Category: Marketing (page 13 of 191)

This is Marxism in one gerundive:

Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

If you say, “Then what?” – you’re out of the club, but that doesn’t really matter: The goal is not their success but your failure.

Civilization is created by Ants for Ants. What happens when civil order itself turns on the Ants?

I think we’re seeing that now. Since last Summer, the law is all on the side of the Grasshoppers when it comes to petty offenses and property crimes, and it has been a year-long rent holiday in many places. Ants are now openly attacked in major cities, and the father of all anti-Ant agendas – anti-semitism – is now ubiquitous.

Is this the pre-licensing stage for a purge? Seems like a good time to beef up the defenses…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise to the occasion at 3%.

Redfin.com: Half of Homes Are Now Selling Above List Price. And the other half…?

John Nolte: ‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.

John Sexton: Shootings and chaos in Portland.

Daniel Greenfield: An Anti-Semitic Hate Wave Grows in Los Angeles.

Brad Polumbo: Rand Paul Warns America: Time to ‘Wake Up’ to ‘Profound Repercussions’ of Biden’s Spending Binge.

Christopher Rufo: The Child Soldiers of Portland: Public schools are training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries.

Joanne Jacobs: Testing out of college.

The Federalist: Even For Kids With In-Person Instruction, This Was The Worst Public School Year Ever.

I have been teasing friends about the vicissitudes of Bitcoin – how 12x last Friday can turn into 7x by today, and how people who talk about x-ing their “investments” are most often degenerate gamblers, losing slowly and lying about it.

I’m not nobody’s investment advisor, just not yours, but I have zero interest in securities, even, much less hypotheticals. But most of the people I do advise have done very well – by avoiding everything arm’s-length and sticking to the soil and the structures appurtenant thereto. 😉

The house I leased last week was purchased ten years ago for $70,500 – and the extra $500 may well have swung the deal in those days. Financed 80/20 and the investor put around $15k back in as rehab. So $30k cash out of pocket is worth $300k today – but not just today. That would be 10x in ten years, but the house has thrown off rental cash-flow the whole time, a little at the start, a lot by now. Ten years of depreciation, plus accelerated depreciation on the appliances – and someday a tax-deferred exit on the appreciation, assuming China Joe doesn’t frolic that up, too.

How much x in ten years? I can’t x that high – and if we have another Summer of “Love”, how much higher can it go? Nothing lasts forever and there is no accounting for luck. But at least half of all crypto-currency “investors” are net losers by now, where the firemen who rescued the economy by buying the houses no one else wanted are becoming millionaires on their prescience.

It could be there’s a clue in there somewhere. If you breathe deep, you just might catch it…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Investors are buying up single-family homes across the US.

The Washington Times: Five Oregon counties vote to explore joining Idaho.

The Daily Mail: ‘It’s become an outdoor psychiatric ward!’ How California’s scenic Venice Beach has become a homeless hotspot with tent cities, violent crime and rampant drug use pushing families and tourists out.

The Federalist: Nearly 20 Percent Read more

In 2006, we sold bedrooms without beds: Acres and acres of homes with no ready residents. Totally a cargo cult, of course: Houses are valuable even with no one to occupy them. But for a while you could flip a new build at COE for $50k more than the contract price – held with a $3,000 earnest deposit ten months earlier.

That would be money for nothing, a great little candy machine while it lasted.

The situation in Phoenix right now is nothing like that: Builders can’t build, anyway, and there are bodies and then some for every bedroom – at least in fee simple housing. What’s going on in multi-family? What’s happening in all those garden-apartment complexes – more arriving daily?

Meanwhile, all the happy-babble real estate “news” from other cities is also all about single-family detached housing – so what is happening with less-spacious domiciles there?

This is demand without supply, not supply without demand. Where is it coming from? Specifically, which homes are being abandoned to ignite this mad conflagration for single-family housing?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications increase for second straight week.

CNBC: Home construction sees biggest drop since pandemic hit. Here’s why.

Housing Wire: Seattle’s already-hot real estate market is exploding.

Jason Rantz: Activist plans taxpayer-funded CHOP block party a year after murders, attempted rape.

Brad Polumbo: New Poll Shows How Riots Have Doomed Downtown Portland.

Cato Institute: Will the Supreme Court Overturn the Infamous Takings Decision of Kelo v. City of New London?

Joel Kotkin: The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny.

Angelo Codevilla: Censorship, Masks, Vaccines, Right, and Revolution: Surrender to today’s oligarchic priorities augurs no peace for tomorrow.

I call it The Batman Fallacy, with the argument being: Batman is nuts.

The ideal, when some bad thing is happening, is that a previously-unsuspected Batman should swoop in to right the wrong with some instant justice.

In the second place, this is irrational just because it is unlikely. Your only reliable self-defense is your persistent defense of yourself. Yael is insurance, if you married right. Batman is imaginary.

But first: Batman is nuts. In any instant matter, you might crave the intervention of a vigilant violent vindicator – but what about when you’re double-parked, you know, just for a sec?

The law might be an ass, but Batman – for real, not in comic books – would be a dictator. Be careful what you wish for…

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence is high, but rising costs of materials present major risks.

Redfin.com: For Low-Tax States, Four People Move In For Every One Person Who Leaves. Rational people respond appropriately to incentives! Who’d a thunk it? They stretch out the timeline to bury the lede, of course, but it wouldn’t be Redfin without little-riot-lies.

City Journal: Galt’s Gulch in Music City, USA: Nashville is attracting a sizable share of blue-state transplants looking to escape hostile economic policies or cancel culture.

Joel Kotkin: How Los Angeles Descended Into Neo-feudalism And How To Fix It.

Brad Polumbo: Lockdown-Weary New Yorkers Fled to One Free State in Droves, New Figures Show: Tens of thousands of families chose freedom over big government.

American Thinker: Bye-bye Broadway: A grim prognosis for New York’s theaters.

Karol Markowicz: If woke companies really ‘care,’ let them help where it counts: fighting crime. Any activity at all beyond mere jawbone would be an actual demonstration of an actual commitment. Accordingly: The purpose of the jawbone is to divert your attention from the company news that actually matters. Caveat lector. Mind what goes into your mind.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: Caniglia v Strom, et al. We have one man who can do the job and eight Imposter Read more

As discussed, Redfin’s actual complaint with exclusive Residential listings is that they don’t pay Buyer’s Agents from other brokerages – meaning Redfin. The race jive is just jive, as it always is with Redfin. Nothing prevents them from continuing to represent their defected buyers – free of the ugly taint of self-interested compensation.

That would be daft, but so is camouflaging incompetence by a pretended concern for the unfortunate – in all this year’s most popular colors! So what should they do instead?

Switch!

That’s the name of a real estate book by Gary Keller, but you don’t need to buy or read it: The title is the entire thesis.

What do you do when your buyers can’t seem to stop betraying you? Stop representing buyers. Do something else instead: Just list, and dish the buyer leads to some other sucker. Do property management. Or flip, and let the house do the selling.

And Redfin is actually in the flipping business, and that much is potentially a good business: Like Zillow, it’s lead-gen either way the conversation starts, but even better, it’s a full-ticket fall-back sale either way. The iBuying part could not be more exclusive – take that, undeserving unfortunates! – but the end result is a listing, either way. And listing means getting paid almost always and betrayed almost never.

Here’s fun, though: Switching! is easy for an agent to do, and not that hard for a team or a brokerage. But what about a big national computerized web portal that only learned real estate by monkey-see-monkey-do in the first place?

A dinosaur built with an erector set is in the end a dinosaur – more relic than robot. Good luck with that…

In other news:

The Minnesota Sun: Minneapolis Mayor Admits Anti-Police Rhetoric has Led to Crime Spike.

Fox News: Veteran who was harassed by Antifa over flag says riots have become part of Portland’s landscape.

The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Out of control’: Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years.

David Harsanyi: Biden Is Off to a Disastrous Start.

MLS fights are always about Residential listings. Nobody is claiming to have lost sleep (or money or jobs or opportunities) over Land and Lots or Multi-Family or BizOps. No one at Redfin is tasked with tracking underperformance by Patagonian buyers competing for Industrial properties. You might from this conclude that MLS “justice” is really just a matter of whose ox is gored. I always think that way.

“What does ‘exclusive’ mean?” a buyer once asked my wife, seeing a rider on a yard sign as they were driving by. “It means they don’t want you to have representation.” That’s the perfect answer – not because she’s the perfect quill-pulling marketer but because she’s sweet and honest.

But her answer is not quite true: When I list a rental exclusively by promoting it only on Realty.bots, I’m not saying prospective tenants can’t have representation. I’m just not paying for it. As it happens, around ten percent of the applications we receive will have uncompensated agents attached to them – hoping to sell the applicants a home in a year or two.

Who goes unrepresented? Everybody else – everybody who doesn’t look like a good investment to be a homeowner very soon. Tenants are always desperate – time is never their friend – so I will get over-the-transom Realty.bot inquiries from theoretically-represented parties, anyway.

Who cares? Nobody. It’s Rental, not Residential, and there are property management companies in Metro Phoenix who pay $25 by MLS to Tenant’s Agents for a completed move-in. Show, application, qualification and follow-through, perhaps weeks later. Key In Listing Office – no joke. Redfin and REX know nothing about gouging other broker’s agents.

I think an exclusive Residential resale listing is colorably a fiduciary violation, since only a full and fair test of the marketplace can surface the highest, safest, soonest offer. But: I list Vacant or Drive-By-Only homes for resale, and I’m done in four days. And: I am not your broker. In any case, the betrayed party, if any, is the seller. No harm? No foul.

Buyers who want access Read more

We market our rental properties with the Realty.bots, not the MLS. I want to meet everyone, and I don’t want to pay a weak agent to come between me and the prospects.

But what that means is that I get inundated with inquiries: The Realty.bots make it easy for unmotivated people to express interest in properties they won’t trouble themselves to visit. Oh well. I respond by form letter and schedule group appointments – Open Houses without the ballyhoo.

Of the people who inquire – meaning who click a button on Zillow.com or another site – about 10% will commit to keeping the appointment, and, of those, around half actually will. That’s good news, right? Only nineteen out of twenty Realty.bot rental “leads” are complete crap.

The people who do come are great – because they are actually motivated. About half of them will apply, which is a great conversion rate on lousy yields, but still wrong: With only one house at a time available to lease, we end up working only the best-qualified applications. I triage them as they come in, pushing the red flag DQs – recent bankruptcy, landlord debt, dubious income – to the side. The one argument I can make for an application fee is inducing marginally-qualified people to think twice before applying.

So: Zillow-like rental “leads” are crap, except for the small few who convert, among whom are amazingly well-qualified folks who just want to lease a house amidst the maelstrom. But: Even with all of that, for our purposes, listing rentals on the Realty.bots is far better than using the MLS.

In other news:

CNBC: This woman got $10,000 for moving from Brooklyn to Tulsa. Here’s how it worked out.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homes Keep Selling Faster Than Ever—Typical Home Sold in Just 18 Days. Redfin will have to double-down on the little-riot-lies soon: We’re ten days away from the anniversary of the onset of the biggest run on fee simple housing in American history, and there is no way to evade it without looking like even bigger liars.

CNBC: San Francisco tech Read more

One of my favorite movies is “Pump Up The Volume” – it’s about blogging before WordPress – and this is one of the best lines in the film:

“I can smell a lie like a fart in a car.”

After a solid year of lying about masks – after first lying the other way – the CDC has now tacitly admitted their uselessness in ordinary social encounters: If the other guy’s viral load is high enough and your immunity is low enough, the mask is negligible as protection, where if either of those sine qua non factors is absent, the mask is redundant.

The trick to not getting sick? Stay away from sick people – but don’t be susceptible to illness in the first place.

This was obvious a year ago – or a lifetime ago, for those not born yesterday – so you know the rest of the news is really bad, for the CDC to cop to factual realty.

In other news:

Housing Wire: New home sales battled scorching prices in April.

FEE.org: Why Inflation Is at a 12-year High: It’s all about the money.

Matt Taibbi: Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It.

Julie Kelly: House Republicans Defy the January 6 Narrative.

Andrea Widburg: Trump needs to do a better job of un-muzzling himself.

Legal Insurrection: California State Board of Ed Dumbing Down K-12 Math Curriculum to Ensure “Equitable Outcomes”. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

Well. Who didn’t see this coming?

The worst inflation news: Inflationary projections correctly anticipate the consequences of more dollars chasing a static quantity of goods – but what happens when productivity also falls?

That would be the practical distinction between a recession and a depression.

Too pedantic? You’ll know better than me, very soon.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates manage another dip to 2.94%.

Housing Wire: South poised to see $1 trillion in home sales in 2021.

Andy Puzder: Post-COVID, no action from Biden, Dems was required for job market to soar. Now look at the mess they’ve made.

Katie Pavlich: BREAKING: U.S. Inflation Soars.

The New York Post: From inflation to jobs to the border, Biden is flailing — when will the media notice?

Victor Davis Hanson: Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom: When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all too predictable future becomes terrifying.

Don Feder: The Left’s War on Procreation.

Karol Markowicz: Kids will pay a steep price for this War on Merit in schools.

I don’t know how closely people are following this clear cooperation mishegoss. It boils down to this: Brokers who can’t sell without the MLS are plotting to handicap those who can. The MLS is a fall-back for good brokers and a crutch for bad ones, but it is beyond absurd to insist that good brokers must indirectly market homes they have already sold directly. If the seller’s not suing, who is aggrieved?

Typically, I do not list rental homes in the MLS. I want to meet the ultimately-successful candidate in person, early in the process, and I don’t want to pay a clueless newbie to impede my access to the prospects – or to their dogs, who I will also want to meet as a matter of due diligence.

Instead I go to Zillow. I get inundated, but I would, anyway. If we move to the supply side, I will drop the MLS and list rehabbed resale homes that way, too: I don’t have to prove maximum marketplace exposure to myself, I just have to hit my number – while not paying for third-party marketing.

The last three words are important: The MLS is third-party marketing for second-party marketers who need the help. If the agent shows up to the listing appointment with a pocket investor – as brokerages big and small are doing in response to the iBuyers – the house gets sold without there ever even being a listing contract to bitch about.

I hate the NAR, but I hate Special Olympics real estate brokers worse. If you can actually do this job, you don’t need to scheme to cripple your competition.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: Where the wealthy fled to: The rich left cities like NYC and Chicago during the pandemic and moved to ‘hidden gem’ locations including Salt Lake City and Phoenix.

Housing Wire: Amid expansion, Opendoor lost $270M in Q1. I love how “news” hide facts: They lost $110,000 per “investment” sold – in the easiest resale market in human history!

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications jump Read more

Welcome to the new age.

What a contrast, huh?

Trump was not supposed to have won the 2016 election – also rigged, but without the late-night emergency fall-back ballot dumps. But the consequence of his having won is that Americans at least have a decent comparison, if not an actual choice about their leaders.

So: Which do you prefer, having had almost four months to judge: The half-assed capitalist or the half-witted fascist?

You don’t have to answer right away. Give it some thought while you’re waiting in line to buy gas – if there is any to buy.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: Zillow and realtor.com Battle for Traffic and Revenue Growth.

The Blue State Conservative: Philadelphia’s Fall: A Microcosm of Democrat Devastation.

Daniel Greenfield: California is Leaving: No children, no middle class, and no future.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: The Geography of COVID-19.

Law Enforcement Today: Former police chief: If we lose the rule of law, we are going to lose America – and we’re just about there.

The American Mind: The Spent Society.

Sohrab Ahmari: Woke-ism will swallow our kids unless we restore the West’s great traditions.

I wrote the other day about Zillow’s losses on its iBuyer “investments” – incomprehensible losses considering that this is one of the few times when it is possible to make money on non-producing real estate.

The losses on iBuyer “investments” can be stupefying from the point of view of any real estate agent, investor or house-flipper: You should be able to show a profit in any market, since making a profit is the goal, the point and the bright-line go/no-go signal on how to proceed.

And this is what is different about Zillow as an iBuyer, as distinguished from OpenDoor and OfferPad: As long as Zillow can sell its web traffic and its fallouts to gullible suckers, iBuying is lead-gen and can be carried as a loss-leader. Witness: Zillow concedes that it lost $30K per “investment” and it still showed a profit for the first quarter – all credit to the sucker-bilking business it claims to disdain.

Zillow got into iBuying because OpenDoor was getting in front of it in the lead stream. It is now in a position to crush OpenDoor and OfferPad: There is no practical upper bound on what Zillow can offer – since they can happily lose money on every “investment” – with more-typical flippers having only the transactions themselves as income streams.

This is beyond crazy – my objection all along. Cinemas show movies to sell popcorn, candy and sodas – the profit centers. Car dealers sell ugly loans, offering pretty cars as the incentive. And Zillow sells easy-peasy tract homes very slowly and very badly as a way of trawling useless agents into paying 35% at COE for well-worked “leads.”

If you think that sounds a lot sleazier than the supermarket real estate magazines Zillow replaced, I expect there’s a good deal of sleaze in Zillow we know nothing about. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot about real estate they don’t know, so we’ll bespy more failures of their snickering guile as the market turns.

In Read more

Charter schools deliver what public schools can’t: Actual taxpayer-funded education. On-line charter schools deliver what no in-person school can do: Education without bullying.

It’s fun to watch them selling it: Short kids, pudgy kids – even a literal red-headed step-child. As noted below, charter schools are answering the “what for?” and “what’s next?” questions better. One on-line charter we know is offering free summer-school – which is simply bald-faced loss-leader recruitment.

I’ve never been crazy about the charter school idea, because you can’t take government money without the government eventually taking over. That hasn’t happened so far, and the teacher’s unions have been remarkably obtuse about the charter movement – so it still works for now. And the simple fact of competition and innovation in education is wonderful, whatever the downstream risks.

Grasshoppers make war on merit because it shames them: The spotlight of excellence silhouettes their sloth and envy. If you would proudly proclaim that you never feed your children poison, make sure no one is poisoning their minds all day while you’re working.

Homeschooling by Aristotle is the ideal, with everything else falling short. Charter schools – on-line or in-person – deliver what public schools won’t, and they mitigate the dogma and bullying. Ultimately, the hard work is all on the kids, but charter schools provide more opportunities and present fewer obstacles to their thriving.

In other news:

Slate: Logjam! A journey to the heart of the lumber shortage.

AP: California leaving: State population declines for first time.

The College Fix: Texas Virtual Academy trains students to enter workforce right after high school.

The American Mind: Schoolhouse Scapegoat: Joe Biden wants to instill racial hatred and resentment as the new American values.

Why should you subscribe to and religiously ingest BloodhoundBlog every day? The price inflation that’s suddenly such big news? We warned you it was coming on February 15th:

“One third of all American dollars are less than a year old. That inflation will be paid for. Plan accordingly.”

That was obvious, frankly, and I had been ruminating about it for months – last year’s mad spending was one of my key objections to Trump. What’s worse is that the yearling dollars by now number five out of every six: In due course, and assuming ZERO additional inflation, it will turn out that an American dollar is worth one-fifth or less what it was on January 1, 2020.

Buy deep, borrow cheap, plan ahead. Dollar-denominated assets will evaporate but tangible goods will require active defenses.

Welcome to the new age. There is at least some measure of self-defense to be found here among the dawgs: We can help you see what’s coming.

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers are the most pessimistic they’ve been in a decade thanks to tight supply, high prices.

Housing Wire: Regulatory costs add nearly $94K to new home prices.

City Journal: Always Be Founding: Projects to “renew” civic education and “reinvent” U.S. democracy smuggle in a rejection of the American Founding.

Christopher Rufo: The Wokest Place on Earth: Disney mounts an internal campaign against “white privilege” and organizes racially segregated “affinity groups.”

American Thinker: One way you can start saving American liberty, personally.

Joe Concha: Social media’s ban on Trump: Our ‘silence of the lambs’ moment.

Zillow’s first-quarter results are out, and the message is plainly obvious: Milk the idiots, but don’t be the idiot.

They won’t learn. The only successful “disruption” in proptech, so far at least, belongs to Zillow: They replaced supermarket real estate magazines with the Zestimate™. The difference is, the sleazoids who published those cheesy shoppers knew where the bread was buttered – bilking an endlessly-renewing stream of gullible morons. This is Zillow’s actual business, but, like Redfin, Coke and so many other publicly-traded companies, they’re not happy making money.

Zillow wants to be a real boy, so it admits to pissing away $30K per iBuyer “investment” in the most amazingly easy seller’s market in the history of time.

People like to smooth numbers, but Zillow is smooth about nothing: They will have made a little money on a few houses, lost money on most – and lost $100K or more on a few. They don’t have a plan, but they do have buckets of money to finance their ineptitude.

When the market turns, Zillow will be able to lose six-figures on every iBuyer “investment.” I’m assuming that will make them even prouder of themselves.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: What Zillow’s Results Reveal About Its Momentum Towards Zillow 2.0.

Housing Wire: More renters and homeowners are making payments.

Christopher Rufo: The Shaky Foundations of L.A.’s Housing ‘Entitlement’ for the Homeless.

The Federalist: The Census Rewarded Red States, But Democrats Are Scheming To Reverse That.

Heather Mac Donald: Diversity Over Discovery: Biden’s war on merit puts America’s scientific edge at risk.