Author: Greg Swann (page 14 of 209)

I don’t know how closely people are following this clear cooperation mishegoss. It boils down to this: Brokers who can’t sell without the MLS are plotting to handicap those who can. The MLS is a fall-back for good brokers and a crutch for bad ones, but it is beyond absurd to insist that good brokers must indirectly market homes they have already sold directly. If the seller’s not suing, who is aggrieved?

Typically, I do not list rental homes in the MLS. I want to meet the ultimately-successful candidate in person, early in the process, and I don’t want to pay a clueless newbie to impede my access to the prospects – or to their dogs, who I will also want to meet as a matter of due diligence.

Instead I go to Zillow. I get inundated, but I would, anyway. If we move to the supply side, I will drop the MLS and list rehabbed resale homes that way, too: I don’t have to prove maximum marketplace exposure to myself, I just have to hit my number – while not paying for third-party marketing.

The last three words are important: The MLS is third-party marketing for second-party marketers who need the help. If the agent shows up to the listing appointment with a pocket investor – as brokerages big and small are doing in response to the iBuyers – the house gets sold without there ever even being a listing contract to bitch about.

I hate the NAR, but I hate Special Olympics real estate brokers worse. If you can actually do this job, you don’t need to scheme to cripple your competition.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: Where the wealthy fled to: The rich left cities like NYC and Chicago during the pandemic and moved to ‘hidden gem’ locations including Salt Lake City and Phoenix.

Housing Wire: Amid expansion, Opendoor lost $270M in Q1. I love how “news” hide facts: They lost $110,000 per “investment” sold – in the easiest resale market in human history!

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications jump Read more

Welcome to the new age.

What a contrast, huh?

Trump was not supposed to have won the 2016 election – also rigged, but without the late-night emergency fall-back ballot dumps. But the consequence of his having won is that Americans at least have a decent comparison, if not an actual choice about their leaders.

So: Which do you prefer, having had almost four months to judge: The half-assed capitalist or the half-witted fascist?

You don’t have to answer right away. Give it some thought while you’re waiting in line to buy gas – if there is any to buy.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: Zillow and realtor.com Battle for Traffic and Revenue Growth.

The Blue State Conservative: Philadelphia’s Fall: A Microcosm of Democrat Devastation.

Daniel Greenfield: California is Leaving: No children, no middle class, and no future.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: The Geography of COVID-19.

Law Enforcement Today: Former police chief: If we lose the rule of law, we are going to lose America – and we’re just about there.

The American Mind: The Spent Society.

Sohrab Ahmari: Woke-ism will swallow our kids unless we restore the West’s great traditions.

I wrote the other day about Zillow’s losses on its iBuyer “investments” – incomprehensible losses considering that this is one of the few times when it is possible to make money on non-producing real estate.

The losses on iBuyer “investments” can be stupefying from the point of view of any real estate agent, investor or house-flipper: You should be able to show a profit in any market, since making a profit is the goal, the point and the bright-line go/no-go signal on how to proceed.

And this is what is different about Zillow as an iBuyer, as distinguished from OpenDoor and OfferPad: As long as Zillow can sell its web traffic and its fallouts to gullible suckers, iBuying is lead-gen and can be carried as a loss-leader. Witness: Zillow concedes that it lost $30K per “investment” and it still showed a profit for the first quarter – all credit to the sucker-bilking business it claims to disdain.

Zillow got into iBuying because OpenDoor was getting in front of it in the lead stream. It is now in a position to crush OpenDoor and OfferPad: There is no practical upper bound on what Zillow can offer – since they can happily lose money on every “investment” – with more-typical flippers having only the transactions themselves as income streams.

This is beyond crazy – my objection all along. Cinemas show movies to sell popcorn, candy and sodas – the profit centers. Car dealers sell ugly loans, offering pretty cars as the incentive. And Zillow sells easy-peasy tract homes very slowly and very badly as a way of trawling useless agents into paying 35% at COE for well-worked “leads.”

If you think that sounds a lot sleazier than the supermarket real estate magazines Zillow replaced, I expect there’s a good deal of sleaze in Zillow we know nothing about. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot about real estate they don’t know, so we’ll bespy more failures of their snickering guile as the market turns.

In Read more

Charter schools deliver what public schools can’t: Actual taxpayer-funded education. On-line charter schools deliver what no in-person school can do: Education without bullying.

It’s fun to watch them selling it: Short kids, pudgy kids – even a literal red-headed step-child. As noted below, charter schools are answering the “what for?” and “what’s next?” questions better. One on-line charter we know is offering free summer-school – which is simply bald-faced loss-leader recruitment.

I’ve never been crazy about the charter school idea, because you can’t take government money without the government eventually taking over. That hasn’t happened so far, and the teacher’s unions have been remarkably obtuse about the charter movement – so it still works for now. And the simple fact of competition and innovation in education is wonderful, whatever the downstream risks.

Grasshoppers make war on merit because it shames them: The spotlight of excellence silhouettes their sloth and envy. If you would proudly proclaim that you never feed your children poison, make sure no one is poisoning their minds all day while you’re working.

Homeschooling by Aristotle is the ideal, with everything else falling short. Charter schools – on-line or in-person – deliver what public schools won’t, and they mitigate the dogma and bullying. Ultimately, the hard work is all on the kids, but charter schools provide more opportunities and present fewer obstacles to their thriving.

In other news:

Slate: Logjam! A journey to the heart of the lumber shortage.

AP: California leaving: State population declines for first time.

The College Fix: Texas Virtual Academy trains students to enter workforce right after high school.

The American Mind: Schoolhouse Scapegoat: Joe Biden wants to instill racial hatred and resentment as the new American values.

Why should you subscribe to and religiously ingest BloodhoundBlog every day? The price inflation that’s suddenly such big news? We warned you it was coming on February 15th:

“One third of all American dollars are less than a year old. That inflation will be paid for. Plan accordingly.”

That was obvious, frankly, and I had been ruminating about it for months – last year’s mad spending was one of my key objections to Trump. What’s worse is that the yearling dollars by now number five out of every six: In due course, and assuming ZERO additional inflation, it will turn out that an American dollar is worth one-fifth or less what it was on January 1, 2020.

Buy deep, borrow cheap, plan ahead. Dollar-denominated assets will evaporate but tangible goods will require active defenses.

Welcome to the new age. There is at least some measure of self-defense to be found here among the dawgs: We can help you see what’s coming.

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers are the most pessimistic they’ve been in a decade thanks to tight supply, high prices.

Housing Wire: Regulatory costs add nearly $94K to new home prices.

City Journal: Always Be Founding: Projects to “renew” civic education and “reinvent” U.S. democracy smuggle in a rejection of the American Founding.

Christopher Rufo: The Wokest Place on Earth: Disney mounts an internal campaign against “white privilege” and organizes racially segregated “affinity groups.”

American Thinker: One way you can start saving American liberty, personally.

Joe Concha: Social media’s ban on Trump: Our ‘silence of the lambs’ moment.

Zillow’s first-quarter results are out, and the message is plainly obvious: Milk the idiots, but don’t be the idiot.

They won’t learn. The only successful “disruption” in proptech, so far at least, belongs to Zillow: They replaced supermarket real estate magazines with the Zestimate™. The difference is, the sleazoids who published those cheesy shoppers knew where the bread was buttered – bilking an endlessly-renewing stream of gullible morons. This is Zillow’s actual business, but, like Redfin, Coke and so many other publicly-traded companies, they’re not happy making money.

Zillow wants to be a real boy, so it admits to pissing away $30K per iBuyer “investment” in the most amazingly easy seller’s market in the history of time.

People like to smooth numbers, but Zillow is smooth about nothing: They will have made a little money on a few houses, lost money on most – and lost $100K or more on a few. They don’t have a plan, but they do have buckets of money to finance their ineptitude.

When the market turns, Zillow will be able to lose six-figures on every iBuyer “investment.” I’m assuming that will make them even prouder of themselves.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: What Zillow’s Results Reveal About Its Momentum Towards Zillow 2.0.

Housing Wire: More renters and homeowners are making payments.

Christopher Rufo: The Shaky Foundations of L.A.’s Housing ‘Entitlement’ for the Homeless.

The Federalist: The Census Rewarded Red States, But Democrats Are Scheming To Reverse That.

Heather Mac Donald: Diversity Over Discovery: Biden’s war on merit puts America’s scientific edge at risk.

I will give you a very simple lens for understanding political issues: “Does what you want require the use of force?”

Are your neighbors your property, to be ordered around at your whim? No? Congratulations. You are now an anarchist.

The Marxists have muddied up that word, so you can choose another – agorist, voluntaryist, anarchocapitalist – if you like. The good news is, you have foresworn your criminal past, so you’re one of the good guys now.

Once you look at things this way – government is the criminal imposition of violence upon innocents – you’ll find plenty of government you want to get rid of. And what has the last year taught us but that even well-meant tyranny is still tyranny?

The government that governs best governs least – and that’s why the best government is no government. That requires better fathers, which suggests the first branches of the state to prune. But government infantilizes and enfeebles us in everything it does, so – as the Trump presidency just illustrated – getting rid of it anywhere makes us stronger everywhere.

We cannot be feral, so we must be civil – but we cannot be civil by predation. Yet as logic dictates and Hayek insists, simply by not pushing each other around, we make wonders where the tyrants make nothing but mountainous mass graves.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates remain under 3% for third week in a row.

CNBC: Federal judge overturns national eviction ban.

City Journal: Anatomy of a Crime Wave: Baltimore’s experiment with de-policing has been disastrous—and deadly.

UPI: U.S. birth rate in 2020 saw largest decline in almost 50 years, CDC says.

The Federalist: Critical Race Theory Illuminates Democrats’ Master Plan To End Honest Elections In America.

City Journal: The Federalism Fix: How to bring peace to Washington’s partisan wars.

Lucky us, we have had zero real estate problems during the pandemic of panic. We manage a portfolio of rental properties, but we had zero missed or late payments – and we even sold two of them occupied, a third-rail red flag when eviction may be forbidden by law.

If you read me elsewhere, you’ll hear me talking about The Affectionate Display: The default proffering and presumption of good will, and the assumption that any difficulties arise from miscommunication or mistake, not malice. That’s a social strategy – assuming the best about other people – but it’s how we run our business, too. We don’t want conflict, so we don’t have conflict.

I can’t swear that’s why the past year has been easy for us – the entire trick to property management is resident selection, and we have wonderful people living in our rentals – but it’s how we know our properties are secure from negligence or damage.

In other news:

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand stalls as rates rise and fierce competition hurts home sales.

Fox 5 Vegas: Renter trashes Las Vegas house on way out, property managers say it’s a pandemic trend.

Katie Pavlich: Americans Set Another Gun Purchase Record in April.

City Journal: Urban Growth Will Continue.

Mises Institute: How Trillions in Newly Printed Money Created a Labor Shortage.

Angelo Codevilla: Oligarchy, and Remedies.

City Journal: Less Than Meets the Eye: How admissions officers could be setting up minority students for failure.

Robby Soave: In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at Math.

Dana Loesch: A Model for Fighting Critical Race Theory in America’s Schools.

Redfin is coming to Boston – if you consider the remote outer-suburbs Boston. From the link:

Redfin is making offers on single-family homes and townhomes built after 1900 in parts of Middlesex, Norfolk and Plymouth counties. The company expects to expand to additional neighborhoods and property types in the region over time.

Going back to 1900 is ballsy. Everything built before 1935 or so was one-off – not production homes – and subsequent remodels would throw comparability out the window, anyway. But most of the houses on the I-495 outer loop – where RedfinNow is actually going – are post-WWII tract homes, many of them post-1980.

Where is RedfinNow not going? To Roxbury and Dorchester – or anywhere in Suffolk County – where the black people are. RedfinNow is redlining the very whitest part of a very racist, very redlined, very white state to stake its claim in Massachusetts.

Making these big-city boasts is absurd. No big-budget iBuyer works in inner-cities – which is why all of them are redlining, de facto. But redlining Redfin is so far from Boston and its bothersome diversity that it might as well claim Providence, too.

What a tangled web! Be like a real real estate brokerage, Redfin. Stop lying about racism and lie about your results, instead, like everybody else.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Greg Swann: If Zillow is buying its marketing from Fiverr, it should spring for the upsell.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: Clear Cooperation Is a Disaster in the Making. Static market fallacy, along with normality bias. I read this theory two years ago and thought the same thing. When the market turns, the MLS will rise again.

The Hill: Is the US headed toward a new housing bubble?

The New York Post: Expelling Asian Americans from top schools proves NYC education is off the rails.

The Wall Street Journal: In L.A. and San Francisco, Schools Are Open but Classrooms Are Near-Empty.

Is Glenn Kelman the Orren Boyle of real estate?

While Basecamp is graciously showing the world how to be based in business, Kelman is the social savior who has a solution for every problem except Redfin.com’s currently-completely-useless marketing strategy.

The flavor of the micro-second? Pocket listings. I don’t like them, either, but they are no less stupid than selling to an iBuyer – like Redfin – in this market.

So Kelman makes an earnest appeal with a hidden motive: Redfin’s buyer’s agents can’t show and collect on exclusive listings. Their dissatisfied buyers have good reasons to gravitate to big local brokerages instead of Redfin’s national database of Pending sales. The MLS has always been a fallback to direct marketing. Other brokers are where you go when the listing isn’t selling – compensating them appropriately for marketing what you could not. As with compulsory commission-gouging, Kelman’s grand statesmanship amounts to outlawing alternatives to dipshit discounters like Redfin.

Redfin can’t get listings because it sells like employees sell – unimpressively – while shafting buyer’s agents from other brokerages. It can’t sell other broker’s exclusive listings, because they and their sellers don’t need Redfin’s remaining buyers just now. And, apparently, it can’t stop bitching about the brutal unfairness of it all.

Here’s the trick: Get better at real estate, Glenn. That would be what they’re paying you for.

In other news:

PJ Media: Change: Austin Voters Strongly Reject Unfettered Homeless Camping.

Fox 5 New York: De Blasio calls city workers back to offices; some aren’t happy.

Andrea Widburg: A software company comes up with a brilliant corporate speech policy.

Brad Polumbo: Biden’s Labor Secretary Just Threatened Independent Contractors.

The New York Post: Educational malpractice in the name of ‘equity’.

Here’s a fun real estate analysis exercise, one you’re unlikely to see anywhere else:

If a neighborhood has a very high ChaosScore™, will it have better or worse tree coverage than one with a low score?

We don’t have to measure chaos. HUD keeps track of rental housing. Will a community that is 75% renters have better foliage than one that is 25% renters?

Wicked easy, ain’t it? The renter analysis is actually better for understanding tree coverage – which is also racist, lesser minds argue. Trees are expensive, high-maintenance amenities, so all the reasons that make homeowners better about upkeep generally make them better about landscaping, too.

So again, not racism but location, location, location. If you prize wildlife, you pay with a longer commute. If you crave tree-lined streets with rolling lawns, you settle for less house for more money. If you want a lot of house for the least money – either as a homeowner or an investor – you buy where the renters are many and the trees are few.

Everything in economics is a trade-off. You could argue that the tenants in a treeless neighborhood have no better choices. The owners all do. Each one chose the home he bought according to his own hierarchy of values, weighing each material consideration by his own scale. If the home he bought does not yet correspond to his dreams, by fix-up or move-up, someday it can.

In other news:

The New York Post: Long Island man dodges eviction for 20 years, living in house he doesn’t own.

American Thinker: The shifting human tide.

The American Spectator: Florida: The Emerging Super State.

Townhall: Biden’s New Death Tax.

Politico: Some kids never logged on to remote school. Now what?

There really is a Crazy Linda, and she really does call herself that, and she really does go to the puppy store at the Arrowhead Mall every day. I can’t imagine what the past year has done to her – not locked in, but locked out of much of her meandering.

I don’t know what happened to the puppy store, either, but there sure are a lot of new puppies out there. And here’s something else I didn’t know – the big-duh secret sauce of the puppy business: Puppies are financed. Just like used cars – and I mean just like used cars.

How stupid is that? For forty bucks at the pound you can get a better dog, and they’ll throw in a nylon lead. Fussy about purebreds – because you like ’em hot and crazy? Over the years, we scored two Bloodhounds, an English Coonhound and a Redbone Coonhound – all purebred, all rescues.

It happens that I am socializing a four-figure dog just now – paid for in cash, I should note – a French Bulldog named Cleo, and I love her to distraction. But the dog who loved me best in the world was Shyly, a Chow/Labrador mutt, an Arizona disaster with four inches of black fur in all directions, passed on twice by other families. Smart, fun, loyal, always by my side.

A few weeks ago, Cleo and I met a nerdy couple at the park – with their puppy and their dog trainer. The dog was a Belgian Malinois – TV-famous for running down Islamofascist terrorists. Why were they buying dog training? Because they were overmatched by their oh-so-fashionable, hyper-dominant puppy. The dog was literally taking over, blocking their access in their own home – itself probably also too much for them!

Funny to me, anyway – this Scottish Terrier couple with a GI Joe dog. It’s funnier still to think that the dog might be financed – at credit-card interest.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts are rising, Read more

Redfin has more home-price ballyhoo this morning, but it answers none of my standing questions:

• Where is all this new demand coming from, and what so-far undocumented vacancy is it leaving behind?
• What is happening to real estate values in the core – not the ring suburbs – of the rioted cities?
• And while we’re about it, what is a “home” to Redfin in articles like these: Any ownable domicile or just single-family detached residences on bucolic, fee-simple suburban lots?

Lots of new puppies last year, but almost no new babies. If the balloon is bulging for puppy-perfect housing, it is being squeezed somewhere. Redfin knows the answers to my questions – and they can’t just be my concerns. It would be nice if someone were to tell the whole truth.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Pending home sales rebound in March.

Redfin: Newly Built Homes Make Up 26% of All Single-Family Homes for Sale—A Record High.

Michael Tracey: One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is “Murderapolis” Again.

Architectural Digest: This Artist Faked Being a Billionaire to Photograph New York City’s Best Views.

I’m doing CE just now – a month early, because I’m about to get hit with houses and I can’t be late.

So: Dual agency is bad, m’kay? Steady source of lawsuits, including class-action suits. But it’s lawful, as regulated, so that’s what’s taught: Written consent of both parties when limited agency is imminent.

Agency with an interest, anyone? I’ve pointed out that the iBuyers are also going to have this problem: They are badly-veiled self-dealers – pawnbrokers – except that pawnbrokers are not fiduciary to their self-designated clients.

And it occurred to me this morning that much inventory, MLS’d or not, must be moving by dual agency. Yes, I’m that dumb: We don’t double-dip, so I never think about it. Buyers will waive anything, right now, so why not representation itself?

Surely that won’t bite anyone in the ass…

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales rose less than expected in March as prices soared.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise, but remain under 3%.

CNBC: The Fed keeps rates near zero — here’s how you can benefit.

Housing Wire: Skyrocketing lumber prices add $36K to new homes.

Fox News: More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year, many citing anti-police climate. If only there were giant real estate brokerages in Seattle to report on actual facts instead of racist chimera.

The Washington Times: Biden’s racial equity agenda targets ‘exclusionary’ single-family neighborhoods.

The American Mind: The Struggle for Owned Space.

Frontpage: Black Supremacy: The hate that dare not speak its name.

American Greatness: America’s Real White Supremacy Problem.

CNN: Meet the 12-year-old graduating high school and college in the same week.