taxpayers, but that’s all gone to hell – even in comparatively-sane places like Arizona, Florida or Texas. Accordingly, the office of the future will offer these amenities:

• Suburban location with easy freeway access
• Low-rise construction; no more beehives
• Vigilant, multi-layered security

If necessary, the parking lot will be fenced and gated – and video-monitored, regardless. The common areas will be patrolled and monitored – with pre-existing pass technology limiting access passively, continuously, anyway.

The point would be to take away the fears not-working-from-home colleagues have of returning to a grim vertical office tower surrounded by vagrants and shunned by respectable taxpayers.

I think employers should focus on maximizing value from their working-from-home employees, but if they’re going to insist on having offices, sprawling mini-fortresses are the offices they are going to have, going forward.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates slip back down to 2.96%.

Pedro Robinson: What the Hell is Actually Going on with Housing??

Joy Pullmann: What Happens When Hedge Funds Buy Up Neighborhoods? I’d like to put a damper on this hysteria by quoting this article’s subhead: “A real estate firm estimates ‘that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by Read more

A recidivist dipshit writer for the Los Angeles Times has come up with a quick ’n’ dirty RiotScore™ – real estate listings should report neighbors who own guns. She doesn’t mean actual doxxing (yet), just a report on nearby gun-ownership:

The metric would be simple.

Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m).

That’s quoted from a Tweet, and I would expect that subsequent Tweeters pointed out the absurdity of comparing very-low-crime Staten Island to very-high-crime The Bronx. Even so, the essential difference is population density, not firearms ownership: Friction begets fractiousness.

But in typical Marxist Upside Down game fashion, the double-dip dipshit is on to something, she just has it ass-backwards. Her claim is that legal gun ownership denotes bad neighborhoods, which would only be true in big cities – where measuring gun crimes would be a better RiotScore™ tell.

But that one metric might be all the RiotScore™ that’s needed: Gun-crime arrests in a one-mile radius in the past year – with any number above zero being a red flag.

Gun owners don’t commit crimes, criminals do – with whatever weapon is at hand.

In other news:

CNBC: Homeowners got $2 trillion richer during the first three months of the year.

Mike DelPrete: Offerpad and Its More Profitable Flavor of iBuying.

Santa Barbara News-Press: Feckless Santa Barbara: woke, broke and on fire.

The Bend Bulletin: Oregon will allow homeless individuals to pitch tents on public land.

J. D. Tuccille: Insane Lumber Prices Show How Governments Break Economies.

CNBC: Deutsche Bank warns of global ‘time bomb’ coming due to rising inflation.

Pedro Robinson: You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy…Yikes. From whence does single-family detached housing derive its market value? Asked another way, what happens to values in fee-simple neighborhoods when too many homes are investor-owned?

Real Clear Investigations: Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society.

Kenny Xu: Critical Race Theory’s Poisonous Roots Trace Back To Harvard University.

I am rehabbing a rental property just now, in preparation for a new lease. We’ve only turned this house over twice in the past ten years, so it’s getting a lot: New paint, carpeting, blinds, plus fit and finish everywhere. I’m hoping to be done for less than $8,000 – where I would have been finished at $5,000 last year.

It’s a boss’s job, and I like it: My goal is to do the best I can with the money I have in the quickest time possible. But it’s funny to me how little of my time goes into a job like this. I don’t charge my investors for this kind of work – I list and lease; I don’t nickel and dime – but my part consists of knowing what I want and whom to hire and putting them to work.

I do almost all of my planning and coordination by texting from my phone – from anywhere I happen to be. There is almost nothing in the way of paperwork, and the clipboard-jockey part of the job comes down to scheduling, so people aren’t impeding each other’s progress. Not even much in the way of management-by-walking-around, since I would just be in the way. I work well alone, and I work well with people who work well alone.

But if I don’t work, no one works. Like the poor-in-character, the Marxist Labor Theory of Value will always be with us, apparently, but all you have to do is rehab a house – or just paint one – to discover why nothing gets done without management.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates drop, but not enough for priced-out homebuyers.

Housing Wire: How fix’n’flip loans could help expand housing inventory.

Zero Hedge: Nobody Wants To Work: Job Openings Soar To All Time High 9.3 Million As Record Numbers Quit Their Job.

City Journal: Call An Audible on Economic Recovery: Policymakers are using the same old playbook to solve a different challenge.

Daniel Greenfield: How Democrats Created a Carjacking Outbreak.

City Journal: Bonkers on the Bay: Educational leadership in Read more

America has always been a Calvinist nation, and remaining one has been a hard stunt for the Ruling Class: What does a post-Calvinistic atheist do to get ahead?

Or: Rather: To demonstrate having gotten ahead, since the Calvinist work ethic is more about competition than work itself. As with Marxism, stripped of the filigreed bullshit, Calvinism is ultimately pretty small: “I’ll show you my predestinate, unavoidable and unchangeable ultimate status in heaven!” The difference would be that the burning need to prove success brought forth a cornucopia of success.

Keeping the will to strive alive is hard to do, absent a putative pre-established status roster in the afterlife. One key clinging point for would-be elitists is The Marshmallow Test – which is seen as a more-mundane expression of the same inalterable ranking of souls.

While the test allegedly measures impulse control in children, it actually measures their parents’ parenting skills – to that point. Immediately afterward, the test tests the test, as you can easily demonstrate by administering it daily – resulting in perfect performance among a dozen kids in two or three days. If you want your dogs to sit at attention before meals, it could take a little longer, but, regardless, training is training.

What a crushing blow to Cautious and Driven parents: Their child’s self-control is their self-control, inherited as intellectual capital – not genes, talent, grace or destiny. A salve for their wounds is that teaching self-control to babies and toddlers sets them up for a life of success and satisfaction. This is the actual “privilege” the Marxists are bitching about.

All of the social sciences are built around stupid cargo cults – many, like this one, desperately seeking a Calvinistic predestinate determinism to absolve the cultists of the awful burden of free will. But the truth is so much better than any clinician’s cloying wishes: You can train your dog to wait for his dinner, train Read more

Passions cool because they must: You can’t floor it forever. But it matters a lot where and how they cool.

There are daily riots in Minneapolis right now, and, sad to say, that’s good for the Phoenix real estate market. There are shootings every day in Chicago – and the slow demise of the city with drooping shoulders has always been good for Phoenix. The urban northwest punches itself in the nose every day to make sure it is bleeding ever-redder – and no one in any vertical city will choose to return to work in an office tower surrounded by homeless people.

Every mistake big cities have been making, progressively, for decades, has been good for Phoenix, with the last year being a bonanza of urban ineptitudes for the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun.

Our governor is a nimrod, but he won’t last. But: Cooled passions or not, the Ant exodus away from Grasshopper dystopias will continue – and that will be very good for the Phoenix real estate market.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Get over yourself and start living.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Homebuyers are growing weary of the housing market.

PJ Media: Trump Was Right: The Biden Administration Is Intent on Destroying the Suburbs.

Daniel Greenfield: The Democrat Model For The Future Is The Worst City In America.

Zero Hedge: More Than One-Third Of Small Businesses “In Jeopardy” Of Closing This Summer.

Tyler O’Neil: Biden Is Carrying Out the New ‘War on Terror’ Right Under Our Noses.

Frontpage: The Left’s Urgent Mission to Sexualize Children.

I have been my own barber for the past year, and I don’t see that changing. My hair looks like hell – but I never cared, anyway. Except for dating and job interviews, grooming is more about effort than outcome. And while I resent all of the custodial functions of the body as time-wasters, hair growth is at least passive in its constant incursions.

Whatever. I think I may never go back to the quick-’n’-dirty stylist at the strip mall ever again. Here’s why: Even though the people behind the virus may turn out to be wholesale genocidal maniacs, I learned things from them about how to avoid getting sick.

I’m talking easy stuff, which Fauci and the CDC mainly lied about: Sunlight, D3, zinc, C – anti-every-viral, and as easy as having breakfast on the patio, at least if you live in Arizona. We were already doing all of that, and I have been a fanatical hand-washer since my school days handling caustic photo chemicals. Even maintaining distance was not news, but managing it as a consistent praxis was.

I don’t work with buyers right now – but, mea culpa, I have worked with sick buyers, and, worse, worked sick with buyers – and it is easy for me to keep my distance selling and leasing. Eliminating most daily direct social contact has been easy, and it promises to get even easier.

Hence, no more Great Clips for me. Doctors and dentists cannot be avoided, but hair stylists who breathe right into my face will continue to live without my money, perhaps forever. I have professional-quality calipers, amateur-quality zeal and a quiet pride in saving both my time and my money – while saving my own life.

In other news:

California Globe: Facing Dry Year, CA State Water Board is Draining California Reservoirs.

David Marcus: How Biden is raising the minimum wage by the back door.

Rough Cut: The New Clerisy: Faith in science is an oxymoron.

Michael Goodwin: A battle over the future of truth in news. Arguing over tenure fro this fraud is choice: She was Read more

We are living through Act I of what promises to be an Ant genocide. The officially-named targets of slaughter will be “white people,” but all Ants will be persecuted. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers, after all. Karl Marx said so.

Making racist genocidal statements in public – at Yale University! – might normally be regarded with suspicion by the FBI, but since the hate-speech was directed at white people, the entire apparatus of law enforcement and social opprobrium will dutifully turn a blind eye to conduct they would surely condemn and find some way to prosecute, had it come from one of the Deep State’s imaginary boogeymen, a “white supremacist.”

If Aruna Khilanani was shouting these words from a big-city street corner in a dirty trench coat, clutching a bottle of Colt 45 in a brown paper bag, her views would not be acceptable – but at least they would be where they belong. Yale is soiling itself in hopes of getting a better spot in the boxcar to the gas chambers.

But: Do be alarmed: Rhetoric like this need not necessarily lead to genocide, but it always precedes it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: May jobs report a mixed bag for housing industry.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Is Relief From The Red-Hot Market On Its Way?

Joy Pullmann: In The Last Year, Congress Sent A Typical Family $27,000 To $110,000 In Cash.

City Journal: Rock Bottom: How progressive reforms helped level a historic part of black Detroit.

Julie Kelly: Government Seeks Retribution for the Biden Resistance.

Andrew Sullivan: Our Politics And The English Language: What would Orwell say about our debased discourse?

Real estate is kids and dogs. Shorties need a back yard, but what matters more is that residential real estate is a safe haven for kids and dogs.

So it’s doubly funny that Redfin is promoting how to celebrate “Pride Month” at home: Make huge, outsized efforts to annoy your neighbors with your prismatic Marxism.

I apologize for picking on ever-more-Redfin again, and, of course, what adults do with their sex parts in private is their business. But private business is not public business even if you insist it’s a matter of pride.

Your neighbors do not want to have to explain to their kids what you are proud of. They bought a house in the suburbs to get away from the pernicious sirens of adulthood. They like their pride and yours inside the house, where it belongs, not out in the front yard.

Funny, too, for Redfin to assume that their entire potential customer base is onboard with “Pride Month.” I would expect rather more the opposite. Doesn’t matter, I guess. Redfin doesn’t have any clients, anyway.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise but stay sub-3%.

CNBC: More than 14% of renters are still behind as national eviction ban comes to an end.

Josh Hammer: COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed Americans’ Trust in Ruling Class ‘Experts’.

American Thinker: Our Government Is Evolving into Something Horrifying.

When I was a kid, I envisioned a newspaper called Actual Facts. Not just no anonymous sources, no bullshit period: No opinion, conjecture, rumors, gossip, trial balloons, campaign narratives – nothing that cannot be independently verified.

I don’t know that anyone would actually read that. The contrary idea – nothing but bullshit – rules what’s left of the “news” business.

So as we are discovering that the “news” media lied to us incessantly about the virus in order to lie to us incessantly about the election, consider this:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a news source that cared about its reputation for integrity?

In other news:

The Sacramento Bee: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article250735029.html.

Paul Bedard: Gun sales: Best May ever, 2021 set to crush record, public ‘afraid of violence, tyranny’.

J. D. Vance: Fighting Woke Capital.

Jason Rantz: Washington State Mandates Critical Race Theory In All Public Schools.

Betsy McCaughey: To Stop Critical Race Theory, Fight To Control School Boards.

Christopher Bedford: How The Media’s COVID Lies Weaken America.

Newsweek: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media.

Vanity Fair: The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.

I don’t represent buyers, not for years, which makes my life very easy. Leasing is work right now, but selling is easy. Soon enough, selling will be hard again – but then we’ll be back to buying.

CNBC, below, is calling all coolers, and I’ve been feeling it, too. The market stalls on over-priced inventory. When the shoe-shine boys are giving stock tips, the Wall Street bubble is about to pop. And when the gonophs list their homes outrageously over market in the hopes of gulling suckers – the worm is turning.

Where our market tops depends on how much worse life in big cities gets, but the gonophs are already out there, and by their actions they are betting that the top is already here.

In other news:

CNBC: Housing boom may be cooling as weekly mortgage demand drops again.

Bloomberg.com: Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home: The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. Easily foreseen, at least here. Every office building surrounded by the homeless is currently worthless. How you gonna get ’em back to their desks? Move the desks to the suburbs, too. Even then, many will never work away from home again – which is excellent news for kids and dogs.

John Nolte: Blacks Murdered at ‘Near-Historic Rates’ in Democrat-Run Portland.

The Post Millennial: Seattle Police expected to lose 300 officers by the end of the month, ‘that’s a third of the agency’.

Julie Kelly: No One Will Pay for COVID Crimes Against Humanity: Big Tech censors and the credentialed public health class, not anti-maskers, are the real Neanderthals, the 21st century’s version of the Flat Earth Society.

The war on Thirteen Privilege continues.

The current target is Latin and Greek at Princeton. The official pretext is that academic excellence makes the black students look bad – in many of the same ways that organized athletics makes the lazy students look bad. The actual objective is to rob virtue of its incentives. The ultimate outcome will be more surgical deaths, among many other disasters.

Why disasters? Because the purpose of excellence is excellence. We study Classical languages not to be Classicists, voted least likely ever to be able to repay a student loan, but to train the mind – especially the memory.

To be a Latinist is to walk the Earth with a surer stride, but to study Latin or Attic Greek at 13 is to be a god, academically, by 18 or 24. For Classicists and concert musicians and surgeons, what you were doing at age 13 matters everything – and the gains made in those tweenage years are very hard to make up for later.

We don’t make war on excellence in sports, yet, but hide and watch. Marxism is at war with all of goodness, all of virtue, all of the wisdom that keeps us alive. The current race jive is just a pretext, like the starving proletarians and the sweat-drenched environment before them. The goal is the destruction of the thing in human beings that makes them strive for better.

And that’s why they want to get ’em while they’re young…

In other news:

CNBC: Millions of Americans could face eviction as housing protection expires in June.

KTLA News: California eyes shuttered shopping malls, big box retail stores for new affordable housing. It’s amazing how many times the taxpayers discover an urgent need to overpay for underperforming commercial real estate. It’s almost as if that’s what government is really for: Discovering untold opportunities precisely where your wife’s brother lost everything.

Just the News: Tale of two economies: Red states roaring, blue states beset by high unemployment.

Chuck DeVore: New Poll Finds All Those Read more

Embracing the pieties of Marxism is bad for business, this being the most obvious statement in the history of everything. Moreover, the Instapundit’s quip – “get woke, go broke” – has proved true since Colin Kaepernick imploded the NFL. If you wonder why corporate poobahs continue to alienate half their customers by publicly kissing Marxist ass, do not discount the idea that they are jockeying for space in the first-class section of the boxcar to the gas chambers.

It doesn’t actually matter. The idiots making these mistakes will surely be replaced. How and by whom is the tell you’re watching for.

As with Chiefs (Chieves?) of Police, if the old big-boss was already very diverse, and if he/she/it is replaced by someone even more intersectionally-sexy – sell. The company’s policy is posturing first, shareholders last.

But if the new head honcho immediately fires the Chief Grievances Officer and all the other de facto Marxists on salary, you’re looking at a true turnaround manager.

But loud terminations are how a big business signals a turnaround – and how small businesses express contrition for their errors. The business of business is business. You’ll know America’s ownership has remembered its fiduciary duties when heads start to roll.

In other news:

Brad Polumbo: Latest economic data show red states crushing blue states — and here’s why.

Derek Thompson: Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market: Rising inventory is one of several signs that we may have reached peak ludicrousness. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Zubu Brothers: Wholesalers Flood Poor Neighborhoods Looking For Distressed Homeowners.

The Guardian: The San Francisco ice cream owner who tried, failed – and now owes $200,000.

Bongino.com: Study: Tech Companies That Made Black Lives Matter Pledges Have 20% Fewer Black Employees.

The Daily Mail: Liberal media FINALLY admit they made a mistake dismissing Wuhan Lab leak theory just because Trump backed it: Washington Post, New York Times and ABC pundits say some ‘have egg on their face’.

Miranda Divine: It’s been a year of Antifa and unchecked anarchy.

The wealth of a nation, ultimately, is its net productivity per head. One hyper-productive person like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk makes everyone richer, even those who produce nothing, even those who are a net drain on productivity. Every better mousetrap enriches everyone whose costs are thereby reduced.

So I come to you this Sunday with a homily of hope: Working from home will have liberated the most productive minds in our economy from the crippling bonds of corporate ineptitude. Yes, the money supply is soaring, but if the last year percolated enough great new ideas, we might-could outrun the brigands yet.

Likewise, the blatant corporate shunning of white, male, straight and unwoke job candidates could spur blindingly brilliant entrepreneurial responses.

Power emerges from the barrel of a gun? Aimed at whom, precisely, comrade? Denouncing virtue as vice does not make vice virtue, but the Grasshoppers chasing the Ants out of firing range may turn out to be a boon full of boons, economically.

In other news:

The Los Angeles Times: Home prices are going through the roof. Millennials piling into the market is one big driver.

Daniel Greenfield: The Richest Homeless in the World.

Greg Lukianoff: Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote!

Andrew Sullivan: Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism: What the “Critical Race Theory” debate is really about.

Roger Kimball: Paying the price of free speech: The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid I have called the crybully.

We now know that Dr. Anthony Fauci is every bit the Marvel Comics super-villain he has seemed to be all along. He deliberately engineered the virus – his behest and funding, not his actual effort – and it remains to be disclosed if last year’s events were actually biowarfare-by-proxy. Just to get Trump? Something even worse?

I have so many questions.

Given one super-villain, previously thought to be purely fictional, that means there can’t possibly be any others, right?

And Fauci’s cheery sociopathy definitely means that all other “conspiracy theories” are false, right?

I, for one, have never found it hard to believe that the Ruling Class is a mutually-blackmailing sex-crimes cult, so I find it reassuring to know that an evil until yesterday thought impossible can have only one locus: Dr. Anthony Fauci and absolutely, positively no one else.

Yes, he can smile and smile and yet be a villain. But that’s just because he is definitely and for sure the only person like that in America. Surely you can trust the science on that…

In other news:

Redfin: Eight out of 10 People Who Relocated During the Pandemic Are in a Similar or Better Financial Position Post-Move.

Zero Hedge: And Now Prices Are Really Soaring: May Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record. The deep dive is the map showing where rents are plummeting – the rioted cities, just as I have argued all along.

City Journal: Civic Education, Rightly Understood: To become responsible citizens, young Americans need a full, accurate, and responsible account of their own country.

Joanne Jacobs: Resisting ‘anti-racist ed’.

James Lindsay: Five Ugly Truths About Critical Race Theory. James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo, linked here often, are the two go-to resources on Critical Race Theory.

Mark Steyn: Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization.