Author: Greg Swann (page 18 of 209)

I think Trump got played on the virus – and I fear the worst news is yet to come.

Lots of chatter about Biden’s speech last night, but the funniest bits turn on China Joe trying to claim credit for the vaccines.

Rushed medicine of unknown risks seems like a poor idea under any circumstances, but when the actual objective of everyone involved except Trump was regicide – no matter who else gets hurt – I think I might let Hidin’ Biden steal the show.

Oh, yes: I am a vaccine skeptic. I am an everything skeptic, and I am an early-adopter on nothing. We would all be better off had Trump listened to Navarro and Atlas, instead of Fauci and Birx, but Trump will be better off, going forward, letting the Democrats take the blame for the vaccines.

In other news:

CNBC: The housing market stands at a tipping point after a stunningly successful year during the pandemic.

Redfin: Home Prices Increased a Record 17%, Pending Sales Up 19% From a Year Earlier.

Tim O’Reilly: The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?

Joanne Jacobs: Researchers: School closures endanger children.

City Journal: Breaking the Spell: Fighting poverty requires more than just sending money to the poor.

Glenn Reynolds: To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are.

Dennis Prager: Most American Schools Are Damaging Your Children.

There’s iBuyer news today – half truth, half lies – but, as usual, the big news is missing: The big-budget iBuyers are by-now swarmed by many, many mini-iBuyers. Hardly anyone knows how to build a magnetic website, but lots and lots of people know how to flip houses.

Here’s more fun: By setting a floor price on many bread-and-butter homes, Zillow is graciously telling flippers how to flip to it: Guaranteed dough in 14 days – or fewer. And, or course, they’re also giving good listers a sweet pitch: “We know the iBuyers will pay the Zestimate. Let’s see how much better we can do on the open market.”

The iBuyers will be truly frolicked when the market turns, but they are frolicking easy to FUD right now: Two words: Shop around.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Young People Are Moving To Red States.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: Massive iBuyer Financial Losses Continue.

Redfin: iBuyer Market Continues Slow Recovery, With Decline In Home Purchases Narrowing to 48% In the Fourth Quarter.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue to rise to 3.05%.

CNBC: Covid changed how we think of offices. Now companies want them to work as hard as they do.

American Rifleman: February Sees 79 Percent Increase in Sales Over 2020.

The Federalist: The Real COVID Nursing Home Scandal Is Why Cuomo And Other Democrats Did It.

The American Mind: Out of His Census.

Christopher Rufo: Revenge of the Gods: California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.

Michael Anton: The Weather Underground’s Lasting Victory.

City Journal: Can Republicans Capitalize on Urban Political Opportunity? A lifelong Democrat suggests how the GOP can become viable in American cities.

Every “news” story about the ongoing Ant-exodus roiling America’s real estate markets attributes the phenomenon to the Coronavirus. This is a lie, of course, as I have been pointing out for months. People who can are racing away from riots, rioters and urban chaos in general.

Folks on the receiving end should rejoice and be glad in it: The new neighbors are Ants, even if they come from Grasshopper towns. Bring in them sheaves: They’re starving for Ant values.

But what about the Ants who can’t race away? What’s going to happen to them?

The people who have moved or are moving are “knowledge workers.” They can work anywhere, and the exsanguination of big cities was accordingly already baked in the cake.

The workers who are left behind use non-laptopian tools on fixed capital. Though they may be better-grounded Ants than the ones who have fled, they cannot leave.

This will not be reported, either, but the hard-working folks left behind to live with the disasters of Grasshopper politics will be “disproportionately” black and brown skinned people.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage credit, and the coming purchase storm.

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand plunges 43% from a year ago, as higher interest rates take their toll on borrowers.

New York Post: NYC faces crisis of empty hotels amid COVID pandemic.

Brad Polumbo: Biden just endorsed a law that endangers 57 million jobs.

Joel Kotkin: Climate Policy: Covid on Steroids?

Razib Khan: Empire of Memory, or Empire of Dreams? America still has time to decide which it will be.

Bari Weiss: The Miseducation of America’s Elites: Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret.

I’ve been meaning to mock Glenn Kelman and Redfin for its commissions hypocrisy, so forgive me my diversions:

Redfin, a national real estate brokerage currently under investigation for undeniable anti-black disparate-impact redlining, is today making claims about primarily black and primarily white neighborhoods – the latter type being where you can get a Redfin Offers offer.

It ain’t easy being racist about being racist, so, of course, Redfin capitalizes “Black” and lowercases “white.” Nothing like granting ornamental trinkets to the folks you’re screwing over.

Racists are the people who talk about race all the time, so Kelman and Redfin definitely qualify. Redfin seems to be committed to hurting people, more than anything else: Using false narratives to inhibit the progress of people – of every color – who respond appropriately to reality. Which, of course, is exactly what they’re doing about commissions, too – hurting people wise enough to avoid them.

Glenn Kelman has posting privileges on BloodhoundBlog, but I would love to see an honest defense of his company’s spastic bigotry here or anywhere: How does deliberately hurting people help anyone?

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Can a veteran buyer waive an appraisal when purchasing with a VA mortgage?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Spring housing market forecast: record purchase volume.

Housing Wire: Is Q1 the last quarter to ride the refinance wave?

Stephen Moore: Red States Should Revolt Against the ‘Blue-State Bailout’.

John Daniel Davidson: Without debate, President Biden has decided on complete open borders.

Helen Raleigh: Stopping The Next Cultural Revolution Starts With Your Home Library: In a totalitarian regime, children’s books are not meant to bring joy or inspiration. Their sole purpose is to instill the correct political ideology in the young mind.

Tim Rice: Paging Dr. Hayek: Free-marketeers should make their case with renewed vigor after central planners’ pandemic missteps.

The best argument in favor of liability limitation is industrialization itself, and all of its further fruits – including this one. Arms-length investment permits the brightest managers to scale rapidly and hugely, causing prices to plummet. That’s a Utilitarian argument – what’s a few deaths compared with all these riches? – but it is nevertheless a truly cornucopian display.

As with the U.S. Constitution and its chiseling rent-seeking, the progenitors of these ideas lived amidst a very-high-trust civilization they did not understand. They could not conceive of how much more underfathered people could become, nor how much more predatory they could be in consequence.

This is what I call Candy-Machine thinking (a little cheating won’t make a difference). Turns out there’s no such thing as a little cheating: Either everyone is honest because everyone is raised to be honest or, eventually, everyone is continuously both predator and prey – briefly – and unlamented thereafter.

Civilization is fatherhood – institutionalized anti-cheating. Cheating undermines it, and, ultimately if not by original intent, destroys it.

In other news:

Daniel Greenfield: Cancelled Tech Genius Behind Brave Preps the First New Search Engine.

City Journal: The Campus as Factory: Corporatist progressivism and the crisis of American higher education.

American Thinker: Preventing a Repeat of Disastrous Lockdown Policies.

Joy Pullman: 15 Insane Things In Democrats’ H.R. 1 Bill To Corrupt Elections Forever.

Roger Kimball: Peak Cancel Culture? Don’t Bet on It.

Predatory traders are not new. Crassus, to pick an ugly example, would bring his fire brigade to your burning Roman insulae – apartment building – but he wouldn’t have them start to put out the fire until you sold the property to him. The longer it burned, the cheaper it got. Desperate businesses get sold this way to this day.

But it is liability limitation that made predation normal – or at least common, to be expected – in trade. We want to do business with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, but instead we wake up with fleas from Bezos, Dorsey and Zuckerberg – the law firm of all the people who didn’t read the Terms of Service.

This is me, nearly sixteen years ago:

“The essential defining characteristic of a corporation, as against other ways of organizing a business enterprise, is liability limitation, a conspiracy between the proprietors and the state to defraud tort claimants of all they might otherwise obtain in redress for their injuries. It’s pure Hamiltonian Social Engineering, Mercantilism at its worst. The idea is to encourage investment by limiting the risk. But by limiting responsibility, investment is distorted away from the individual integrity that is the sine qua non of enlightened self-interest. The limited liability corporation is the rope by which Capitalism hung itself.”

Some people are much better at particular jobs, which is how task specialization brought us the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Some people are better at organizing and managing things, too, and this, also, is a talent to be exploited in the marketplace – within limits.

Liability limitation rewards investors for hiring ruthless managers. The butcher marks up cost-plus not because everyone else does it that way, too, but because friends don’t gouge friends. The baker gives you a baker’s dozen doughnuts because you take care of the people who take care of you. The candlestick maker employs your kid part-time – not because he’s worth it, but because someday soon he Read more

Arizona is opening back up – much like and in lock-step with Texas. Doug Ducey, R(ino)-Purple Gang, our governor, is not bright enough to do the right thing for the right reasons, so I assume this was a marketing move forced upon him by the real estate industry, Arizona’s strongest power base. Texas just stumbled stupidly in the snow, so, by all means, Keep Arizona Housing Competitive™.

Reopening the “red” states will be a good pretext for the next phase of the Ant exodus: Riot Season is upon us in Minneapolis, so the virus that will be gone by the first crack of the bat on Opening Day will be blamed all year for the further flight to safety.

In other news:

CNBC: The spring housing market just lost more than 200,000 new listings.

Spectrum News: Nation’s First 3D-Printed Homes for Sale Hit Austin Market. Architecture has been lost for 100 years, like everything else, but this house is straight outta Sullivan: The method of construction is its own ornamentation. It is beautiful because of the way it is built.

The Fence Post: ‘30 x 30’ — Progressives pushing for massive federal land grab.

City Journal: Opportunity Knocks: Cities hoping to attract footloose workers should embrace growth and affordability.

AND Magazine: The Left’s Revolution Is Just Getting Started – More Riots Are Planned.

Townhall: Time to Start Talking About America’s Coming Bankruptcy.

I gave this observation to Odysseus a few weeks ago – opining about the world as an opinionated dog might do:

“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.”

Shoe pinch? I wasn’t talking about dogs.

Ordinary everyday Americans are “owned as a nuisance” to too much of the Ruling Class. Humanity is a burden to be borne by the putative elite: Not beloved pets, not prized investments but simply inherited livestock – to be locked down, stimulused if you insist, ordered around in detail, excoriated at length and otherwise neglected.

None of those slaveries would be right, of course – owning and controlling people is evil. But which is worse?

The Tea Party and the resultant Trump movement are slave rebellions: Slaves owned as investments by the Federal Reserve Bank have been agitating for more than a decade for a better split of their own proceeds. Am I too cynical? What about the Laffer Curve would not also apply to actual dairy management, and not just to milking taxpayers?

To Ci and Dc in power, ordinary people are mere pawns in their games. Not individuals of uniquely lovable potential and merit, but simply ciphers, tokens – livestock of unknown investment value. This is true of both political parties, and, seemingly, of virtually everyone in government: You’re not nature’s perfect problem-solver – you’re the problem.

So which slaves would be wiser to rebel – the ones owned as an investment, or the ones owned as a nuisance?

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Mat Ishbia draws a line in the sand; do business with Rocket Mortgage and you won’t do business with UWM.

In other news:

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Homes Sell Closer Than Ever to List Price as Average Sale-to-List Ratio Approaches 100%.

CNBC: Manhattan apartment discounts may be ending soon as sales soar 73% in February.

City Journal: Is Texas’s Affordable Housing Endangered?

The Read more

We are told that Marjorie Taylor Greene hung a sign outside her office reading, “There are only two genders.”

That’s stupid, of course. Gender refers to types of words, and a language will have as many as it thinks it needs. There are only two sexes – the point Greene was trying to make.

That kind of thing is common, alas: Putative opponents of tyranny buttressing their enemies by “fighting” on their turf – using their terms.

We are in fact unled. There is no philosophical opposition to the Marxist tyranny engulfing us. The Dc and Ci arguments don’t cut it: Rotarian Socialism is alt.predation – and the camouflage is threadbare by now.

We are a Ds nation with no Ds leadership anywhere – and no informed leadership of any kind.

In other news:

Housing Wire: For the first time since July, mortgage rates pass 3%.

Zero Hedge: JP Morgan Is Trying To Offload “Big Blocks” Of Corporate Manhattan Real Estate.

American Greatness: Is New York Dead Yet?

CBS News: Experts sound the alarm on declining birth rates among younger generations: “It’s a crisis”.

Zero Hedge: US Life Expectancy In 2020 Saw Biggest Drop Since WWII.

The Federalist: Is Our Exploding National Debt Fueling A Stock Market Crash?

The American Spectator: Lockdowns: Which ‘Experts’ Were Right? A year later it’s clear that most media and government experts were dead wrong.

City Journal: How the Woke Stole Childhood: The campaign against Theodor Geisel takes cancel culture to new lows.

American Thinker: The Case for Closing Public Schools… Indefinitely.

Real estate has a demography problem – especially nerd-bait real estate: The kids are not all right.

Real estate is kids and dogs – which is to say that people buy homes to house the further fruits of their coupling. Fewer couples, fewer purchasers, more renters. But fewer couples, less capital accumulation overall.

We have bred ourselves away from breeding – but also from saving-up and from planning-ahead generally. We celebrated juvenility until we became a nation of juveniles.

The people most enthralled by hi-tech real estate novelties are the ones least likely ever to buy, or even ever able to afford, a home – but they’re not coupling, anyway, not enduringly.

A truly forward-looking real estate start-up would build rental dormitories: “Mom’s Basement: Cooking, cleaning and laundry – but no curfews!”

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage application demand stalls as interest rates surge to highest level since July.

CNBC: 10% GDP growth? The U.S. economy is on fire, and is about to get stoked even more.

Law and Liberty: Inflation Comes for the Profligate.

Daniel Greenfield: Coke Goes Woke and Broke: Brands go woke because they’re going broke.

The Federalist: The Left’s Vision Of Equity Will Cripple A Generation Of Minority Students.

Christopher Rufo: Critical Race Fragility: The Left has denounced the “war on woke,” but it is afraid to defend the principles of critical race theory in public debate.

John Daniel Davidson: The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next.

For my two most-recent listings, the prep work consisted of landscaping – around $300 each. For one, I had planned to have a huge, ugly tree trimmed, but the house sold before the tree surgeon could sharpen his scalpel. For vacant listings, I’m doing landscaping plus deep cleaning, but I’m still coming in under $1,000 a house.

Yesterday I saw an article – I won’t say where – on the importance of staging for the sale of your home.

Yeah… Not so much. Not now. Everything helps, incrementally, I suppose – but anything that delays your entry into this market right now is probably a mistake. If I take possession of a house on Monday, I will have it listed by Friday and sold by Tuesday – or sooner. My staging right now consists of a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Staging, photos, drone shots, virtual tours, floorplans, blah, blah, blah. The purpose of marketing is to move goods that aren’t moving on their own. When houses are selling like hotcakes – and when the breakfast menu could go away at any second – our job is not marketing but salesmanship.

In other news:

CNBC: Creating safe and affordable homes is reaching a crisis point. Ahem. Get the hell out of the way.

Legal Insurrection: Kristi Noem: “COVID didn’t crush the economy. Government crushed the economy.”

City Journal: Covid’s Transportation Tsunami: To allocate new infrastructure spending wisely, legislators need to understand how Americans’ habits have changed.

City Journal: “Money Printer Go Brrr” Can the U.S. borrow endlessly?

American Greatness: A Trojan Horse for Woke Education.

I watched President Trump at CPAC – or I tried to.

I saw Jim Jordan earlier, and he rocked – six minutes of Toastmaster perfection. Trump, by contrast, was late as usual, lazy in his delivery as usual, and was so often off-script – as usual – that his talk ran on forever.

At least I think it did. I kept nodding off, so finally I just turned it off and took a nap – a better use for a Sunday afternoon.

Trump is Incandescent, and that makes him more interested in the accolades for the accomplishments than the accomplishments themselves. That’s why he spends so much time patting himself on the back – and why he spent so little time talking about what he’s going to do now, going forward.

A serious anti-Marxist political party would:

• Recall every Democrat at every level of government; less mischief if you can keep them on defense.
• Enact election integrity laws wherever possible, all the way down to the precinct level.
• Eliminate the state-level emergency powers that made the lockdowns and the election theft possible.

To the extent that few of these things are happening now, you can estimate the future efficacy of Donald Trump.

In other news:

Redfin: One Year Later: The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Impact on the U.S. Housing Market In 12 Charts. Last year’s riotous real estate market was caused by the riots, not the virus. Redfin knows that, as does everyone else with a functioning brain. Why would they lie about this for months on end? Where are they located?

American Thinker: The Left’s Latest Battleground Is Your Neighborhood.

The Washington Post: The wave of covid bankruptcies has begun.

David Marcus: CPAC Is Still Trump’s, But Something Has Changed.

Daniel Greenfield: Kamala Harris: Equality is Old News, Let’s Talk About Equity.

Heather MacDonald: A New Crime Wave – and What to Do About It: New York City rejected the policing lessons that led to its success, and violence is surging.

I was all torqued up to beat up on Redfin this morning, but then I befogged my brain with thoughts of homeless people and dogs, so those nimrods can wait, for now.

Instead, I will assign you homework.

Real estate is kids and dogs, but home is where the heart is. Accordingly, homeless people with dogs are a little less homeless, a little more at home, wherever they go.

Homelessness is unnecessary. In a truly free market, it would not exist. But homeless people are not alien to you. But for the luck of the draw, they are you, clinging to every dignity they can sustain at the left edge of a very cruel bell curve.

The love that matters to all mammals is storgic love, the enduring love of families. We rhapsodize romance or even just sex in our crap art, but what matters at the end of a day – and at the end of a life – is family. Homeless people may have lost everything, but the ones with dogs have what matters more – a love that will not fail, will not flee, will not abandon them, will not die, even when the memory of that perfect love is all that remains of it.

Your assignment: Watch them, when you see them, to see how much alike they are to you – and to see how good their dogs have it, from the dog’s point of view.

In other news – not much of it:

Rob Hahn: The Zestimate Is Now the Purchase Price from Zillow.

Thomas Lifson: World Economic Forum commits a ‘Kinsley gaffe’ and then deletes Twitter video revealing its real agenda.

Thomas Lifson: Ending advanced classes in public schools because the wrong races excel at them.

If you sell your home to an iBuyer, you will net around 94% of the offered price, after the accumulated impacts of the fine print you did not read are deducted.

If you list your home for sale with me or any good lister, you will net around 92.5% of the purchase price, after real estate commissions and miscellaneous closing costs.

Advantage iBuyer?

Not hardly. Until now, iBuyer offers have been below Fair Market Value, where listed homes have been selling above market – well above market and for the past seven years, where I work.

So, a year ago, before the lockdowns, if your home was worth $300,000, they might have offered you $290,000 – netting you $272,600. I would have listed at $300,000 and sold then for $305,000 – netting you $282,125. I sell in a weekend and my prep costs are running under $1,000, so convenience back then cost the price of a steller vacation or a decent used car.

But now everything has changed. For one thing, I can reliably sell at 5% or 6% above FMV right now, so I might start at $305,000 and finish at $315,000 – netting the seller $291,375.

But the other big change is that Zillow will now use the Zestimate for many houses as its “instant offer.” They should have done this three years ago: Zestimates are reliably erroneous – I could tell them how if they but had the nerve to ask – but the errors would tend to cancel each other out. Plus which, Zillow is playing with lives as if they were Legos: They don’t give a shit about money.

So what now? In our example, Zillow offers $300,000 – netting you $282,000. I’m beating that by nine grand and a nice dinner for two.

Any comparison shopper would list in this market. But every other iBuyer knows where to start, now, to beat Zillow. And there are a lot of them out there.

iBuyers sell very slowly, by my standards. Buying from you, they can beat me to Read more

If you see a link to this post early in the day, thank the poster: It ain’t me.

I’m in Facebook jail for another three hours or so. I told a trayf truth – and smokin’ ain’t allowed in school.

Way to prove my point, though.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Zestimate to double as Zillow’s iBuying offer.

Redfin: New Listings Fall 17%, Prices Rise 15%.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates climb higher to 2.97%.

CNBC: You can now buy a 3D-printed home – here’s a look inside.

Housing Wire: Pending home sales drop, but there’s a silver lining.

KPIX-5 TV: San Francisco-Based Airbnb Reports Huge 4th-Quarter Loss.

City Journal: The Low Spark of High-Speed Rail: California’s bullet-train project is still under construction as delays and costs pile up.

Real Clear Books: How Wokeness Captured Big Business.

American Greatness: The Imaginary Menace Behind Everything Wrong In America.