There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 29 of 81)

Overnight News: California ghouls? What has Grasshopper government begot?

Ya think it's easy?

“Heaven is a place called ‘Supermarket Dog Park.’ It’s not in California.”

“California Dreamin’” of what, precisely? Sad to say, the Golden State is badly tarnished. The good news? The Ants will emigrate.

Forbes: Here’s Why The California Real Estate Market Is Hot. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Amy Alkon: L.A.’s Failed Homeless Policies Turned My Home Into a Prison.

New York Post: This city just banned candy from supermarket checkout aisles. 1. No bigger problems just now? 2. Shut down the concession stand at the cinemas, too, if they’re open; that’s where their profits are, too. 3. Soon California will be Grasshoppers-only.

The Drive: There’s a Jeep Wrangler Dangling Off a Cliff in California After Some Fool Drove Up a Bike Trail.

The Federalist: Why We Can’t Have A Good Society Without Freedom.

We gave the Pooh bears some hell last night, but here is the principled anti-Pooh bear poke.

Unchained Melodies: Music to poke Pooh bears by…

As you may have noticed, I am a student of artistic categories no one else knows anything about. In celebration of The Incumbent’s jump into the big game, where it has no one but itself to blame for its consistently abysmal “investment” results, here is a very sparse but very fun musical category:

Pop acts telling their record companies to go to hell.

First is Graham Parker, whose career was essentially ruined by “Mercury Poisoning.” Out of all the New Wave rockers, he’s the rockingest, and he should have been a stadium act in those first few years.

Next up is Cracker, and this is definitely not safe for anywhere:

Listen carefully. Shaggy-dog stories typically don’t hold up well in songs, but this one really works.

But this is a category of only two exemplars, as far as I’m aware. If you know of others, speak up.

Overnight News: It’s quiet… Too quiet…

Ya think it's easy?

“I never could understand the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’ until a very smart kid explained me to me: ‘Odysseus can’t talk. That’s how you know he’s a dog.’”

Despite the headline, it’s not so much quiet as boring. That’s the way weekends are supposed to be.

Housing Wire: OJO Labs rolls out agent referral network. I don’t normally link to crap like this, because it’s just PR, but two things popped out at me in this one:

  1. “There is no fee to get started, but OJO Labs earns a commission for successful conversions.” Commissiondectomy is the new way to pay!
  2. “In June, OJO Labs announced a $62.5 million funding round and the acquisition of Movoto, a residential real estate search site. Last October, OJO Labs also acquired real estate software platform RealSavvy, and WolfNet Technologies in October 2018.” If you don’t host your own content, you’re at the mercy of whomever your “trusted” vendor pimps itself to.

1000watt.net: Friday Flash: Zzzz.

Note this: “Why would Zillow carry that burden [traditional listing of iBuyer turn-downs] when they’re getting 35% referral fees on the seller leads they’re feeding to existing Premier Agents already?”

My read is that iBuyer “news” is always veiled screams of financial agony. Zillow’s press release the other day read to me like The Incumbent is trying to recapture turn-downs and fall-outs from its broker-partners. That much would be penny-pinching. But all internet “leads” are crap, especially Zillow’s. People either convert instantly or they are gone. How many other inquiries has the prospect made? And were they made at 2 am, after a quarrel? Who wants to pay 35% for that kind of quality?

HotAir.com: Kentucky Lawmaker Arrested On Rioting Charge, Accused Of Setting Fire To Public Library.

City Journal: A “Culture of Lawlessness” in D.A. Offices.

Not the Bee: Super-efficient USPS delivers a letter in Michigan 100 years after it was mailed.

And: Funny, even so:

Just-enough-cinema at home: The just-enough-real-estate movie.

Just-enough-intimacy for two people who are really bad at it.

There is a trend in American cinema over the past dozen years, a product of divorce-culture, that we call the just-enough-dad movie.

Like this: Single-mom of overmothered beta nerd barely tolerates her teenage son learning masculine frame from her disreputable, curmudgeonly neighbor. The yarn is always a benedy: In Act III, the kid takes leadership of his own life, gets the girl and walks like a man from then on.

The best example I can think of is “Gran Torino” – which is also a just-enough-Jesus movie – but there are a bunch of them out there. Find an aging male lead who photographs well without a shave and you’ve got a third the cast – and all of the funding.

So today I bring you a couple of one-off variations.

First, free with commercials on IMDB, “Did You Hear About the Morgans?”

Note well: This is not a send up. This film is a collection of poor choices glued together with treacle. But it is fun, despite all that, and it measures up as a just-enough-real-estate movie.

What’s wrong? The title is awful – useless as marketing. Sarah Jessica Parker is much too old for the role she plays. And Hugh Grant – who surely comes with his own writers to make his gags consistent and his performances too long – for some reason fails to deliver the patented Hugh Grant huge rant at the end of Act II.

Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen are fun, as is everyone in the film who does not live in New York. In that sense, it’s a just-enough-Wyoming movie, too, but there is no reason to believe that Hugh Grant either mastered or could manage any sort of masculine frame, going forward.

As for the real estate, it comes down to two scenes. In the first, Parker’s character blows a showing so badly that I wanted to send her license back to the state on the spot. But in the second, she deftly guides an underfunded seller into boosting his curb appeal, leading to a sale. Score Team Read more

Overnight News: Hey! Be nice! Don’t poke the Pooh bears! They’ve got big money to lose – and you can help them squander it!

Ya think it's easy?

“We have alpacas in our neighborhood, but I’d just as soon break into the fridge.”

For all of me, I prefer to think of iBuyers as whales, the very rich dumbasses who unknowingly fund the entire gambling ecosystem. But bears works, too – poorly-adapted, slow-witted, no match for three or four smart dogs working together. When they get lost and wander down into the desert, they leave nothing but sun-bleached skeletons behind.

So, yeah: Poke! Do your worst, Pooh bears. Your wins are imaginary. Your losses are legion – so far.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Eric Blackwell: Zillow: Whatever you do. Don’t poke the bear. Lol. Poke!

Brian Brady: Mortgage Refinancing and Forbearance: Three Balls, You Walk, One Strike, You’re Out.

As for the rest of the world…

Redfin: Home Prices Just. Keep. Climbing. National Median Now Up 14% from Last Year. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: New home sales crush expectations, but the supply is running out. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Redfin: New-Construction Home Listings Drop 4% in August, Reversing Course From July’s Rebound. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

SFGate.com: Bay Area applicants flood program that pays them $10,000 to leave California.

Fox News: Gun sales in major swing states up nearly 80% this year: Will it have any bearing on election outcome?

The Daily Signal: Public Schools Across Country Promote Black Lives Matter, Organize Protests.

TaxProf Blog: Welcome To The Turbulent Twenties.

Anchorage Daily News: Brown bear breaks into Alaska Zoo, kills alpaca named Caesar.

Overnight News: Why would the world’s dumbest real estate investor hire himself as his own broker? Because the emperor is definitely not naked!

“The money-making secret to real estate brokerage? Socialize the risks to the seller – not the broker.”

Yesterday’s big news? “The Incumbent” doubles down on dipshit. Dipshit-aficionados rejoice.

Housing Wire: Home prices post record two-month gain, FHFA says. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Redfin: Sacramento, Austin and Phoenix Are the Most Popular Destinations For People Searching For Homes Outside Their Metro Area. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Renovation loans get pandemic boost as homeowners want home offices. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Coronavirus pandemic fuels affordability crisis for homebuyers. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Dave Stevens: 5 reasons why mortgage rates are going to rise in 2021.

Seeking Alpha: Zillow Offers Will Expand Services in 2021.

Housing Wire: Zillow iBuying program brings real estate transactions in-house by licensing Zillow Homes employees.

Joanne Jacobs: Not indoctrinated, just ignorant.

City Journal: Merit on the Ropes.

Angelo Codevilla: Revolution 2020. Incidentally: CTRL-F ‘riot’; 6 found.

And our own Brian Brady! San Diego Union Tribune: I’m a Republican. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death is both a loss and a legal opportunity.

A fun fact about #iBuyers? Every buy-box is redlining.

“Totally not redlining!”

The image is a map of Zillow’s sold iBuyer homes in the densest parts of Metropolitan Phoenix.

See that Madonana-like shape running West from the I-17 Freeway. Looks like a pregnant single-mom, doesn’t it? The poster-child of fair-housing law, right there on the map.

Looks like redlining, doesn’t it?

I’ve been watching Zillow’s iBuying results for years now. It always looks like redlining. I warned them about it when I was working as a pricing algorithm.

Is it really redlining? It’s the further fruits of a buy-box that wisely avoids old, small and irregular housing. For all of me, Zillow’s buy-box is much too loose, but the net consequence is that much of the housing Zillow excludes is in contiguous neighborhoods emerging West from the I-17.

Is it really redlining? The neighborhoods Zillow and the other iBuyers exclude in Metropolitan Phoenix are far browner, blacker and redder than the neighborhoods they include. That’s redlining de facto, by disproportionate impact.

Is it possible for investors to work from a buy-box that does not redline in disproportionate impact terms? I don’t see how. The buy-box my investors work from is much more stringent, to the point that we only work in a few subdivisions, by now.

Is it possible for licensed real estate brokers to work as investors without committing hundreds of de facto materially-damaging fair-housing violations by means of redlining? I don’t see how.

That’s why investors should not be licensed, for one thing, but I think it illuminates how poorly thought-out are all the “black lives matterers” among the iBuyers.

Have fun when the lawsuits start – particularly since you’ve all already declared what racists you are.

Overnight News: CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

“How can you tell the country is not being torn apart by rioting? Because Joe Biden is just fine!”

Sorry if I seem to be beating a dead horse, but the refusal of the “real estate industry” to admit the existence of the riots while writing all about their secondary consequences is my kind of fun. Hypocrisy abounds, alas, but hypocrisy on high is especially comical. The scum who presume to “lead” us have their homes and headquarters in the riot zones – could they be gaslighting the world until they can sell out? – yet somehow they purport to be amazed that urban counties are bleeding, suburban counties are bulging and moving vans are unobtainable. Jeepers! How’d that happen?

What’s the trick to assimilating the news – all news, not just real estate news? Read everything that seems worthwhile – and assume that everything you read is lying to you in ways you may not suspect. Certainly every story written about real estate results right now is lying, since none of them will admit to the impact – or even the existence – of the rioting.

United States Department of Justice: Department Of Justice Identifies New York City, Portland And Seattle As Jurisdictions Permitting Violence And Destruction Of Property. Riots!?! Who knew?!

Redfin: Affordable Areas Outside Big Cities Are Heating Up the Fastest As the Pandemic Changes Homebuyers’ Priorities. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: What’s Causing Home Prices To Skyrocket – Low Rates Or Wanting More Space? CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Homeowners gain over $620 billion in equity in second quarter. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Home equity surges as demand soars and mortgage rates hover near lows. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Millions can’t pay rent. Landlords making less than $50,000 a year are caught in the middle.

MarketWatch: The COVID-19 lockdown is squeezing real estate from all sides and threatens to burst the housing and mortgage bubble.

The Federalist: Aftershocks Of Summer Riots Are Making Kenosha Scared To Rebuild.

The Ohio Star: NYU Prof Says More Than 20 Percent of Universities Could Fail Because of the Lockdowns.

City Journal: The Nemeses of Cities.

Yahoo News: Read more

Three facts about big-shot “real estate industry” executives and racism in America.

What’s funniest about the “real estate industry’s” riot-denial? Where are the riots happening?

Witness:

  1. Big-shot real estate industry executives deeply abhor the “systemic” racism in the real estate industry – even though they have not identified or paid fines for any specific, independently-verifiable racist crimes.
  2. America’s big cities have been beset by riots all Summer, resulting in the destruction of many homes and businesses and leading to a mass exodus from these communities to safer, more-suburban locales. We may be seeing the de facto abandonment of vast swaths of America’s housing stock. Homeowners who cannot flee will be hurt worst as prices plummet, with many of these stranded homeowners being black Americans – only just recovered from their last round of real estate haircuts.

  3. About this catastrophic exsanguination of the black middle class, the big-shot real estate industry executives say: Boo. Not quite so, alas: Instead, they have actively pretended none of this is happening.

Imputed, ephemeral, non-demonstrable racism? Right on it!

The actual destruction of the best of the best of black America? Crickets.

That’s how much black lives matter to them.

My experiences with actual – not imagined – racism in real estate.

“I’ve had better haircuts, but never cheaper or faster…”

That’s me to the right, a certified selfie with today’s hair and today’s shave. I am my own barber, in the age of the Coronavirus, and I am delighted to say that I’m improving faster than I expected. A year from now I could be as good as awful or even barely-adequate.

But: I have been a Realtor for nearly twenty years, a broker/owner for fifteen. I have sold a few hundred homes and overseen or advised on the sale of hundreds of others. I have met with or spoken to thousands of customers, making hundreds of them my clients or tenants to the rental homes we manage. I am my only agent for now – I sub out anything that does not require a license – but, with my wife Cathleen on board or without her, we have always been scrupulous about fairness – not just fair-housing but fair-dealing as such. I hate predators. I never want to be one.

So what is my experience of actual, specific, objectively-real racism in real estate?

I once had an out-of-town investor in my car who said things I considered red flags, so I drove him back to his hotel. This is the same thing I do with irrationally optimistic investors – except I’ve met dozens of them.

Want more? When I first started, working as an apartment locator, I had a very racist elderly black woman as a client, but I just laughed at the things she said – and in the end she found a new place without me.

I have one more: We used to use a centrally-located Fidelity office for most of our title work. In those days, that was the “Spanish” office, the one where all deals that were to close in Spanish were sent. Over the years, I saw several contracts fall apart on Friday afternoons, with the whole family coming down to sign, only to find out that no one, until then, had told them what their monthly payment would be and how much cash they needed to close. Not Read more

Overnight News: “Systemic racism” in real estate? Demand specifics.

“My dying wish? Not to be dead. That won’t work, either.”

Is no news good news? It seems there is no real estate news, nor any other kind of news except Supreme Court news.

The Washington Examiner: Racist? Under Trump, black people and Hispanics join suburbs and home ownership up.

National Review: Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

Townhall: How Woke CEOs Traded Our Future For BLM Approval.

City Journal: Show Us Your Systemic Racism, Princeton.

Those four stories together suggest a strategy: Until this weekend, since George Floyd was canonized, half of all real estate news has consisted of over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats insisting that real estate is systemically racist – both the buying, selling and hypothecation of homes and the management of the brokerages and lenders.

Is that so? Demand specifics.

Demand that they back up their bullshit claims. We know they are lying on the transactions side: The fines are huge but they are almost never collected. Regardless, self-identified violators are required by law to document their violations – if any – to regulators. How many bellowing grand poohbahs have self-reported their purported fair-housing infractions?

If they are not lying about their own personnel management, why haven’t they resigned? If there is “systemic racism” in real estate management, the problem would be “the system” – the very over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats making the specious claims.

Demand specifics – and assume the worst about anyone who will not provide them.

Daily Mail: UK, that is, where they know how to pack up a headline. Trump’s Supreme Court frontrunners: A mother of seven who adopted two children from Haiti and belongs to a Christian sect that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale – and a Cuban American whose father was stopped from becoming a lawyer by Castro.

Breitbart.com: Nolte: Passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Permanently Resets 2020 Election.

Daily Wire: ‘Evil Is Real’: North Carolina Police Officer Pens Heartfelt Resignation Letter To Community Amid ‘Unprecedented’ Exodus From Force.

City Journal: Heiresses on the Barricades.

Overnight News: Mocking Redfin about The Dystemperor’s New Unriots is funny – until you think about what our studied negligence is doing to the black middle class.

“Red Americans got rooked once and completely. Black Americans get rooked with every spin of the ‘economic cycle.’ That’s how you know Black Lives Matter.”

As I noted yesterday, these are not just riots we are seeing across the country, they are carefully-mismanaged riots. Where the police department is allowed to function according to well-understood crowd-control theory, there are no riots. Cf., e.g., Detroit. As with acknowledging the riots themselves, taking note of this deliberate mismanagement is useful: It is the key proxy signal needed to determine any given neighborhood’s RiotScore™.

Redfin: Housing Market White Hot After Labor Day: Home Prices Up 13%, Pending Sales Up 27%. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: MBA: 11 million households fell behind on rent or mortgages in second quarter.

CNBC: Refinancing your mortgage will cost more thanks to an ‘adverse market’ fee.

Forbes: The Paradox Of The U.S. Black Home Ownership Rate.

John Wake is an old friend of mine and of BloodhoundBlog’s. He doesn’t address it here, but a further consequence of the rioting will be a decimation of black homeownership in the riot-wracked cities: The homes that were not destroyed are bleeding equity with every departing U-Haul van. The middle class is how we grow – as traders but also as neighbors. Strangers learn to love each other from trade – that’s how polyglot cities have always worked – but traders cultivate their neighbors by their good example. The social capital this Summer’s riots have destroyed far exceeds the physical damage.

So take just a moment, right here in the middle of the news, to reflect upon the hypocrisy of the so-called “leadership” of the so-called “real estate industry.” Redfin pimps an ugly, racist hiring preference for its Board of Directors and the grand poohbahs of the big brokerages actually promise wholesale violations of fair employment laws – all to make up for the “systemic racism” for which they are the actual and ongoing “system.” And yet, not one of them is standing up to defend the black middle class as it is being exsanguinated right before our eyes. We are “led” by scum – the sleaze Read more

Hey, big-talking big-datafied AI-enhanced machine-learning Realty.bots, give us what we really need: A neighborhood RiotScore.

If it’s not obvious, the big ugly question is my addition.

Redfin is back with new disinformation about the current national state of housing turmoil. It turns out it is not just the pandemic that has incited this frenzied reordering of housing priorities. No. Forest fires are responsible, too.

That is to say: Yet again: CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

I was snarking about yesterday’s disinfo on Facebook, thusly:

If #Redfin were of a mind to do something actually useful, this matters:

Some cities that might be considered riot-prone effected the time-honored policing strategy of taking the hotheads down fast and decisively, snuffing off the conflagration before it could start. Two I can think of are Detroit and Lancaster, PA.

My question: What is the relative difference in the riot-induced exodus in cities like that, compared to the ones which indulged their rioters?

That would be useful information – and a refreshing reconciliation with the truth. Simply classifying cities by their riot-friendliness would be a mitzvah.

And a friend popped off with this:

A riot score next to the walk score?

Bree-izz-illiant! A RiotScore is much more valuable than a WalkScore. If you’re running from trouble, how can you be sure you’re not racing from the frying pan straight into the fire?

Easy to compute. Redfin tried to pretend yesterday that that silly Red/Blue nonsense is meaningful. In fact, Blue cities (cities that are full of very red Marxists, so we lie and call them Blue) are surrounded by Blue suburbs, leading to a Blue-to-Blue exodus that is apparently confusing to people paid to be confused.

What matters more is the factor cited above: How do the local police respond to pre-riot activity? A riot is a critical mass of hotheads that is enflamed by one or more super-hotheads. Pinch off those match-heads right away and there will be no riot. Blue suburbs with reliable cops will have a very hot seller’s market. Those less vigilant will be eclipsed by Redder (less Marxist) exurbs further out.

Another obvious tell: Was the steely-eyed, up-through-the-ranks, by-the-book police chief recently replaced by a newcomer who is (check as many boxes as possible) black, hispanic, Read more

Unchained Melody: “Your sister cried” – but why?

This is brutal and opaque and it kills me in every version of it I hear. This is a movie of the mind, and it is built to make you squirm.

What’s going on? I keep coming back because I can’t quite tell…

I’ll never know how you got into such a mess.
Why do the bridesmaids all have to wear the same dress?

Fred Eaglesmith is the best country songwriter since Townes shambled on. His work will survive because of songs like this one.

How do you beat the Realty.bots? The 3 key weapons of the Guerrilla Bloodhound: Brick and mortar, ink and paper – and flesh and blood.

“I wasn’t always a Realty.bot. I used to drive a driverless-Uber. Hardly ever hit anyone.”

I spent an hour on the phone with Brian Brady yesterday, always a tonic for my spirit. We are both of us guerrillas, both counter-marketers, always looking for ways to use the enemy’s strengths against him.

When we first met, Brian was using the internet to take business away from white shoe lenders and I was using it to scare up clients who wanted to avoid the sleaze of the supermarket-magazine-advertising Realtors.

That is to say, we were using the internet as guerrilla marketers against competitors who were not – or who were not any good at it, anyway.

How now, russet Bloodhounds?

The opposite, yes? Now our most-threatening competition is very adept at marketing by internet.

The Guerrilla Bloodhound’s response: The three ideas in the headline can be subsumed by one idea: In Real Life. And that notion is best understood in longtime BloodhoundBlog contributor Jeff Brown’s formulation: Belly-to-belly.

Be here now? You’ve got it, they don’t. Your best marketing advantage, by now, is that you are not on the internet, that you are present in real life and can address the issues paperwork exists to paper over.

Until they burn up all the excess wealth fools accord them, the Realty.bots will take as much business as they can from Driven and Cautious principals. The former value time over money, while the latter seem to think computers can’t cheat. Those folks may not be completely gone from your life, but they are all of online-shopping’s target market. Your value propositions and their values are a poor match, going forward.

The Incandescents will always be represented. If you’re good at selling luxury, historic, architectural or other jewelry-box homes, your world is secure. Bots can’t do what you do as a real estate analyst, but they can’t even touch what you do as showmanship.

And that leaves the Sociables, who are wise to wonder – continuously! – if they are being taken. They are yours and you are theirs because they do not trust a transaction this huge to what might as well Read more