Author: Greg Swann (page 13 of 209)

I think I must have promised to write about the Empathy for the Transaction somewhere along the line. My apologies. I have houses to manage, and it’s been a houseful year. Plus which, I am plagued by a Batman story, and I hope to rid myself of it this Summer.

Even so, we touched on it a little yesterday, me broad-brush in my post and Brian more-granularly in the comments. There is nothing blindingly new in what either of us has to say, but the territory is virtually unexplored, anyway.

A salesman cursed by luck has no reliable systems – ask me how I know. But a cargo cult is not the antidote to chaos.

The second worst problem with cargo cults is their atheoretical idiocy: “The other guys does all the knowing for me.” But the worst problem is the assumption that the other guy knows what he’s doing.

If you don’t know why, you don’t know what. If you got no theory, you got no praxis.

In other news:

Housing Wire: NYC, LA and SF residents are moving to these cities.

Mike DelPrete: Zillow, Power Buyers, and the Challenge of Attaching Mortgage.

Ashe Schow: Former Seattle Police Chief Says Media Downplayed Violence At CHOP To Make It Appear Peaceful.

Brad Polumbo: Here Are the 10 States Where Residents Pay the Highest Lifetime Taxes.

Christopher Rufo: The Woke-Industrial Complex: Lockheed, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sends key executives on a mission to deconstruct their “white male privilege.”

The American Mind: Miserable Women, Purposeless Men.

Greek thought is so much the water we swim in that we never think to think about it. We sort and reorganize and align and trim and we never wonder why we fuss so incessantly about “proper order,” when both words are entirely artifacts of the mind. Nature does not care if your pencils (ahem!) are sharpened, just your math teacher – or your boss.

But Ovid reminds us that the man who is not prepared today will be even less so tomorrow, and I would add that the job that was done badly the last time will be done worse the next.

The Greek ideal of a world without imperfections is absurd, and they knew that. The Christians ripped off the idea and called it heaven, but, regardless, there are still no real phenomena free of all defects.

But that’s what a praxis – your praxis – is for. A praxis is a practice you are actively working to get better at: Sound theory informing your efforts, measured results improving the theory, iteration after iteration. Your objective is to remove defects in your performance, as you identify them. When you can’t find anything else to fix, either find better eyes to judge your work or move up in the challenges you’re taking on.

And that, too, is a very Greek way of thinking. We malign the Greeks as dreamers, but to this day, our way of relentlessly pursuing perfection is the praxis we learned from them.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices haven’t risen this fast since 2005.

Redfin: The Wave of Pandemic-Era Relocations Continued in April, With Nearly 31% of Homebuyers Looking to Move to Another Metro. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. Their own charts show the influence of the riots. Now that the pandemic lies are abating, will real estate demand die down as well? In conversation, I keep saying that near-term results in Phoenix hang on whether we have another “Summer of Love.” Everyone always laughs – an hypocrisy tell.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand falls as Read more

A year ago today, a very bad man graced the earth with his demise.

George Floyd is missed by his loved ones, but surely not by his many victims. He died of a self-administered drug overdose, but the whole world conspired to lie about that obvious fact in order to create a pretext for chaos – targeting Donald Trump’s re-election effort and initiating an on-going color revolution in the United States.

We have spent the past year – and many decades before – demonizing the great people who built this country in order to aggrandize the truly demonic. How’s that working out for you?

Give George Floyd this, though: He’s the shit-test for all the ages. Anyone singing his praises today is not to be trusted: There was nothing praiseworthy in his life until it ended – at which point his demonic impulses metastasized as a national cancer.

Witness: George Washington, America’s Cincinnatus, was a great man – even though, like Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ ancestors, he owned slaves. George Floyd was a lifelong predator and parasite – even though he died in a snuff-porn video. The revolution will have succeeded when you can no longer keep those simple facts straight.

In other news:

CNBC: Home prices in March saw highest growth in over 15 years, S&P Case-Shiller says.

Housing Wire: NAR: Almost 50% of homes sold for more than list price. What’s up with the other half?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Minneapolis to bring in outside help to deal with surge in violence.

The American Spectator: Democrat Policies Have Created a Blue-State Exodus.

John Nolte: Democrat-Run Cities Can’t or Won’t Protect Jews and Asians from Hate Crime Explosion.

Julie Kelly: Time to Confront the U.S. Capitol Police About Its January 6 Lies.

The Federalist: In May 2020, Rioters Rained Hell On Our Cities. One Year Later We Ask: For What?

Lee Smith: Street Violence as a Political Tool.

The New York Times discovered the population bomb over the weekend, so our ugly demographic portents are temporarily news. I’ve been talking about this for a long time, and others, notably Mark Steyn, for even longer.

I can explain this in DISC terms, but the matter is plain on the surface: Given a choice, more risk-averse people will tend to defer reproduction, often beyond the point-of-no-return. Raise the risks, as we did all last year, and childbirth plummets. Chip away at the rewards for being alive, as we have been doing since Marx and before – and childbirth plummets decade-by-decade. The Times should have a look at the corresponding demographic disaster at the other end of life.

Life could be a dream, we are exhorted, if only it were a machine. But inside the machine, you’re either a gear or a gum-ball. Surprisingly only to parasites and predators – given a choice, no one wants to live like that.

In other news:

CNBC: Robert Shiller: ‘Wild west’ mentality is gripping housing, stocks and crypto.

CBS News: The Great Reshuffling: How the real estate market exploded. CTRL-F: ‘riot’; not found.

National Review: Austin’s Revolt against a Homelessness Surge.

Fox News: St. Louis’ murder rate, already highest in US, soared last year; mayor vows to defund the police.

Heather Mac Donald: The Revolution Comes to Juilliard: Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the art.

American Thinker: No Race Has Ever Done More for Another Race than White Americans Have Done for Black Americans. A fun read, and precisely the conversation on race no one wants to have. If this article is not buried, beware of exploding heads.

Issues and Insights: The Population Dud: Paul Ehrlich, Call Your Office.

Most of the personal safety you have known in your life owes to the fathering skills of people born before you: You and virtually everyone else continually effect the self-restraint you mastered as toddlers, and, in neglected consequence, peace and plenty abound.

What about people less masterful at self-restraint? They are constrained by their fear of the future consequences of their actions: Violent retaliation and/or arrest and incarceration.

The anti-Ant crime – and simple ugly malice – we are seeing right now is the further fruit of underpolicing the underfathered.

The police were never the cause of your safety in the first place, but now they cannot even deter bad behavior. Respond accordingly.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: California nightmare: How high taxes, rampant crime, suffocating wokery, streets littered with homeless addicts, and years of liberal policies are blamed for ruining the Golden State… as thousands of families flee to Republican Texas and Florida.

Reason: The California Exodus Is Real.

PJ Media: ‘The Wheels Are Coming Off.’ Deeper Cuts to Austin Police Are on the Way in Mayor Adler’s ‘Reimagining’.

The Conversation: Employees are feeling burned over broken work-from-home promises and corporate culture ‘BS’ as employers try to bring them back to the office.

The American Mind: Baby Bust.

As noted below, hedge funds are still buy-and-hold buyers. Do not ask me why. We have not worked on the buyer side of an investment deal in six or seven years. My style of single-family property has been upside down for a long time.

But we sell to them, happily, when we hit their buy box, which we almost always do. Over the past few years, you can track them as they went from bargain hunters at 85% of list to retail shoppers at list or above. I can’t imagine they’re picking off very many right now, given what owner-occupants are willing to pay, but, as before, I’m not seeing their upside, anyway.

For a reason why, take the satellite view of Bumstead, AZ – and look at all that empty dirt. Zoom out: There’s lots more. All that land and much to the west of it will be houses someday.

Could it be that the hedge funds are putting a corner on tulip bulbs?

In other news:

CNBC: April existing home sales drop, marking three straight months of declines.

Bloomberg.com: Mega Landlords Are Snapping Up Zillow Homes Before the Public Can See Them. Is this opaque to you? Are they buying at retail, off the MLS? Or are the iBuyers wholesaling inventory at precisely the wrong time? And what would be the point of that, anyway – buy high, sell even lower?

Housing Wire: Home shoppers aren’t the only ones using Zillow. I know a lady who meanders neighborhoods in Google Streetview.

Daniel Greenfield: San Fran Legalized Shoplifting. Now Seniors Have No Pharmacies.

Angelo Codevilla: Regime vs. Regime.

Julie Kelly: The January 6 Commission Is All About Revenge.

Karol Markowicz: Back from Florida—To Stay? A lifelong New Yorker wonders if the city can still be home.

This is Marxism in one gerundive:

Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

If you say, “Then what?” – you’re out of the club, but that doesn’t really matter: The goal is not their success but your failure.

Civilization is created by Ants for Ants. What happens when civil order itself turns on the Ants?

I think we’re seeing that now. Since last Summer, the law is all on the side of the Grasshoppers when it comes to petty offenses and property crimes, and it has been a year-long rent holiday in many places. Ants are now openly attacked in major cities, and the father of all anti-Ant agendas – anti-semitism – is now ubiquitous.

Is this the pre-licensing stage for a purge? Seems like a good time to beef up the defenses…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise to the occasion at 3%.

Redfin.com: Half of Homes Are Now Selling Above List Price. And the other half…?

John Nolte: ‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.

John Sexton: Shootings and chaos in Portland.

Daniel Greenfield: An Anti-Semitic Hate Wave Grows in Los Angeles.

Brad Polumbo: Rand Paul Warns America: Time to ‘Wake Up’ to ‘Profound Repercussions’ of Biden’s Spending Binge.

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

Joanne Jacobs: Testing out of college.

The Federalist: Even For Kids With In-Person Instruction, This Was The Worst Public School Year Ever.

I have been teasing friends about the vicissitudes of Bitcoin – how 12x last Friday can turn into 7x by today, and how people who talk about x-ing their “investments” are most often degenerate gamblers, losing slowly and lying about it.

I’m not nobody’s investment advisor, just not yours, but I have zero interest in securities, even, much less hypotheticals. But most of the people I do advise have done very well – by avoiding everything arm’s-length and sticking to the soil and the structures appurtenant thereto. 😉

The house I leased last week was purchased ten years ago for $70,500 – and the extra $500 may well have swung the deal in those days. Financed 80/20 and the investor put around $15k back in as rehab. So $30k cash out of pocket is worth $300k today – but not just today. That would be 10x in ten years, but the house has thrown off rental cash-flow the whole time, a little at the start, a lot by now. Ten years of depreciation, plus accelerated depreciation on the appliances – and someday a tax-deferred exit on the appreciation, assuming China Joe doesn’t frolic that up, too.

How much x in ten years? I can’t x that high – and if we have another Summer of “Love”, how much higher can it go? Nothing lasts forever and there is no accounting for luck. But at least half of all crypto-currency “investors” are net losers by now, where the firemen who rescued the economy by buying the houses no one else wanted are becoming millionaires on their prescience.

It could be there’s a clue in there somewhere. If you breathe deep, you just might catch it…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Investors are buying up single-family homes across the US.

The Washington Times: Five Oregon counties vote to explore joining Idaho.

The Daily Mail: ‘It’s become an outdoor psychiatric ward!’ How California’s scenic Venice Beach has become a homeless hotspot with tent cities, violent crime and rampant drug use pushing families and tourists out.

The Federalist: Nearly 20 Percent Read more

In 2006, we sold bedrooms without beds: Acres and acres of homes with no ready residents. Totally a cargo cult, of course: Houses are valuable even with no one to occupy them. But for a while you could flip a new build at COE for $50k more than the contract price – held with a $3,000 earnest deposit ten months earlier.

That would be money for nothing, a great little candy machine while it lasted.

The situation in Phoenix right now is nothing like that: Builders can’t build, anyway, and there are bodies and then some for every bedroom – at least in fee simple housing. What’s going on in multi-family? What’s happening in all those garden-apartment complexes – more arriving daily?

Meanwhile, all the happy-babble real estate “news” from other cities is also all about single-family detached housing – so what is happening with less-spacious domiciles there?

This is demand without supply, not supply without demand. Where is it coming from? Specifically, which homes are being abandoned to ignite this mad conflagration for single-family housing?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications increase for second straight week.

CNBC: Home construction sees biggest drop since pandemic hit. Here’s why.

Housing Wire: Seattle’s already-hot real estate market is exploding.

Jason Rantz: Activist plans taxpayer-funded CHOP block party a year after murders, attempted rape.

Brad Polumbo: New Poll Shows How Riots Have Doomed Downtown Portland.

Cato Institute: Will the Supreme Court Overturn the Infamous Takings Decision of Kelo v. City of New London?

Joel Kotkin: The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny.

Angelo Codevilla: Censorship, Masks, Vaccines, Right, and Revolution: Surrender to today’s oligarchic priorities augurs no peace for tomorrow.

I call it The Batman Fallacy, with the argument being: Batman is nuts.

The ideal, when some bad thing is happening, is that a previously-unsuspected Batman should swoop in to right the wrong with some instant justice.

In the second place, this is irrational just because it is unlikely. Your only reliable self-defense is your persistent defense of yourself. Yael is insurance, if you married right. Batman is imaginary.

But first: Batman is nuts. In any instant matter, you might crave the intervention of a vigilant violent vindicator – but what about when you’re double-parked, you know, just for a sec?

The law might be an ass, but Batman – for real, not in comic books – would be a dictator. Be careful what you wish for…

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence is high, but rising costs of materials present major risks.

Redfin.com: For Low-Tax States, Four People Move In For Every One Person Who Leaves. Rational people respond appropriately to incentives! Who’d a thunk it? They stretch out the timeline to bury the lede, of course, but it wouldn’t be Redfin without little-riot-lies.

City Journal: Galt’s Gulch in Music City, USA: Nashville is attracting a sizable share of blue-state transplants looking to escape hostile economic policies or cancel culture.

Joel Kotkin: How Los Angeles Descended Into Neo-feudalism And How To Fix It.

Brad Polumbo: Lockdown-Weary New Yorkers Fled to One Free State in Droves, New Figures Show: Tens of thousands of families chose freedom over big government.

American Thinker: Bye-bye Broadway: A grim prognosis for New York’s theaters.

Karol Markowicz: If woke companies really ‘care,’ let them help where it counts: fighting crime. Any activity at all beyond mere jawbone would be an actual demonstration of an actual commitment. Accordingly: The purpose of the jawbone is to divert your attention from the company news that actually matters. Caveat lector. Mind what goes into your mind.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: Caniglia v Strom, et al. We have one man who can do the job and eight Imposter Read more

As discussed, Redfin’s actual complaint with exclusive Residential listings is that they don’t pay Buyer’s Agents from other brokerages – meaning Redfin. The race jive is just jive, as it always is with Redfin. Nothing prevents them from continuing to represent their defected buyers – free of the ugly taint of self-interested compensation.

That would be daft, but so is camouflaging incompetence by a pretended concern for the unfortunate – in all this year’s most popular colors! So what should they do instead?

Switch!

That’s the name of a real estate book by Gary Keller, but you don’t need to buy or read it: The title is the entire thesis.

What do you do when your buyers can’t seem to stop betraying you? Stop representing buyers. Do something else instead: Just list, and dish the buyer leads to some other sucker. Do property management. Or flip, and let the house do the selling.

And Redfin is actually in the flipping business, and that much is potentially a good business: Like Zillow, it’s lead-gen either way the conversation starts, but even better, it’s a full-ticket fall-back sale either way. The iBuying part could not be more exclusive – take that, undeserving unfortunates! – but the end result is a listing, either way. And listing means getting paid almost always and betrayed almost never.

Here’s fun, though: Switching! is easy for an agent to do, and not that hard for a team or a brokerage. But what about a big national computerized web portal that only learned real estate by monkey-see-monkey-do in the first place?

A dinosaur built with an erector set is in the end a dinosaur – more relic than robot. Good luck with that…

In other news:

The Minnesota Sun: Minneapolis Mayor Admits Anti-Police Rhetoric has Led to Crime Spike.

Fox News: Veteran who was harassed by Antifa over flag says riots have become part of Portland’s landscape.

The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Out of control’: Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years.

David Harsanyi: Biden Is Off to a Disastrous Start.

MLS fights are always about Residential listings. Nobody is claiming to have lost sleep (or money or jobs or opportunities) over Land and Lots or Multi-Family or BizOps. No one at Redfin is tasked with tracking underperformance by Patagonian buyers competing for Industrial properties. You might from this conclude that MLS “justice” is really just a matter of whose ox is gored. I always think that way.

“What does ‘exclusive’ mean?” a buyer once asked my wife, seeing a rider on a yard sign as they were driving by. “It means they don’t want you to have representation.” That’s the perfect answer – not because she’s the perfect quill-pulling marketer but because she’s sweet and honest.

But her answer is not quite true: When I list a rental exclusively by promoting it only on Realty.bots, I’m not saying prospective tenants can’t have representation. I’m just not paying for it. As it happens, around ten percent of the applications we receive will have uncompensated agents attached to them – hoping to sell the applicants a home in a year or two.

Who goes unrepresented? Everybody else – everybody who doesn’t look like a good investment to be a homeowner very soon. Tenants are always desperate – time is never their friend – so I will get over-the-transom Realty.bot inquiries from theoretically-represented parties, anyway.

Who cares? Nobody. It’s Rental, not Residential, and there are property management companies in Metro Phoenix who pay $25 by MLS to Tenant’s Agents for a completed move-in. Show, application, qualification and follow-through, perhaps weeks later. Key In Listing Office – no joke. Redfin and REX know nothing about gouging other broker’s agents.

I think an exclusive Residential resale listing is colorably a fiduciary violation, since only a full and fair test of the marketplace can surface the highest, safest, soonest offer. But: I list Vacant or Drive-By-Only homes for resale, and I’m done in four days. And: I am not your broker. In any case, the betrayed party, if any, is the seller. No harm? No foul.

Buyers who want access Read more

We market our rental properties with the Realty.bots, not the MLS. I want to meet everyone, and I don’t want to pay a weak agent to come between me and the prospects.

But what that means is that I get inundated with inquiries: The Realty.bots make it easy for unmotivated people to express interest in properties they won’t trouble themselves to visit. Oh well. I respond by form letter and schedule group appointments – Open Houses without the ballyhoo.

Of the people who inquire – meaning who click a button on Zillow.com or another site – about 10% will commit to keeping the appointment, and, of those, around half actually will. That’s good news, right? Only nineteen out of twenty Realty.bot rental “leads” are complete crap.

The people who do come are great – because they are actually motivated. About half of them will apply, which is a great conversion rate on lousy yields, but still wrong: With only one house at a time available to lease, we end up working only the best-qualified applications. I triage them as they come in, pushing the red flag DQs – recent bankruptcy, landlord debt, dubious income – to the side. The one argument I can make for an application fee is inducing marginally-qualified people to think twice before applying.

So: Zillow-like rental “leads” are crap, except for the small few who convert, among whom are amazingly well-qualified folks who just want to lease a house amidst the maelstrom. But: Even with all of that, for our purposes, listing rentals on the Realty.bots is far better than using the MLS.

In other news:

CNBC: This woman got $10,000 for moving from Brooklyn to Tulsa. Here’s how it worked out.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homes Keep Selling Faster Than Ever—Typical Home Sold in Just 18 Days. Redfin will have to double-down on the little-riot-lies soon: We’re ten days away from the anniversary of the onset of the biggest run on fee simple housing in American history, and there is no way to evade it without looking like even bigger liars.

CNBC: San Francisco tech Read more

One of my favorite movies is “Pump Up The Volume” – it’s about blogging before WordPress – and this is one of the best lines in the film:

“I can smell a lie like a fart in a car.”

After a solid year of lying about masks – after first lying the other way – the CDC has now tacitly admitted their uselessness in ordinary social encounters: If the other guy’s viral load is high enough and your immunity is low enough, the mask is negligible as protection, where if either of those sine qua non factors is absent, the mask is redundant.

The trick to not getting sick? Stay away from sick people – but don’t be susceptible to illness in the first place.

This was obvious a year ago – or a lifetime ago, for those not born yesterday – so you know the rest of the news is really bad, for the CDC to cop to factual realty.

In other news:

Housing Wire: New home sales battled scorching prices in April.

FEE.org: Why Inflation Is at a 12-year High: It’s all about the money.

Matt Taibbi: Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It.

Julie Kelly: House Republicans Defy the January 6 Narrative.

Andrea Widburg: Trump needs to do a better job of un-muzzling himself.

Legal Insurrection: California State Board of Ed Dumbing Down K-12 Math Curriculum to Ensure “Equitable Outcomes”. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

Well. Who didn’t see this coming?

The worst inflation news: Inflationary projections correctly anticipate the consequences of more dollars chasing a static quantity of goods – but what happens when productivity also falls?

That would be the practical distinction between a recession and a depression.

Too pedantic? You’ll know better than me, very soon.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates manage another dip to 2.94%.

Housing Wire: South poised to see $1 trillion in home sales in 2021.

Andy Puzder: Post-COVID, no action from Biden, Dems was required for job market to soar. Now look at the mess they’ve made.

Katie Pavlich: BREAKING: U.S. Inflation Soars.

The New York Post: From inflation to jobs to the border, Biden is flailing — when will the media notice?

Victor Davis Hanson: Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom: When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all too predictable future becomes terrifying.

Don Feder: The Left’s War on Procreation.

Karol Markowicz: Kids will pay a steep price for this War on Merit in schools.