Category: Lending (page 8 of 56)

Who can deny that the Supreme Court is useless?

Just in the last year:

• It gutted the Takings Clause by refusing to shut down the CDC’s completely lawless eviction moratorium – now renewed under the ‘what are you gonna do about it?’ principle.

• It wreaked chaos in the eastern half of Oklahoma, undermining a century of common understandings about who governs what.

• And by finding the words “sexual orientation” where they are entirely absent from any statute, it rendered unemployable anyone who won’t refer to a he as a she or to an individual in the plural.

The Supreme Court was sold to conservatives and libertarians as the last, best hope for freedom. Instead, it has delivered us to Room 101: Lie or die, no exceptions.

Nice going, asswipes. Y’all oughta shop for flashier dresses.

In other news:

CNBC: CDC to issue new eviction ban effective through Oct. 3, source says.

Housing Wire: 30-year rate drops below 3% for first time since February.

Joel Kotkin: Garcetti’s Legacy: The Los Angeles mayor will leave his city diminished, if not permanently undermined.

Jack Cashill: Newly Released Documents Suggest Coercion in the George Floyd Case.

The American Mind: The End of the Long March: The army and the police have not capitulated to Wokeism—yet.

UnHerd: America has become its own worst enemy: Like the Soviet Union, the US is dying from despair.

City dirt was waning, anyway, before the pandemic. With every Uber ride, every Door-Dash delivery, the commercial corner was losing value – along with the car dealership sitting on it. The virus rushed this transition, but suburban car-culture was being replaced by suburban delivery-van culture, regardless.

But the riot-borne exodus that no one can talk about so no one can document will have affected commercial corridors and inner-city neighborhood market centers worst. As we have discussed, people fled from spaces that are easy for rioters to get to: Neighborhoods accessible on foot or by public transportation.

So, arguably, commercial dirt already suffering a slow and steady leak has now been abandoned by the half of the traffic that had money to spend.

Fear hides in silence and shadows: Drop you keys in an empty mall to figure out why you’re never going back. Empty streets invite predators – who keep the streets emptied. Once-active city streets are now home only to the homeless – who will do their own part to keep offices emptied.

What’s actually left? Live performances and restaurant meals? And you were planning to go to those by bus…?

The Ants in the suburbs will have all they ever wanted of the city, and the city will have the Grasshoppers it foolishly put first.

In other news:

CNBC: Despite national protection expiring, some states will continue banning evictions.

The Federalist: Crime Is Spiking In U.S. Cities Because Democrats Literally Asked For It.

The Daily Wire: Report: 9 Of The 10 Worst Cities For First-Time Home Buyers Are In California.

City Journal: Hosting Mostly Debt: Cities have borrowed billions to build convention facilities, an industry with a cloudy future.

Karol Markowicz: Masking kids and closing schools is irrational, unscientific child abuse.

Christopher Bedford: Masks And CRT Are Just The Start: It’s Time To Break The Public Schools (And Here’s How).

Joy Pullman: A Guide To Long-Term Strategic Thinking For Parents Who Oppose CRT In Schools.

I’ve written a zillion very-short jokes in my life, many of them band names. ‘The Breakthrough Superspreaders’ is funny all the way to the morgue, but everything that claims to be leadership is fatally comical by now.

The good news is the bad news: Insanity is always temporary: A moral philosophy that is anti-human survival will be abandoned, eventually, by the survivors. That’s how you can tell that true Marxism has never been tired: There are always some survivors.

But the bad news is in no way good: Billions will suffer and millions will perish so the Deep State could get rid of Donald Trump.

What was the consequence of not having ‘Nuremberg Trials’ for the many Marxist genocides?

More genocide.

And it is very far from over…

In other news:

The New York Post: Ignore the hysteria: It’s time to move past COVID, America.

The National Review: AMA to Urge End of Sex ID on All Birth Certificates.

Heather Mac Donald: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact: Succumbing to specious charges of racism, America’s orchestras, opera companies, and conductors are abandoning the Western canon.

We had a listing appointment yesterday for a house I will list in two years, at the soonest. That sounds silly, but it’s not: Cautious people over-prepare. If you can’t accept that, they work with someone who can.

But the great part about meeting that early in the process is that we can help devise the grand strategy, so that we will get the house just the way we need it, when it is finally ours to sell.

Even so, it was funny, because we were being asked about a listing strategy that won’t exist until we’re ready to list the house – in what will surely be a very different market.

I made Cathleen come, because we may be staging again by then. For the past few years I have scheduled staging and cosmetic repairs for the week after I list – knowing the houses won’t last that long. Two years from now, we might actually have to market homes to get them sold.

We love the seller, but we are blessed that way: We don’t represent anyone we don’t love like family. Every house I see, I want to sell today, because I don’t like what the market looks like tomorrow. But we killed it yesterday, at the listing appointment two years before the listing appointment, and we will kill it when the house is ours to sell.

In other news:

Associated Press: Bacon in California May Soon Be More Hard to Find as Pig Rules Take Effect.

Becker News: YouTube Suspends One of Biden’s Biggest Critics in the International Media: ‘The Fox News of Australia’ Sky News.

Michael Anton: David French and the Conservative Case for Hereditary Bloodguilt: A prominent “Never Trumper” argues that the sins of the fathers must be visited upon the sons.

The CDC’s completely unconstitutional eviction moratorium ends tonight. I am innocent of any first-hand experience with this mess. We didn’t miss a payment on the rental homes we managed, and we sold three tenant-occupied homes – allegedly the third-rail – for top dollar, with no trouble.

Linked below, the Foundation for Economic Education is making the propertied argument, and it’s one I agree with in principle.

But: Most landlords who get into trouble went looking for trouble.

There is a median for everything, half above, half below. If you shop for tenants above the median on follow-through, you had an eviction moratorium experience like ours – no experience. If you shop below the median – thinking, perhaps, that people with few choices will stay longer, or, worse, planning to evict, thus to rack up another huge financial judgement – I’m guessing the last 18 months have been painful for you.

Dang.

Until some grown-up puts his foot down hard, you can expect more unconstitutional usurpations. But you can improve your results in a crooked game – by giving up crookery yourself. If you want people to treat you right, treat them right. If you want to make an honest living, stop being a bottom-feeder.

In other news:

FEE.org: The Push is On to Extend One of the Federal Government’s Worst Pandemic Power-Grabs: Whenever the order finally expires, crushing bills will come due.

Redfin.com: Prices of the Most and Least Expensive U.S. Homes Are Surging the Fastest.

The Federalist: New York Is A Cautionary Tale About The Dangers of Progressivism.

John Podhoretz: Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City.

The Federalist: Cuomo Is Begging New Yorkers To Come Home, But Why Would They?

Matt Taibbi: From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘No, you moron’: Dems have selves to blame for vaccine hesitancy.

Julie Kelly: ‘Unprecedented, Unreasonable, Unconstitutional, and Wrong’.

City Journal: The Perpetual Emergency: Regular talk of crisis can degrade liberty.

Is today the day we find out the vaccines don’t work? Yesterday, the Biden cabal admitted that the vaccines are Trump’s accomplishment – which would seem to imply blame, not credit.

Until lately, I would have argued that the lockdowns were humanity’s worst-ever unforced error. Can the vaccines relegate last year’s bungling to second place?

Here’s worse news: Cautious tyranny rules by intimidation and lies: “You don’t want me to call you a racist again, do you?” When the lies stop working, all that’s left is the intimidation.

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales drop in June — more evidence of a housing turnaround.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Post Smallest Increase in Over a Year.

CNBC: White House calls on Congress to extend expiring eviction ban.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers Are Back: Purchase Volumes and Prices Soar to Record Highs. The sound effect for every kind of hubris: The Jack-in-the-Box.

Ron Paul: The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us.

American Greatness: The Dissident California Right Is the Future.

Linking to a ZeroHedge article on governors in rebellion against the CDC, I issued this bit of snark:

“Yo, #Redfin, now would be the time to watch for ‘pandemic’-caused relocation – rather than the riot-flight afoot over the past year. Same destinations, but without the corollary gun sales.”

As always, I am apparently the only person in real estate publishing who can say out loud that the real estate surge that followed the inglorious death of George Floyd was caused by the riots that also followed the inglorious death of George Floyd. This is completely obvious, is easily demonstrated in Redfin’s own charts and is corroborated by a corresponding surge in firearms sales. Ignoring reality is a full time job, apparently, but I’m guessing it pays well.

Even so, I think the governors are trafficking in proxy signals: What “We are CDC rebels” really means is: “We are Ant-friendly in every way – especially schools.”

That would be actual dog-whistling, albeit not the kind we’re always warned about: Red-state governors are advertising for freedom-seeking Ants to relocate to their states – not to escape risible mask rules but to escape the color revolution in Grasshopper-led cities.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates creep up slightly to 2.80%.

Matt Welch: CDC Sentences Kids to Another School Year of Irrational Masking.

Katie Pavlich: We’ve Discovered the Real Reason the CDC Is Requiring All Kids Wear Masks in Schools.

Kay Hymowitz: Dr. Biden’s Lesson: Runaway degree inflation reinforces the class divide.

Among American religionists, the most vaccine-resistant turn out to be the atheists. I don’t like most atheists – too often Ci pedantic assholes – but this is an outcome easy to foresee: People habituated to making critical distinctions are not going to be early-adopters on anything. Festina lente all damn day, but contemplation won’t be rushed.

But letting the other guy make the early mistakes is never a bad strategy. Almost nothing new works as planned, and every sort of launch is understood as a shake-out – an opportunity to inflict all the undetected design flaws on unsuspecting dupes.

My attitude, always: I can wait. And I am always happiest when I keep my own counsel.

If you didn’t know paper masks are a joke, your sense of smell was already gone. If you didn’t know the diagnostic testing was juiced to get Trump, you have not been paying attention. And if you thought “MUST-RUSH-NOW!” and universal vaccination were ideas that would go good together, then yesterday must have been the joyous day of your birth.

If Democrats were smart – if dogs could talk – they’d already be smearing Trump with the vaccines. Their failure is imminent and obvious – and part of the plan?; lockdown-lust is also imminent and obvious – so somebody’s going to have to be the fallguy.

Meanwhile: Look out for your own. The way to avoid getting viral infections is to stay away from sick people and to be healthy enough to repel any virii you didn’t avoid. Even if they worked, the vaccines would simply relicense the bad choices that are actually killing people.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates just dropped to a six-month low, and refinances shoot higher.

Housing Wire: Foreign buyers are avoiding American homes: NAR.

Fox News: Seattle mayor calls for more police after six shootings in one weekend.

Victoria Taft: The People Who Brought You CHAZ Get Their WA State Police Reform Wishes Granted and They’re a Hot Mess.

The Daily Wire: Thanks To Inflation, American Wages Drop By Nearly 2%.

Josh Hammer: How to Interpret Section 230?

I spent much of last year hearing the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “King of the World” every time I went to the supermarket: “If I stay inside, I might live ’til Saturday.” So I have been delighted, this year, to again hear the voices of children in stores.

Real estate is kids and dogs, and I engage well with both. It’s them that all of us are working for – the satisfaction of their needs. Plus which, they’re excellent closers: Whey they move in, everybody moves in.

But I read a horrifying article this morning – anecdata, so take it for what you will – about the birth dearth among the Cautious.

I’ve been saying this all along, of course: Where reproduction is optional, the Cautious prefer not to – lifelong marriages with one or at most two offspring for Cs, serial graduated celibacy for Ci.

But: America is a Cs nation, has been since Ibsen’s world premiere performances took place in Minnesota, since Kolachis came to Texas, since the Mormons blazed the Hashknife Trail. Cs is why your grandma was surrounded by six kids at all times, and it’s why your own grandkid is surrounded by six grownups at all times.

But at the end of a year where dogs and even chickens were adopted with what will turn out to be sociopathic abandon, no children were spawned. And now we are well into an inexplicable global vaccination frenzy, and I am wondering what that is doing, de facto, to fertility.

I can belay all suspicions, for now, but I really would like to see some infants. Practical ontology proves nothing, of course, but it does distinguish fact from fiction.

So: Are there any newborns out there?

In other news:

CNBC: Housing boom is over as new home sales fall to pandemic low.

Housing Wire: Why the US MLS system is the envy of other countries.

CNBC: Home prices broke records in May, according to S&P Case-Shiller.

City Journal: Better Red Than Taxed: As government revenues rebound, GOP-led states are cutting taxes while Democratic states ponder increases.

Josiah Lippincott: The Conservative Read more

When William F. Buckley declaimed that The National Review “stands athwart history yelling Stop!” – he was conceding Hegel’s (and hence Marx’s) argument by pretending to defy it. It would be churlish to ask how not challenging political determinism has worked out, but NR has been hugely successful at throwing off new totalitarians – who then make bank as cable news “conservatives.”

Whatever. We are at a moment where actual – not symbolic – athwartnering can do some good.

Assuming electoral redemption is possible – assuming the Grasshoppers have not taken over permanently – what we need right now is the best attainable outcome of government: Nothing.

We need to stand athwart the Biden regime demanding that it stop doing anything until it can be replaced.

The Arizona recount argues that Senator Mark Kelly should be recalled. The endless shenanigans in Georgia demand the decertification of its Senate run-off election.

Assuming neither of those things happen, Americans need to lean on their senators and representatives to make sure nothing more changes until the voters have had a chance to veto the Marxism Biden’s handlers are trying to smuggle in.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Out-of-Towners Moving to Austin Spend $22,500 More on Homes Than Locals.

The Associated Press: Sparked by pandemic fallout, homeschooling surges across US.

American Greatness: How Parents Should Talk About ‘White Privilege’.

City Journal: Year Zero: The roots of the woke revolution.

Roger Kimball: Losing Our Liberty All at Once?

At the time the election was stolen, I advised people to count the cranes on their skylines. They weren’t there three years ago, and three years from now they’ll be gone again, shunted back to Obamaville.

This is practical ontology, apprehending the universe with your own senses, so you cannot be fooled by testimony. If you don’t see trusses on trucks, no new houses are being built, regardless of the hype. If you don’t see cranes silhouetted against the sky, the big developers in your town are betting against your future.

A new structure is a forward-looking hope derived from backward-looking portents. Want proof? Note how many of your becraned buildings-in-progress are multi-family housing. A year ago we learned why that bet might not be as fruitful as it had seemed – when the plans were made three years ago.

Three years ago, the United States and all it myriad mini-states were operating in good order – a good time to plant new flags. Three years from now, who knows what will remain of America, its people or its currency? Projects already underway will be completed, at least for now, but the line for new building permits will grow shorter by the day.

Who needs whom? Taxes, regulations and NIMBYs don’t even get their chance to destroy the future if investors are in despair…

In other news:

The Epoch Times: California is Experiencing a Crime ‘Tsunami’: Sacramento DA.

Kevin Downey, Jr.: The World Has Had It With China Flu Lockdowns: Protests Rock Cities All Over the Globe.

Joel Kotkin: The coming collapse of the developing world: Covid has pushed vast swathes of humanity to the brink of extreme poverty.

James Bovard: The Coming “January 6” Train Wreck.

American Greatness: Critical Witchcraft Theory: “Systemic racism” is not a sociological theory. It is theology. More precisely, it is a demonology: a theory of witchcraft.

If the Coronavirus was a tailored pathogen – germ warfare – against whom was it tailored? People clinging just this side of death’s door, yes? People who were within months of dying, anyway. Tailored or not, that’s who it killed.

Who might you suppose are the costliest beneficiaries of the ever-so-benevolent welfare-state? It turns out that it’s people clinging just this side of death’s door, people within months – but not just days – of dying.

A country has citizens, but a welfare-state just has dependents. Some subjects are capable of warfare, others of clerical work, but everyone is ultimately just a wide-open mouth and an oscillating rectum. Money is always a problem – under every form of Marxism, the looting goes up as the productivity goes down – so shedding costs is always a priority.

When first I heard that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was sending infected patients back into nursing homes, my instant assumption was that his motive was mass murder for budgetary purposes. Whether or not the virus was intended to kill the elderly, it did so perfectly, anyway.

Cuomo’s crimes were replicated in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan – at a minimum – all palpable mass murders committed to shed the welfare-state of promises everybody knows it cannot keep.

As we should expect by now, these murders will not be prosecuted – nor even investigated.

Why is that? So they can be repeated, of course.

In other news:

SFGate.com: Californians are arriving in Montana in droves. But they’re not welcome.

Karol Markowicz: Read my lips: We’re not going back to masks and lockdowns again.

Christopher Rufo: Critical Race Theory’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Julie Kelly: A January 6 Detainee Speaks Out.

Angelo Codevilla: Why Not Award Ashli Babbitt’s Killer the Medal of Honor?

I mock Redfin a lot, but it’s only because they deserve it. Probably, Zillow has been lying about the rioting for thirteen solid months, too, but Redfin just has the more-mockworthy Marxist take on things.

So, as everybody knows, the red-hot real estate market that succeeded the demise of George Floyd was caused by the subsequent rioting, not by the pandemic. This is obvious from Redfin’s own charts, and, as noted, they can heat-map price-appreciation by inaccessibility-to-rioters.

Again: The real estate market’s year-long frenzy was caused by the rioting. Ants who no longer had to live near their employers escaped Grasshopper urbanity at its ugliest – most of them never to return.

As if anyone needed proof of this – the truth, by now, is what no one dares to talk about – the real estate market is settling down just as gun sales are doing the same.

There is no election this year, so the remaining rioting is random dingleberrys, operating without political cover or financial support from the Democratic party. The heat is off in the rioted cities, and hence real estate and firearms sales are calming down.

This is even more obvious to Redfin, but they can’t tell the truth. I can.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates plummet to 2.78%.

CNBC: Sales of existing homes rise slightly as more listings finally hit the market.

Redfin.com: What is Dual Agency and How Does it Work? Shoe pinch? Hide and watch. Every Wall Street brokerage will be eaten alive for double-dealing, even as they are eaten alive from within by their Marxist staffers. None so deserving.

Housing Wire: Housing inventory slowly coming back as frenzy fades.

Mike DelPrete: Opendoor’s Mortgage Attach Rate Jumps, But At What Cost?

City Journal: Venice Beach Doesn’t Have a Homelessness Crisis. It has a quality-of-life enforcement crisis.

Kenny Xu: Silicon Valley’s Cynical Treatment of Asian Engineers.

City Journal: The Social Justice Network: Facebook announces sweeping new restrictions on criticism of protected groups.

Somewhere in the city of the night a lone rebel makes his mark, raising his fist in defiance of big-tech censorship as he slashes out his message:

“Graffiti is the social network of the perma-banned.” –Buck Phiden

Yes, Buck Phiden, the magatagger, the clean, serene meme-machine, the paleo-artisanal wall-blogger. Description? Never seen. M.O.? Telling the truth in the only way still allowed: Graffiti.

“When justice is outlawed, only outlaws have justice.” –Buck Phiden

Buck Phiden demands to be heard – in just the way you hear him: Telling truths the Deep State can’t figure out how to suppress. Please share any Buck Phiden graffiti you see to social media. Or just scrawl it on the nearest wall. Buck Phiden longs to be free.

“Everybody knows.” –Buck Phiden

In other news:

Redfin.com: Investor Home Purchases Hit Record, Surpassing Pre-Pandemic Levels.

City Journal: Universal Basic Wealth? If you want to reduce inequality, these new proposals aren’t the way to do it.

American Thinker: The Antifa/FBI Coalition.

Senator Tom Cotton: Breaking the Crime Wave.

If you sold a home to an iBuyer over the past 12 months, you were probably rooked – and you may have grounds for litigation.

If the iBuyer did not explicitly disclose to you that listing on the MLS would be to your best financial interest in a madly accelerating market, you were overtly and objectively misled. A licensee misleading a customer creates agency – omission is deception, deception is advice. Arguably, you were gulled out of a substantial portion of your equity in an undisclosed dual-representation: You were advised to make a mistake by the party – agent AND principal – benefitting from the error.

Until now, class action lawsuits for undisclosed dual-representation have been the belles of the real estate litigation ball. But how about a class action lawsuit against an entire class of gonophs? All of the iBuyers can and should have their licenses put to the test: Are they fiduciary – and hence massively-redundant double-dealers – or are they somehow exempt from the real estate licensing laws?

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence is still high, but it slipped this month as construction costs grew.

Redfin.com: Interest in Relocating Remains Elevated, With Nearly 1 in 3 Redfin.com Users Looking to Move to a Different Metro.

CNBC: Homebuyers aren’t seeing savings from falling lumber prices – here’s why.

Mike DelPrete: The Rise of Power Buyers. See above and add two more rookings: The buy-side and the financing.

City Journal: A Nation of Rentiers: The notion that homeownership should be a primary tool for building wealth is mistaken.

Helen Raleigh: Public Schools’ Systemic Problem Isn’t Racism Or Money. It’s Teachers’ Unions.