Author: Greg Swann (page 20 of 209)

I listed a house on January 29th that closed yesterday – eleven calendar days, inclusive, and the seller is out of state. The house sold in one day on market. I’m normally not quite that quick – it takes a few days to milk every offer to the limit – but we got an offer that we literally could not refuse.

Vide:

• Full list price
• All cash
• Appraisal waived
• Inspections waived
• Repairs waived
• Closing in 10 days (we lost a day to the HOA)

The house is tenant-occupied, a reddish flag in the midst of eviction moratoria, so it was impossible to pass on a contract where the only possible exits for the buyer were force majeure and acts of god. They literally could not cancel.

I am not your broker, and I am very glad that I am not representing buyers right now. But if you are, there is no posture quite so appealing to sellers right now as coming in completely supine, prostrate, waiving everything.

You can say the buyer of my listing was advised in ways that could lead to adverse consequences – that that’s what buyer protections are for.

My answer: They got the house.

In other news:

nbc4i.com: Just years after building San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, Salesforce will let most employees work remotely indefinitely.

CNBC: Mortgage demand drops as interest rates hit a three-month high.

CNBC: Mortgage delinquencies sink to pandemic low, but distress is far from over.

City Journal: Recall Fever in California: Gavin Newsom might not be the only Golden State politician facing a reckoning. This makes great sense everywhere: Get rid of whom you can and preoccupy the ones you can’t.

City Journal: Come One, Come All: President Biden’s immigration agenda will be a disaster for working-class Americans.

Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism Is the New War on the Working Class.

Dennis Prager: How Many Americans Has the American Medical Establishment Killed?

Michael Goodwin: With acquittal a foregone conclusion, the real drama is what Trump does next.

Michael Walsh: Republican Ineptitude and Democratic Ruthlessness Put Liberties in Danger.

I had a bunch of impeachment links, but I ditched them. If you care, you know what to Doogle. I expect I’ll wait to see the highlight reel. I’m much more curious about Trump and his portents than I am watching the Senate embarrass itself some more, in any case.

I was on the bubble about Trump forever: Di or Id? We know now: Trump’s Achilles’ heel is his reputation – second by second. A Di truly does not care what other people think, especially about him or his work. Ask me how I know? Trump cares a great deal, and so it is easy to push him off his game by threatening him in the next few news cycles.

Idsc, I think, not that it matters. Trump was never the solution, just the stopgap. We’ll find out this week if he can retain that role, but the gap is all but unstopped – at least for now.

In other news:

Housing Wire: 5 million missed rent or mortgage payments in December.

Redfin: Redfin Publishes Commissions on Over 700,000 Homes for Sale. What’s funny about this? Only Cautious buyers care what the Buyer’s Agent makes. Redfin is crowing that its marketing excludes black, brown and poor people generally by disparate impact.

Housing Wire: More real estate agents charged with storming the Capitol.

Rob Hahn: What Did the Judge Mean Here? Questions on the PLS v. NAR Ruling.

City Journal: The Other California: After Covid-19, the Inland Empire offers a way forward for the Golden State.

The Federalist: Leftists Are Colonizing Red Towns Like Mine, And Local Republicans Are Clueless.

FEE.org: The Democrats Just Reintroduced a Labor Law that Would Destroy Uber—And It Could Actually Pass This Time.

National Review: The Fracturing of the American Ideal.

Bill Barr knew all about the election fraud. He wrote and spoke about it in prescient detail months in advance. And yet he did nothing to prosecute the theft of the right of the American people to choose their own leaders. Now we know why…

In other news:

Thomas Lifson: Trump aide Peter Navarro charges AG Barr worked to help Biden issue blizzard of early executive orders.

Redfin: The Biden Administration Could Create Three Times as Many Affordable Homes By Building in Places Already Affordable. The blinders-off admonition would be “Bribe cheaper municipalities!” The problem is, it’s not municipalities the Marxists are funneling bribes to.

Rod Dreher: The Snowplow Test.

Salena Zito: The kids aren’t alright.

City Journal: Taking on “Progressive Prosecutors.” District attorneys who refuse to enforce the criminal law are violating their oath to support and defend the Constitution – and could be challenged on those grounds.

Daniel Greenfield: The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats.

The point of the January 6th fiasco was the January 6th fiasco: Marxists spent all year goading Trump supporters into civil war. They didn’t quite get bupkis, but nothing like the pretext they needed to commence the Ant pogrom.

That’s why they’re confessing now. It looks like a modified limited hangout – slow-walking the confession to take the shock off the big reveal – but I suspect it’s still more taunting. The railroading of Trump is about to become that much more obvious, so if they can’t incite an “insurrection” now, their actual five-year-long coup d’état will be exposed for what it is: A totalitarian putsch poised for genocide.

How do you best them from here: Stay home, stay calm, stay safe. They’re the bad guys – hundreds of millions of murders worth. Don’t muddy the waters.

In other news:

Yahoo Finance: Biden Wants to Shut Down Credit Bureaus – What Would That Mean for You?

J.D. Tucille: Americans Shouldn’t Be Treated Like ISIS Insurgents. Adopting “counterinsurgency” tactics for use against wide swaths of Americans can only make the situation worse.

Conrad Black: Biden’s Rapidly Deflating Honeymoon Balloon: Biden and his media supporters will see the prohibition they have imposed on any questioning of the election result blow up in their faces.

Rick Fuentes: The Art of the Steal.

Michael Barone: ‘Mostly peaceful’ violence and dueling double standards.

Clarice Feldman: Rigging the Election for China and Profit.

If you’ve been following along here, you know the election was rigged. I don’t argue the case much, but I link liberally to excellent resources. The actual dispositive rigging was the emergency fallback ballot stuffing – because Trump’s landslide was so huge that he beat all of the combined Deep State and all of its freelance henchmaniacs.

Time magazine is so proud of the Deep State’s machinations that it boasts about everything the Ruling Class did to subvert democracy – to prevent Americans from choosing their own leaders.

You knew they were scum all along – before you watched them kill thousands of people last year to get Trump. Now they are bragging about creating a legitimacy crisis.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind…

In other news:

Raheem Kassam: TIME Mag: “Trump Was Right. There Was A Conspiracy… Well-Funded Cabal, Powerful People Changing Laws, Steering Media & Controlling Information.”

Housing Wire: Homebuyers put pets first when shopping for homes. Kids and dogs, but this one time I got one of my wife’s buyers off the dime by pointing out that she didn’t need a perfectly-safe home she could never find, she needed a firearm to make any home safer. She got a 1911 and it changed her life.

The American Mind: Are stocks real?

City Journal: Under the Gun in Philly: As murders mount and public pressure grows, city officials continue to look for answers in the wrong places.

Brendan O’Neill: Is AOC the most dangerous politician in America? Since the Capitol riot she has been whipping up a culture of fear that could have dire consequences for liberty.

The world I live in is routinely selling at around 5% over market: If a house lists at or above its current Fair Market Value, when it closes it will turn out to have sold for ~105% of FMV.

That’s bidding wars, and it’s less the agents’ skills than the buyers’ frenzy.

But what that frenzy means is that it is beyond foolish to sell to iBuyers or any other sort of “instant” cash buyers right now. It can make sense to go to a pawnshop when no one else is buying. But when everyone is buying, not taking a very brief test of the marketplace is a betrayal of your own estate.

And here’s what’s funny: The iBuyers know that. They know that it is a mistake for you to sell to them right now. They know you are leaving at least 5% of your hard-won money on the table by trafficking with pawnbrokers.

Why is it funny? All real estate licensees are fiduciary. Deliberately leading a client into error is a fiduciary violation. Replicated hundreds or thousands of times a year. Per iBuyer.

Their buy-boxes redline. Their marketing targets only nerds – hugely exclusive by disproportionate impact. And every house they buy is another opportunity to ignite a national class action suit.

Oh, and the Vampire Party is hungry. Very hungry…

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: What Professor Alexander Kurov Gets Wrong About Gamestop and Bubbles.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue to stay low at 2.73%.

Redfin: Asking Prices Hit a New High, Up 10% From Last Year.

Housing Wire: Urban home values growing faster than ‘burbs in Midwest. This is more of Redfin hiding the riots, FWIW: Most “cities” are mainly suburban. What’s going on where the riots actually hit?

City Journal: Climate Change Follies: President Biden’s war on fracking will raise electricity prices while accomplishing nothing on climate.

John Hinderaker: Democratic Governors Have Devastated Their States.

Glenn Reynolds: Why are Democrats so scared of Donald Trump when they just defeated him?

City Journal: Unity or Union Loyalty? President Biden’s early Read more

The idea of ‘systemic’ racism is stupid. People who habitually make poor choices always blame everything but themselves. But if you’re looking for ubiquitous, constant, inescapable racism, I can point you to it:

Follow elderly Asian women in poor neighborhoods in big cities on either coast. When they go out unaccompanied, they will be visited with endless, unrelenting racist verbal and physical attacks, coming almost entirely from young black males. That would be reality, rather than ‘news.’

For purposes of racial despoliation, Asians are white. So, too, most Hispanics. How can that be so? Because ‘white’ means Ant, and Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers. The people who denounce ‘white supremacists’ insist that you are one if you respond appropriately to values and incentives – no matter what your skin color.

Bad news for everyone, worse news for Asian kids who bust their asses believing that America is a meritocracy.

In other news:

Redfin: Austin, Atlanta & Tampa Are Attracting Homebuyers From More Expensive Cities, Contributing to a Housing Supply Crunch.

CNBC: Want to own an apartment building? Buy a distressed hotel for pennies on the dollar.

The American Mind: Biden Doesn’t Need Woke Help to Destroy America.

John Kass: Erasing classic literature for kids.

City Journal: Science Betrayed: The propaganda infecting K–12 science curricula, especially on the environment, won’t go away.

American Mindset: Contra Experts.

Jeff Bezos resigns. Big yawn. He has to make more time to take Soros lessons.

What’s funnier about the swap is his replacement: Andy Jassy, the man who killed Parler and in so doing alienated thousands – perhaps millions – of Amazon’s retail customers, costing shareholders billions of dollars in the long run.

So I’m left to wonder: Is he really so good that he can make up for a billion-dollar blunder? Or is Amazon less in the retail business and more in the Soros business?

In other news:

Redfin: 2021 Housing Market Shaping Up to be Even Hotter than 2020.

CBNC: Mortgage refinancing suddenly surges, but homebuyers stall due to sticker shock.

Housing Wire: White homeownership rate hits nine-year high. Black homeownership, meanwhile, fell to 44.1% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

City Journal: New York’s Housing Refugees: The affordability crisis is a burden for residents and a drag on growth.

FEE.org: Local Kroger Stores Close as California ‘Hero Pay’ Ordinance Backfires.

Real Clear Politics: Enemies of the State vs. Enemies of the People.

City Journal: Secretary of Ethnic Studies? President Biden’s choice to lead the Education Department has a thin record—except in one trailblazing area.

Want to hear the most remarkable news in the past calendar year?

Jeopardy, the game show, had a perfect chance to piss off half or more of its audience – and it passed!

The most important thing any commercial entity can do right now is to overtly and repeatedly kiss Marxist ass in public, no matter how many of its long-standing customers it alienates.

Don’t believe me? Good grief: NASCAR, NFL, NBA – even the NHL. Fox News, Kohl’s, Sephora. Still don’t believe me? Watch the commercials on TV and try to figure our what is being sold to whom. Just don’t try to sell anything to white female voice actresses: They’re cancelled as a class.

But Jeopardy, when presented with the chance to go with the flow, chose instead to stick with the dough: If Katie Couric insults the audience, she’s fired.

I’m calling this The Jeopardy Line, the refusal to destroy your business in the foolish pursuit of approbation from totalitarians. We’ll see if Jeopardy can hold the line, and we can watch in wonder as once-great commercial enterprises devour themselves – live on TV.

In other news:

City Journal: Remotely Competitive: Cities and regions are betting that working from home is the next big thing in economic development.

Willamette Week: A Key Indicator of Real Estate Investors’ Interest in Portland Shows a Precipitous Decline.

David Marcus: Why Trump Should Press His Case On Voter Fraud.

Townhall: Whoa: We Now Know How Many Guns Were Purchased In January.

Jordan Davidson: Stanford Doctor: COVID Lockdowns Were An ‘Overreaction’ To ‘Protect The Rich’.

Angelo Codevilla: How Our Oligarchy Crushes Terrorism: The FBI’s increasing preference for political action over bona fide investigations is part of its overall decadence—laziness, incompetence, and eagerness to integrate with the ruling class.

Single people produce about as much wealth as they consume. Married fathers produce around five times as much wealth as they consume. The wealth of the West emerges not from scaled productivity – the Dc innovations the marketplace worships – but from the friendly Ds competition among fathers to better provide for their families.

Big duh, huh? Who knew…?

In other news:

Forbes: Death Of A City: The Portland Story?.

CNBC: Americans are flocking to the suburbs — here’s how much you need to earn to buy a house.

City Journal: Soft on Crime: A Biden administration policy of weak policing and lax prosecution would be a disaster for the nation’s cities.

American Greatness: Hijacking the Clown Car: The GameStop revolt should serve as a message to those in charge: you are loathed by ordinary Americans who are struggling to get ahead.

Roger Simon: How the Hydroxychloroquine Scandal Wrecked America and the World Along With It.

David Horowitz: A Tsunami of Hate: There is one party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent.

FEE.org: David Mamet Explains What Happens When the Experts Fail.

I like Aesop’s metaphor of the Grasshoppers and the Ants because it explains how (un)civil society is actually divided: Ants work and build while Grasshoppers play and prey – on Ants but also on other Grasshoppers.

Beginning with the Tea Party, all of Trumpism is a slave rebellion by the Ants against the Grasshoppers. As noted here and nowhere else, the ongoing exodus in the United States is Ants fleeing Grasshopper dominated cities and states. Gamestonk is belligerent Ants laying siege to apex-predator Grasshoppers. And now the Deep State is gearing up for an Ant pogrom – the gradual dehumanization and eventual extermination of as many Ants as possible.

Marxism is Grasshoppers devouring Ants, and, hence, it is necessarily self-extinguishing: Feasting on farmers leads to a gradual narrowing of dietary choices. But Marxism is the predation of all against any, so for now, alas, we need only think of ourselves as predators or prey.

Strive to be neither. God help you if you’re both.

In other news:

Karol Markowicz: The future is Florida.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Pandemic has more Twin Cities home buyers looking outward.

Rick Moran: Here’s Why Impeachment Will Backfire on Democrats and Make Trump Stronger.

Daniel Greenfield: Unite and Heal With Show Trials and Fascist Purges.

Clarice Feldman: You Will Be Made to Believe Implausible Things.

Yesterday, the putative “elite” struck back – twice. Not for Gamestonk and not even for Trump, specifically, but simply to put you in your place.

So, first, in response for a four-year domestic espionage and political interference operation unparalleled in American history, precisely one person was tried and convicted of crimes. He was sentenced yesterday. To probation.

And: An interstate domestic terrorist group was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

They’re not screwing with you, and it’s not just the Opposite Game. They are telling you what their values are: Murder and treason are literally noble in the pursuit of power.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Experts optimistic about home sales in 2021.

Wall Street Journal: Keith Gill Drove the GameStop Reddit Mania. He Talked to the Journal.

Chip Roy: Leftists Must Be Punished At The Ballot Box For Their COVID-19 Hypocrisy.

Reason: School Choice Spreads as Pandemic Public Education Falls Short. Never forget: Freedom emerges when tyranny retreats. Rejoice and be glad in it.

I saw this on Facebook, and it sums the world up perfectly:

Are the people who can get trading stopped in the middle of a trading day the same people who can get vote counting stopped in the middle of an election night?

Wall Street is red-pilling America so well that it is making the election fraud that much more plain.

We know we live in a two-tiered justice system, and yet we know we cannot do this and sustain a Ds economy. Leadership can try to wear other hats, but followership is a loyalty borne of mutual love.

Our would-be leaders are palpably self-seeking, and most do nothing to hide their contempt for ordinary people. This will not have happy consequences.

More underground Gamestop news:

is the squeeze squoze yet?: as of January 29, the squeeze has not been squoze.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates dip back down to 2.73%.

CNBC: December pending home sales drop as buyers face record high prices and low supply.

Redfin: 55% of Homes Under Contract Within 2 Weeks, a New Record.

Housing Wire: New home sales historically high in 2020.

Redfin: Housing Supply in Rural Areas Drops a Record 44%, Helping Drive the Overall Shortage of Homes for Sale.

Sean Davis: The GameStop Saga Isn’t About Finance, It’s Part Of The Ongoing War Between Elites And Populists.

Matt Taibbi: Suck It, Wall Street.

Daniel Greenfield: When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance.

Joel Kotkin: Woke Politics are a Disaster for Minorities.

David Marcus: How Equity Will Destroy America.

If you’re not following the GameStop saga, the first link is a better summary than you will find in the mainstream media. The whole episode is yet another sweet opportunity for the Ruling Class to expose itself as the Predator Class: They prey on you, fair game, but if turnabout is for once fair play, that’s “HATE SPEECH!”

In other news:

Patriots.win: On Gamestop, Why Hedge Funds Are Not the Good Guys, Why Redditards Are An Ally in this Particular Fight, and How MSM is Lying to Us (Again).

CNBC: The Fed won’t keep interest rates near zero forever — here’s what to do now.

Redfin: West Palm Beach Luxury Home Sales Soar a Record 116% In Fourth Quarter as Wall Street Moves South.

NOQ Report: Don’t be distracted by the ‘impeachment’ drama. The real threat to our republic is H.R. 1.

Angelo Codevilla: Dismounting the COVID Tiger.

The National Pulse: Trump Can Turn The Impeachment On The Insiders And Put Congress On ‘Trial’.

I had a run in with a Doctor of Education who could not reliably distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘effect.’ This is not rare, but it should be among people who think degrees matter. Plus, the answer is right there from the Anglicized Latin: A-, Ad- verbs are accusative in English; E-, Ex- verbs are ablative. I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I just said, “It’s easy. Just remember that ‘affect’ is accusative and ‘effect’ is ablative.”

That didn’t help. Probably didn’t help you, either, but my take would be that you can’t make sense without grammar and logic – the acquisition of either of which is likely to get you kicked right out of any American school of education.

Schoolteachers are dumb, as a rule – and dumber by the day in underfathered America. But wafting in on the breezes with all the imaginary coronavirus droplets is some good news: Because schoolteachers are too dumb to keep their jaws on the prey, some students are managing to escape their stultification.

You can lament that too many are still caught in the awful trap of public education, and I’ll join you in that. But I can celebrate that some slaves, at least, have made it to freedom.

In other news:

Zero Hedge: Home Prices Soar At 4.5 Times The Fed’s Inflation Target In All US Cities.

Housing Wire: Rising mortgage rates push applications lower.

CNBC: America’s top-tier malls were resilient, but values are now crumbling, down 45% from 2016 levels, Green Street says.

J.D. Tucille: As Teachers Unions and Bureaucrats Battle, Families Choose Alternative Schools.

City Journal: Narrative Before Facts: When will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?