Category: Group Therapy (page 18 of 81)

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.

Absent zoning – without arbitrary government intrusions in the housing market – there is no homelessness.

If the ordinary progression of housing from A-rated to D-paper is allowed to run its course, we find the people now living outdoors in D- or even E-level housing – but they are living indoors, with heat and running water.

That’s not all that’s required, of course: The employment market has to allow for marginal entrants. Would you hire the people now living outdoors? At the right price, someone will, but that price is not $15 an hour – nor even $7.35 or whatever is the current cut-off on legally-permitted viability.

Poverty is not caused by government. It is caused by bad luck and habituated poor choices. But poverty is massively worsened by government: The lowest-skilled and least-hirable people are prevented from improving their fortunes while they are pushed outdoors with every new mercy inflicted upon them by their coercive caretakers.

Do recall that E-level housing is what the muck-rakers raked muck against – and it’s what Robert Moses obliterated when he invented homelessness by way of Urban Renewal. Moses was a royalist, not a Marxist, but the man definitely liked breaking eggs. We have been wrong about housing for more than a century, and the shards of the eggshells line our streets in tents and pilfered shopping carts.

Poverty didn’t do that. Free markets didn’t do that – to the contrary. Government did that.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Even with high lumber prices, new home sales beat expectations.

Mike DelPrete: The Top Threat to Real Estate Portals.

City Journal: Just Say No . . . to Parks?! Urban recreation areas are reenergizing neighborhoods, but activists increasingly fear “green gentrification.”

David Horowitz: The Fascist Democrats and the Fake Insurrection: Why Americans should be afraid. Very afraid.

American Greatness: We Are Living in the Ruins of Our Civilization.

Michael Anton: Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement?

I’ve been at this every day for half-a-year now. BloodhoundBlog is mainly the Overnight News, for now, with an occasional essay by me or Brian. There are 70 people with posting privileges to this blog, and others among them will show up in due course.

The news is a glimpse into my days’ reading, although I do get – and welcome – tips. I don’t always use them, and I don’t link to even half of what I read: The Overnight News runs from hard facts to big ideas, always with what I think is a connection to doing this job. No paywalls, no promos, no tall weeds; if my eyes glaze over, yours will, too.

The reason for doing this is by now obvious: Every means of communication that escapes the censorious boot of Big Tech is to have been throttled. If we don’t up our own organizations, we won’t have any place to talk at all. Moreover, this point of view – looking out for the grunts on the ground – is one that can only be defended from here.

So do your part, too: Subscribe – the email subscription from the comments box is wicked slick – link and promote: Tell you friends we’re here and that we’re looking out for them.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices soared 10.4% in December.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage application volume drops 11% as rates spike and Texas power outages hurt demand.

Rob Hahn: Insane Seller’s Market Calls for… Auctions?

American Thinker: Sayonara California: Corporate Relocation Experts Expect Best Year Ever!

David Marcus: One Year Later Our Answer To Lockdowns Must Be ‘Never Again’.

City Journal: We Are Not Safer At Home: While making only a limited impact on Covid-19, lockdowns are taking a severe toll on physical and mental health.

Glenn Greenwald: House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms.

Joel Kotkin: Economic Civil War.

Frontpage: Why The Texas Blackout Has The Greens So Scared.

Do you think I’m joking in the headline? I’ve never loved the basic preparation of my fellow real estate agents. When I started, I wrote a satiric essay on checking your agent’s math. By now it would be wise to check you agent’s English – and logic.

Mostly, the offers I take are perfect: We sign them as is because the agent knows what it will take to get us to sign them as is – often because I tell them what we’re looking for. But I see a lot more offers than I take, and, for many of them, I would have to recast them by addendum to achieve the Buyer’s Agent’s putative intent – and I am not any of these agents’ broker.

I suspect the rise of the team model is compensation for salespeople who can schmooze but can’t spell. And if you can’t connect the dots between podcasts and illiteracy – there’s a brand new podcast just for you!

How can you tell if your agent can’t read? Well, he can’t write, so that’s easy. But even if he seems to be able to sling a sentence or two, if he can’t spell, he can’t – or doesn’t – read. We retain our memory of how words are spelled by reading them – a lot, every day. People who don’t read spell poorly.

So now what? Duh! Seek elsewhere. An agent who can’t read well has no idea what he’s getting you into.

In other news:

CNBC: More Americans are looking to move as remote work gains acceptance during Covid pandemic.

CNBC: December home prices rose 10.4%, the biggest gain in 7 years, Case-Shiller says.

American Banker: Fed sounds alarm on commercial real estate, business bankruptcy.

Stephen Moore: The Blue States Are Now the Beggar States.

City Journal: Should Public Transit Be Free?

City Journal: Broadway’s Annus Miserable: Live theater has been devastated by the pandemic, and its return remains uncertain.

Margot Cleveland: Supreme Court Denial Of 2020 Election Cases Invites ‘Erosion Of Voter Confidence’.

As you may have noted, I am fascinated by my own special set of proxy signals. Supermarket floors must sparkle and everyone is to have been DISCed. I am interested in everyone’s first two decades, and I’ll take that in five-year quadrants – with those first years being the most telling of tells. In the bigger picture: Dad was where, when? Career frustrations? Recurring relationship disasters? I ask the questions that make the grown-ups cry.

Here’s a tell for the people you find at the top of any merit-based ziggurat: They all have Thirteen Privilege: They were not wasting their time at age 13.

True or false? Qui non est hodie cras minus aptus erit. At 13, the academically-ambitious Cautious students (aka ‘The Front Row Kids’) could translate that for you – except they were too busy being even more over-prepared for tomorrow’s homework. At 13, the Driven kids were driving their teachers crazy – and bringing home trophies or building the future after school. At 13, the outstanding Incandescents were painstakingly navigating the route to Carnegie Hall – practice, practice, practice.

The attack on merit is a usurpation of invested effort – seizing that Thirteen Privilege away from the hard-working people who earned it, socializing to anyone who didn’t.

Classical music excludes lazy musicians, so it must go. Pro sports teams exclude lazy athletes, so presumably that will have to be corrected, in due course, as well. We depend for our lives on people who were very serious and very busy at age 13, so we must do as much as possible to punish and abuse those people.

We must not only deny them the benefit of their arduous labor, we must also deny ourselves the further fruits of their labors. Their glaring Thirteen Privilege not only denies us jobs we’re not qualified to do, it puts our entire culture of mediocrity into stark relief. Surely it’s easier to rid the world of virtue than to amend the smallest vice…

In other news:

The New York Post: New York City businesses are barely hanging on.

David Blackmon: What Read more

I met Sonny through Tony. He had come to Arizona to look at possible rental homes with me, and Sonny, his business partner, came along with him.

This was in 2005, and houses were tough to get. We looked at one that I knew was doable, so I said, “So, are we ready to write a contract?”

Just doing my job, but Sonny said: “Wow. He’s a closer.”

And I thought: “Wow. He’s a cooler.”

I was wrong, though. Sonny caught on quick, and by the next morning he was ready to buy, too.

He and Tony found a FSBO that was holding an open house. Sonny was definitely interested, but they couldn’t figure the seller out.

They asked me to meet him and in six questions I sussed out the scam: The seller was a seminar investor who would get pre-foreclosure borrowers to put him on title, promising to help, then essentially sell their homes out from under them. He was so cagey because he lived in fear of his past victims. He worked out of a Post Office box and met people in parking lots. No kidding.

Those six questions set my star above all others in Sonny’s eyes. We bought the house, and I had to write my own sales commission into the deal, since the property was not listed.

He moved his mother into that house, and she was there until she had to move on. I sold it when she did, and Sonny did all right. Not a killing, but all right – for a house that almost fell into his lap.

And the next one literally did. I was working in a house we had just acquired for another investor when a neighbor popped in and asked, “Are you a real estate agent?”

It can happen – bread cast upon the waters. And it gets better:

The neighbor was Joe, and Joe said, “Can you find a buyer for my house? I don’t want a lot of hassle, I just want to get out Read more

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman has apparently made a fetish of purging his company of the awful influence of creatures like himself – white and male.

If we were to adapt those terms and say instead that he was out to persecute people who are non-white or female, we would recognize at once that he is a hateful bigot – a racist and a sexist. If you didn’t have to make that mental swap to see the truth, call yourself wise – wiser, certainly, than Kelman.

Ignore altogether the Great White Father posturing of a white male so at war with whiteness and maleness that he most certainly must not resign – thus to rid his company of his own malevolently melanin-free toxic masculinity – but must instead remain heroically in charge to rescue all the pathetically helpless black, brown and ovaried people. There is nothing hypocritically ugly in that pose.

Ignore, too, that Redfin and a zillion other corporate villains are bragging about their racism and sexism, all of a sudden. Here’s another clue for you all: The people being unfairly helped were not hurt by the people being unfairly hurt. There is nothing of “justice” in any of this, simply prideful virtue-signaling of the ugliest of human vices. Public preening like Kelman’s is just the real-life enactment of The Hunger Games, where the capricious choosing of the slain masquerades as noblesse oblige.

Consider this, though: The officer roles in a publicly traded company are fiduciary. Kelman should not put his personal politics ahead of the profitability of his typically-unprofitable company – but his doing so creates liability that his shareholders should enforce. Deliberately hiring the wrong people to make a point is the ostensive definition of a fiduciary violation.

But go once further: Redfin is a real estate brokerage. It is fiduciary to its clients for every single activity it undertakes. The claim that the deal having been screwed up matters less than the (reported) skin color or (imputed) gonads of the screw-up seems unlikely to fare well in court. For a Read more

We sold a lot of houses, over the past dozen years, by agreeing to do property management on them. We’re small fish by any scale, but I represent a pool of investors – California middle-class, so Arizona rich – and a portfolio of homes.

We bought for resale value, and over the past few years we have been demonstrating the wisdom of that praxis: My guys are making a killing when they cash out, almost always tax-deferred.

This is a note I sent to them this week:

I never want to bet against Phoenix, but we are nevertheless as adept at crashing to the ashes as we are at soaring to the heights. This market last topped out in 2006, and now, 15 years later, we may be hitting the upper limits of where we can go.

This past year killed for appreciation, with three factors driving our price surge:

1. Fear-driven demand, with population growth from both the virus and from unrest elsewhere.

2. Low interest rates and the fear-of-missing-out on them.

3. Currency inflation; by the time all the checks are cashed, the money supply has grown immensely.

Fear is unpredictable, but Texas is blowing us a cold wet kiss just now: They are not energy-secure, but we are. Interest rates are rising now, and inflation invites its own responses.

The point would be that now may be the time to sell, if you have a way of moving to a safer investment – ideally avoiding the capital-gains tax hit.

We have been selling properties by 1031 exchange – moving from one real estate investment to another with the taxes deferred – but your investment advisor can talk to you about moving from real estate into other investments, by way of tax-deferred retirement-investment vehicles.

I’m not chasing you away. We’re selling a tenant-occupied home now, so we’re about to lose our favorite tenants and it’s breaking my heart. But the name of this game is buy-low, sell-high, and now or sometime soon may be the time to Read more

Here’s a thought that occurred to me this morning: Who’s going to milk the new licensees?

Eighty-five percent of all new licensees in Arizona fail within the first two years: They fail to renew their licenses and drift back into the shadows. Cynical brokers opine that everyone has at least three transactions in him, and those brokers will milk non-salesmaniacal non-entrepreneurs for whatever deals they can cough up, before kicking them to the curb.

The funniest thing about iBuying is that the iBuyers don’t know what business the brokers are in. They think the real estate business is about real estate, when for most brokers the business is milking new licensees into bankruptcy. For a new agent to hit the glide path – more money coming in than going out, consistently – is the rarest of outcomes.

There is much to hate in the agent-milking racket – but quite a bit less at the moment. Without in-person real estate schools, I wonder if there are any new licensees…

In other news:

KOMO News: Amid protests and unrest, demand for security jobs in Washington has jumped. Irony is the hardest of mettles.

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence improves, despite record high lumber prices.

Housing Wire: New mortgage originations totaled $1.2T in the fourth quarter, New York Fed says.

John Daniel Davidson: The Failure Of The Texas Power Grid Is Worse Than You Think.

City Journal: Chicago’s Big Education, Inc: The teachers’ union’s outsize power comes at the expense of students, parents, and taxpayers.

Don Feder: Our Enemy: The Boardroom.

Mark Steyn: The Indispensable Man: Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021.

Housing prices surged, post-pandemic. Redfin, et al, like to blame that ephemeral flu because it permits them to whitewash (ahem) – perhaps to redline (bada-bing!) – all the riot-evacuated neighborhoods.

Our recently-massively-inflated money supply might seem to account for the price increases, but – now more than ever – all real estate is local. The “macro” factors argue against any supply shortfall: Household formation? Birth rates? Substantial immigration? All down, significantly, and for a long time. Our current highly-localized “housing shortage” is caused by an abandonment of still-serviceable inventory in riot-torn cities.

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.

The abandoned homes will be gradually subtracted from the available housing stock Detroit-style. This is Bastiat’s seen and unseen – among many, many shiny objects – and we’re not built to notice gradual change. The decline in the rioted areas will be masked by the hyperinflation: “See! Prices are rising in Portland, too, just not as fast!”

The housing shortage is a flight to safety – from every sort of peril, real or imagined. There is no shortage of perfectly adequate places to live in recently-rioted neighborhoods – and there may soon be a housing glut in Texas!

In other news:

Glenn Kelman: Diversity at Redfin in 2020. When is a “struggle session” audit a self-authored confession to a national fair employment lawsuit? What is Redfin getting wrong? It got big enough to be cannibalized.

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications drop for second week.

CNBC: Retailers trade Fifth Ave for Worth Ave as Palm Beach scene thrives with Americans heading South.

Townhall: Texas’s ‘Nightmare’ Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America. Read more

Yesterday, I noted that, “One third of all American dollars are less than a year old.” What’s the implication?

Since the quantity of available economic goods doesn’t change much, from year to year, it is reasonable to suppose that soon the dollar will have lost around a third of its purchasing power.

Hard to measure right now, with the “market basket” so COVID-skewed, but we have massively increased the amount of money chasing goods, so we should expect to see prices of everything rise to meet that “inflated” demand.

Under Trump, economic output was surging everywhere, tempering his complete lack of fiscal temperance. We know the opposite will be true under China Joe, so the inflationary sugar high is likely to have an ugly hangover.

The teeny tiny filigree on fiat money that no one ever reads says this, over and over again: “Hell is to have been paid.” Bank on that.

In other news:

Joel Pollak: San Francisco ‘Feels Like a Tomb’ as Companies Embrace ‘Work from Home’.

John Hinderaker: Why has Texas gone dark?.

Thomas Lifson: Dems introduce legislation to kill the gig economy, destroy millions of jobs.

John Daniel Davidson: Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Care If The Election Was Tainted, But You Should.

Matt Vespa: An Emerging and Tragic Side Effect of COVID Has Hit San Francisco.

Steven Malanga: The Amazon Effect: The Internet giant has been a key driver of job growth and productivity during the pandemic, but unionization efforts could undermine its e-commerce model.