Author: Greg Swann (page 16 of 209)

For the past couple of years, I’ve had my eye out for a top to this market. That was when there was one – a market. Now there are zillions of real estate markets, no two alike, and what is going on in Greater Phoenix is necessarily counter-balanced by bad news in other hyper-local markets.

I’ve been very concerned, lately, since surging valuations price out buyers, as do rising interest rates, sated irrational demand, etc. The investors I work with bought at 6:35 on the clock’s face – not the absolute bottom of the market, but just after it. Our goal is to sell at 11:55 in preference to 12:05. Knowing when high noon is impending is my job.

And since Monday, my job is much easier. If we have another Summer of riots, Phoenix will continue to soar toward the ever-fecund sun. We are the world’s biggest suburb but we are still also the world’s biggest cow town. The state of Arizona has never not been open-carry. We have almost none of what Ants are fleeing from – and a cornucopian abundance of everything they are fleeing to.

All of this will be true nationwide: The cites being fled to will continue to do well, going forward. Any pain in the real estate markets will be felt first, worst and longest in the cities being fled from. Redfin, Zillow and the NAR all have the data to prove me wrong – if I am – and if they ever dare to admit that the riots are happening and that they are roiling real estate markets everywhere.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand hits lowest level in over a year, and homebuyers retreat, too.

Redfin: Are We In a Housing Bubble? Will the Housing Market Crash in 2021?

CNBC: ‘When is the housing market going to crash?’ is a red-hot search on Google – here’s why.

The Blaze: Study: San Francisco lost the most residents of any major city in the United Read more

I hesitate to speculate on the long-run future of the Republic, but the future of America’s big cities seems clear:

As the Ant exodus continues, riot-friendly cities will become Grasshopper reservations: Except for tragically brick-’n’-mortar-bound Ants, only the Grasshoppers will remain.

At that point, we become two countries, so it makes sense for Ant counties to separate themselves from Grasshopper counties, as is now being proposed in Idaho and Oregon.

What will happen to the Grasshoppers, once the Ants escape their inept attempts to enslave them? Odysseus told you:

“To be owned as a pet is to be loved. To be owned as an investment is to be prized. But to be owned as a nuisance is to be abandoned in due course – or simply slaughtered.”

Cultivate your new neighbors. Make sure they know what they’re running from. Lean hard on your Grasshopper enclaves, like Tucson or Austin. Trim every government budget of Grasshopper-attractants like subsidized housing.

Living the Grasshopper lifestyle is a lifelong mistake, but for Ants to indulge that lifestyle is catastrophic – for the Ants – as we are seeing in the self-destroyed Grasshopper cities.

In other news:

CNBC: More boomers are choosing to ‘upsize’ their homes in retirement.

Housing Wire: NAR schedules proxy war with Zillow.

City Journal: Can American Cities Manufacture Again?

Andrea Widburg: The woke corporations are coming for election integrity.

Brad Polumbo: ‘Dirty Jobs’ Star Mike Rowe Just Totally Debunked the Argument for a $15 Minimum Wage.

Michael Fumento: Obesity: COVID’s Third Rail: We’re too fat to fight this virus but not allowed to talk about it.

What’s “The Great Reshuffling”?

That, apparently, is the name that is to be given to the lies about why so many Americans have moved since May 25th, 2020. Given the way these propaganda campaigns go, I would look into Critical Theory or “Great Reset” literature for the origin of the term.

I linked Saturday to Zillow making absurd predictions about the rest of the year – all the while neglecting the riots, just as all of real estate media has affected to have ignored the riots. Bad news, prognosticators: The riots are back.

What should you expect? More of the same, very likely:

• Rioted cities will continue to bleed their remote-work-capable Ants.
• Inventories in target cities will tighten even more, since effectively ZERO current homeowners will elect to sell into this maelstrom.
• The real estate press, most especially the PR operations at Zillow and Redfin, will continue to obscure the devastation in the abandoned neighborhoods of the rioted cities.

This is me in February, telling the actual truth about “The Great Reshuffling” before the lie had even been cooked up:

I can’t defend that claim because it is not being documented by the real estate press, but it will turn out that rioted cities will have lost population to non-rioted cities, that more-suburban areas in rioted cities will have gained where more-urban areas will have lost, and that, generally, people will have moved from D- and C-quality housing to B- and A-rated domiciles – leaving many empty former-residences behind them.

All of this will express itself further as the flight-from-Grasshopperism moves into smaller (hence cheaper) communities and, eventually, beyond these shores.

I used to say, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.” Ants are running farther and faster than ever before – and their flight to safety will not stop, not soon and perhaps not ever.

In other news:

The New York Post: National Guard deployed in Minneapolis after fatal police shooting of Daunte Wright.

CBS News: First-of-its-kind meeting draws more than 100 corporate leaders to discuss state voting laws.

The New York Post: Atlanta cops beg residents to stop shooting each other in new Read more

I got surveyed by Facebook yesterday.

I wish I had thought to take screen shots, but the jist was this: “Why do our users hate us?” I expect the bigger, hidden question is: “And where the hell did they all go?!?”

Horses. Barn doors. Predictable consequences. It’s worthwhile to remember that Facebook was started by a teenager – who has since encountered few reasons to have grown up.

What the hell is wrong with the stockholders, though? Not just at Facebook, but at every company that thinks pushing the cash customers around is the right way to attract and retain business. None of this mishegoss will stop, apparently, until a few proud-mouthed CEOs are very loudly fired.

Want to know your problem, Facebook? You’re a lousy bartender. All you had to do is smile and take the money. I’m hoping your replacement has better sense.

In other news:

FEE.org: Biden’s $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Is Loaded With Corporate Welfare.

Paul Bedard: Biden threat supercharges sales of ‘ghost guns,’ AR pistols, and ammunition.

American Greatness: End Woke Corporate Extortion.

The purpose of a family is to replicate itself. The purpose of grandchildren is to redeem their grandparents’ traditions, values and choices. A culture is a collection of like-minded families replicating their shared heritage together.

This is why our current cultural chaos doesn’t matter very much. Sexual diversity is very much not our strength, but where the ongoing explosion of delusional genders might seem to pose a threat, the opposite is true.

Here’s why: Vive la différence! No one trades corn for corn. Most of what we are witnessing is simply involuntary celibates multiplying their imaginary paramours, but, in any case, modernity’s mob of media-made monsters is unlikely to reproduce propitiously – and in replication of what, precisely?

Humanity’s future is manly husbands, comely brides and houses bursting with kids and dogs. No one trades corn for corn, and, accordingly, only people who live up to the sexuality imposed by their biology will successfully replicate their families – their values, their traditions, their heritage, their culture.

Millions of misled innocents are voluntarily withdrawing from the reproductive pool. The future belongs to the children of the people too busy making love to make war on their own identity.

In other news:

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Homes Sell at Fastest Pace on Record. What happens if Derek Chauvin gets acquitted – especially since no one has admitted the riot-borne impetus behind “The Great Reshuffling” in the first place.

CNBC: Zillow president expects increase in home listings as Covid certainty improves. Ahem. As above. Plus which, as always, what is going on with the abandoned housing?

City Journal: Detroit’s Black Wealth Tax: To help close the racial wealth gap, slash Detroit’s confiscatory property tax rate.

The Hill: Cities got deadlier in 2020: What’s behind the spike in homicides?

John Hinderaker: Is Race Discrimination Illegal, or not? Boxcars are pulling out of town…

Matt Welch: Kindergartners Abandoning Public School in Fall 2021, Too.

Good dogs are made – carefully socialized – not born.

So, too, for bad dogs: They may be tormented, but typically they’re just neglected – living among other neglected dogs, fed sporadically and in bulk, so that only the most vicious are well fed.

Here’s good news for Easter Week: Even the worst dog can be redeemed. It just takes time, patience and a lot of love.

Even better news: The same is true for bad people – with stipulations. Every dog wants to love and be loved. So does every human being, but dogs put up fewer obstacles.

The best news: We can raise good people just like we raise good dogs – sweet, lovable, reliable, trustworthy humans, with not a predator or misanthrope among them. This was common knowledge just 50 years ago, but we’ve neglected a lot of children since then…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates drop slightly to 3.13%.

Housing Wire: The housing boom juices Home Depot’s bottom line. There has never been a better time to buy a used refrigerator…

The Daily Wire: San Francisco Hemorrhaging Residents To Texas And Florida.

The Daily Caller: ‘Antiracist Agenda’: Boston Hospital Will Offer ‘Preferential Care Based On Race’. Boxcars are pulling out of town…

Joel Kotkin: America’s elites want a racial apocalypse.

The American Mind: How to Woke-Proof Your Kids.

I’ve had great fun mocking Redfin, Zillow and the real estate press for their refusal to acknowledge and come to grips with the riot-incited flight to safety in American residential real estate. Of course, the frenzied suburban home-buyers make matters easier for them by shading the truth about their motivations, but the timing and the target destinations make it obvious what is going on.

It’s not “white flight” – it’s Ant flight, a mass exodus away from everything Grasshopper. And as soon as you see it that way – the productive “socially distancing” the destructive – it’s not only easy to see what is going on, it’s easy to talk about, too.

Here’s the problem: It ain’t over. Derek Chauvin is almost certain to be acquitted. He performed exactly as trained, compassionately, and commendably under stress. The mainstream media is hiding the trial evidence, just as they have hidden the evidence in George Floyd’s death all along. When the jury acts upon facts you know nothing about, what will ensue in America’s biggest cities?

What will newly-enflamed riots do to the ongoing riot-borne Ant exodus from Grasshopper-ravaged cities?

And what new myths will the real estate press come up with to lie about it?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Zillow: Millions will enter housing market in 2021. More little riot lies, of course. What is happening is the abandoned cities?

CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/05/homeowners-in-covid-forbearance-could-get-foreclosure-reprieve.html.

NPR: Texas Courts Open Eviction Floodgates: ‘We Just Stepped Off A Cliff’.

Housing Wire: Does CFPB have authority to postpone foreclosures?

Stanley Kurtz: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Aims to End Single-Family Zoning.

City Journal: Turn Off the Spigots: Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal includes no serious attempt to control runaway costs.

Joanne Jacobs: ‘Anti-racist’ narrative is ‘you can’t get ahead’.

Real estate is kids and dogs, but real estate sales is entrepreneurs.

I was interviewed yesterday on the future prospects of the big-name iBuyers, whose numbers are everyday augmented by many, many no-name iBuyers. I’m a bear, of course. When the market turns, the slow-selling pontificating poindexters will discover why less-pedigreed brokers do not own the inventory they represent. Plus which, when the world catches on to The Full Uruguay, American residential real estate could be in decline enduringly.

Worse than all that, worse than everything else is simply this: Employees are not entrepreneurs. Before there’s a fire in the hearth in someone’s new home, there was a fire in a real estate agent’s belly – and if not, the process took too long and cost too much.

The proud-mouthed iBuyers are interesting to me, right now, to see how poorly they sell in an impossibly-easy market for listing brokers. They stand out in any screen of listings, since they are the only listers who can get to double-digit Days-on-Market. The listing histories are always interesting, as are the financial details of the closed sales: By selling poorly and by mismanaging their offers, iBuyers end up with weaker buyers – with financed offers in an all-cash world – frequently paying closing costs.

The question: How do iBuyers matter in my world?

The answer: They don’t.

They’re pawnbrokers, and only a fool would pawn a house in this market. They invariably list too high, so they make my listings look like a bargain to buyers. And because they sell so slowly and so weakly, they make me look like a genius to my sellers. Beyond that, the big-budget iBuyers are just more tricky niche pitches in a world awash in them.

In other news:

Housing Wire: The appraisal gap is complicating deals across the country.

Mike DelPrete: America’s Next Top Real Estate Model: Tracking the Growth of eXp, Redfin, and Compass.

Housing Wire: Rising rates push mortgage applications down for fifth week.

CNBC: Mall vacancies jump at fastest pace on record, hitting new high, as retailers cull Read more

If you know when you hire them that your employees will never, ever be coming in to the office, why would you care where they live? Bandwidth-permitting, why not Uruguay? Better yet, why not recruit – with no worries about visas – from Uruguay’s intellectual elite, instead?

That flips the script on the remote-work question: How are you gonna get ’em back to Paree, after they’ve smelled fresh air? You won’t. Instead of continuing to try to make that beehive disease vector of an office work – situated, as it is, amidst a newly-police-demoralized warzone – when employers wake up and embrace the actual “new normal,” the whole world changes.

Intellectual capital is now transnational, or it soon will be. California fears Texas, but Texas should fear Uruguay or The Philippines or the vast and hugely anglophilic subcontinent of India.

Commercial real estate is now transnational – and immensely redundant.

Residential real estate is now transnational. Ex-pat retirees have known this for decades: Living elsewhere on an American income makes for a nice life. Wages will flatten, but now you don’t have to retire to live in paradise.

The Full Uruguay is already here, at least within the U.S. But it’s here, too, in all of the casual off-shoring already underway – and in the digital nomads who have been working this way for years. Elon Musk promises anywhere-internet, along with the power to drive it. ‘Knowledge workers’ can now work from anywhere, including Montevideo.

Call it globalization-by-internet, The Full Uruguay will tend over time to flatten wages and housing prices – as it craters the value of office space.

Incredible homes can be yours cheaply, but you must act soon. 😉 Meanwhile, consider that you now face global competition from people much better-prepared than you – who are willing to work for much less. Plan accordingly…

In other news:

CNBC: ‘This is not the time for amateurs,’ says real estate agent in a fiercely competitive housing market.

Housing Wire: CFPB proposes foreclosure ban until 2022.

Fox News: Portland police look for exit, say they’re ‘burned out’: report.

The American Mind: Permanent Racism.

The Read more

BloodhoundBlog inadvertently took Easter weekend off. My apologies.

We got clobbered by something big Friday morning. I haven’t read the server logs, and My Eyes Glaze Over anyway, but the ISP shut down HTTP access for our own safety.

That much is just right. When bad guys bounce, they bounce elsewhere. An hour or two later, you’d never know there was a storm.

Alas, it was Easter weekend. The ISP was understaffed, and I inkle that BloodhoundBlog was not the only site affected. It’s a jungle out there.

In any case, like the world itself this Easter Monday, we are redeemed. I had been on a 221-day blogging streak, so starting today I get to try to beat that number.

I’m glad you’re here. And more and more every day, I’m glad we’re here.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Asking prices of newly listed homes reach all-time high.

Redfin: Homes Sell At Fastest Pace on Record—59% Under Contract within 2 Weeks.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 3.18%.

Rob Hahn: Zillow is Not Your Competition: A Point from My Presentations.

Fox News: Police defunded: Major cities feeling the loss of police funding as murders, other crimes soar.

American Thinker: I Work in the Public School System. Critical Race Theory Is Everywhere.

Andrea Widburg: How not to cower before the COVID police.

City Journal: Test Anxiety: Asian-American parents mobilized to oppose the de Blasio administration’s specialized high school proposal. Now they’re fighting a larger battle.

John Kass, who I swear is anointed in his dreams by Mike Royko’s Ghost, brings us Federal Judge James Ho, who explains quite cogently why all of “anti-racism” is hideously racist:

Once everyone has had full and fair opportunity to be considered, you pick on the merits. Both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act make it clear that it is wrong to hire people based on race.

This would be the opposite of what Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman and other proud-mouthed openly-racist corporate weenies are bragging about doing.

Played, paid or afraid? Why would these ignominious clowns publicly boast about deliberately making hiring errors? The truth is, they’re simply juveniles, saying what they think it takes to get by.

One can hope for redemption – it’s Easter, after all – but my bet is that these perfectly-appointed perpetually-teenaged jackasses will be spewing their puerile bullshit all the way to the death camps.

In other news:

Housing Wire: The ugly side of housing: low inventory.

Housing Wire: What Biden’s infrastructure plan does for housing.

KXAN TV: ‘We need help’: With eviction moratoriums extended, some landlords are selling.

CNBC: Most evictions are banned through June. What you need to know.

Brad Polumbo: The Biden administration quietly extended a disastrous pandemic policy.

The San Diego Union-Tribune: California legislature tries to eliminate single-family-home zoning, again.

Heather Mac Donald: Mostly Peaceful Mayhem.

Angelo Codevilla: As We Look For Others: Whoever would lead America’s deplorables must head up a national effort to discredit and stop the totalitarian tactics of the Left.

The American Mind: Terms of Servitude.

Continuing his quest to be real estate’s leading champion of the forthcoming anti-Ant genocide, Redfin’s Glenn Kelman yesterday jumped onto the pandering-to-aggrieved-Asians boxcar bandwagon. As I’ve pointed out before, racism is a terrible idea for both Asians and Redfin, none of whom have any excuse for their dalliances with bigotry.

This was my instant reaction to Kelman’s newest anti-Ant admonition:

“We stood with Black Americans against violence then; now we stand with Asians and Pacific Islanders.” –Glenn Kelman, #Redfin.

Hey, Glenn, since you’re up on all the latest bigotry stats: Who is it who persecutes Asians, most often?

Who gains when Asian students or job applicants get screwed?

Hiring the wrong people is obviously bad for business, but do you really think this abject racist pandermania works as marketing? Is there no one else in your life to condemn your deeply earnest bigotry? No one, even, to measure the substandard results?

Fun to think that there is no way for you to talk about anti-Asian racism without admitting who are the worst racists in America, but I doubt any of this will keep Asians, Jews or other competent people out of the boxcars.

I know you had an education, so you cannot claim you don’t know where your racist policies lead. Are you a grown-up, Glenn Kelman, or just another corporate clown?

Glenn Kelman has posting privileges here, but, here or anywhere, I challenge him to defend his racism not to me, not to his shareholders or clients, but to his sons, who someday will face the artificial barriers to success he is erecting – unless they have by then already fallen prey to the anti-Ant pogrom.

In other news:

Redfin: Five Ways the Housing Market Will Change After the Pandemic. More Redfin bullshit. The exodus was caused by the riots, not the virus, as is obvious in Redfin’s own charts. What has happened to real estate values around CHAZ/CHOP? What will happen if Derek Chauvin is not lynched, as planned?

CNBC: Pending home sales fell over 10% in February, Read more

The workers of the world never would unite, but they put the lie to the stories of their exploitation by getting very, very fat.

That’s what gave birth to environmentalism: Free markets are clearly much better for people than “compassionate” slavery, so a new villain was schemed up – the rape of the planet. People got right on fixing all that, of course, so the goalposts had to be moved, again and again, with the threat ever more nebulous but the solution always the same: Still more government.

And that was the state of play until the virus licensed a brand new fear campaign. And who can argue with the results? A full year of voluntary self-imprisonment in response to hysterically exaggerated false proxy signals.

But: Is the jig up? China Joe is begging states to reimpose mask mandates, but the fear factor is clearly gone. The virus kills people who would have died anyway and the morbidly obese. That low-hanging fruit is already gone, sadly, just as we are reaching herd immunity – and just as sunlight is becoming more abundant everywhere.

Frustrated displays escalate and amplify – the maskholiness displays will get worse – and that’s a good thing. It’s how everyone eventually catches on to the scam.

In other news:

CNBC: Some landlords sell properties as CDC extends eviction ban.

City Journal: The Death of Density? To survive and thrive, cities will have to overcome a number of formidable trends.

CNBC: Old golf courses and office buildings are turning into retail warehouses as demand for industrial space keeps climbing. Land seeks its highest and best use. This is a celebration of down-scaling – of disimprovement.

The New York Post: Seattle residents at breaking point with homeless crisis: ‘Makes me depressed’.

The Center Square: Commerce Department report: Red states leading U.S. economic growth.

Brad Polumbo: Free States Faring Far Better Than Lockdown States in One Huge Way, New Data Show.

City Journal: Progressive Parents, Closed Schools: Residents of wealthy, left-leaning communities in New Jersey struggle against the power of teachers’ unions.

I’ve been socializing a puppy in my spare time over the past few months. Her name is Cleo, a French Bulldog. She thinks I’m her favorite playmate. I think she hung the moon.

I’m only with her a few hours a week, typically, but I do have a praxis and a plan: I want for her to have a happier, more playful adulthood than most dogs – more Labrador, less snoozehound. That’s a funny idea, except that I firmly believe that toddlers stumble onto their destiny – unless they are led to it. Can I ‘imprint’ a dog against what is imputed to be ‘her nature’? We’ll see. We’re having fun, regardless.

Cleo is a church dog and this is the Paschal Week, so she’ll be spending a lot of time with me, her church’s designated atheist. That will be fun for her, since work is play to dogs. And it will be wonderful for me, because real estate is kids and dogs.

In other news:

CNBC: CDC will extend national eviction ban through June 30, sources say.

The Hill: Democrats move to crush red states’ rise and threat.

American Thinker: The States Must Resist the Federal Takeover of Elections.

Stark Realities: Study: U.S. Media’s Covid Coverage Slants Heavily Negative.

Fox Business: Biden administration working with industry to develop COVID-19 ‘passports’ as vaccinations progress.

Daniel Payne: Homeschooling numbers soar amid continued school closings, signaling post-pandemic resilience.

Priests and judges dress in drag to overawe you, to stun you into silence by their assertion of superior office. Scientists do the same thing with their lab coats and trifocals. The display lends nothing to the argument, but if you are blinded by it, so much the better.

All three of those branches of authority, plus many others, used to invest a great deal of effort in defending their reputations for probity. Science, in particular, wanted you to know all about the incorruptibility of the scientific method – long since supplanted by the popularity contests known as peer review.

Nobody does that any longer – stands up for probity – and we all know that any particular exponent of authority easily could be and very probably is corrupted – if not by lucre then by ideology. To expect integrity from anyone in a position to betray you for advantage by now just seems naive.

What’s changed? I can give you the answer in one brutal question:

Is there really no one in your life who would be ashamed to see you behaving this way?

We are inducted into the cult of lifelong trustworthy behavior, if ever we are, by the moral exemplars around us in our toddler years. It’s typically dad’s approval we’re living up to, but it could be mom or a grandparent – the person who was gracious enough not to buy your shit when you were still a very poor liar.

Why is no one in authority worthy of trust? Why are young people mutilating their genitals? Same answer to both questions – and to all questions about the discontents of modernity: No fathers, no families, no future. No exceptions.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: The Biggest Flaw in NAR’s Defense of Commissions.

The New York Post: Los Angeles agency votes for $36M police funding boost as crime surges.

Zero Hedge: Where Manhattanites Fled During The Pandemic May Surprise You.

Townhall: Losing the Language, Losing the Argument.

Brad Polumbo: We need to stop overlooking one Read more