Category: Marketing (page 16 of 191)

Real estate is kids and dogs, but real estate sales is entrepreneurs.

I was interviewed yesterday on the future prospects of the big-name iBuyers, whose numbers are everyday augmented by many, many no-name iBuyers. I’m a bear, of course. When the market turns, the slow-selling pontificating poindexters will discover why less-pedigreed brokers do not own the inventory they represent. Plus which, when the world catches on to The Full Uruguay, American residential real estate could be in decline enduringly.

Worse than all that, worse than everything else is simply this: Employees are not entrepreneurs. Before there’s a fire in the hearth in someone’s new home, there was a fire in a real estate agent’s belly – and if not, the process took too long and cost too much.

The proud-mouthed iBuyers are interesting to me, right now, to see how poorly they sell in an impossibly-easy market for listing brokers. They stand out in any screen of listings, since they are the only listers who can get to double-digit Days-on-Market. The listing histories are always interesting, as are the financial details of the closed sales: By selling poorly and by mismanaging their offers, iBuyers end up with weaker buyers – with financed offers in an all-cash world – frequently paying closing costs.

The question: How do iBuyers matter in my world?

The answer: They don’t.

They’re pawnbrokers, and only a fool would pawn a house in this market. They invariably list too high, so they make my listings look like a bargain to buyers. And because they sell so slowly and so weakly, they make me look like a genius to my sellers. Beyond that, the big-budget iBuyers are just more tricky niche pitches in a world awash in them.

In other news:

Housing Wire: The appraisal gap is complicating deals across the country.

Mike DelPrete: America’s Next Top Real Estate Model: Tracking the Growth of eXp, Redfin, and Compass.

Housing Wire: Rising rates push mortgage applications down for fifth week.

CNBC: Mall vacancies jump at fastest pace on record, hitting new high, as retailers cull Read more

If you know when you hire them that your employees will never, ever be coming in to the office, why would you care where they live? Bandwidth-permitting, why not Uruguay? Better yet, why not recruit – with no worries about visas – from Uruguay’s intellectual elite, instead?

That flips the script on the remote-work question: How are you gonna get ’em back to Paree, after they’ve smelled fresh air? You won’t. Instead of continuing to try to make that beehive disease vector of an office work – situated, as it is, amidst a newly-police-demoralized warzone – when employers wake up and embrace the actual “new normal,” the whole world changes.

Intellectual capital is now transnational, or it soon will be. California fears Texas, but Texas should fear Uruguay or The Philippines or the vast and hugely anglophilic subcontinent of India.

Commercial real estate is now transnational – and immensely redundant.

Residential real estate is now transnational. Ex-pat retirees have known this for decades: Living elsewhere on an American income makes for a nice life. Wages will flatten, but now you don’t have to retire to live in paradise.

The Full Uruguay is already here, at least within the U.S. But it’s here, too, in all of the casual off-shoring already underway – and in the digital nomads who have been working this way for years. Elon Musk promises anywhere-internet, along with the power to drive it. ‘Knowledge workers’ can now work from anywhere, including Montevideo.

Call it globalization-by-internet, The Full Uruguay will tend over time to flatten wages and housing prices – as it craters the value of office space.

Incredible homes can be yours cheaply, but you must act soon. 😉 Meanwhile, consider that you now face global competition from people much better-prepared than you – who are willing to work for much less. Plan accordingly…

In other news:

CNBC: ‘This is not the time for amateurs,’ says real estate agent in a fiercely competitive housing market.

Housing Wire: CFPB proposes foreclosure ban until 2022.

Fox News: Portland police look for exit, say they’re ‘burned out’: report.

The American Mind: Permanent Racism.

The Read more

BloodhoundBlog inadvertently took Easter weekend off. My apologies.

We got clobbered by something big Friday morning. I haven’t read the server logs, and My Eyes Glaze Over anyway, but the ISP shut down HTTP access for our own safety.

That much is just right. When bad guys bounce, they bounce elsewhere. An hour or two later, you’d never know there was a storm.

Alas, it was Easter weekend. The ISP was understaffed, and I inkle that BloodhoundBlog was not the only site affected. It’s a jungle out there.

In any case, like the world itself this Easter Monday, we are redeemed. I had been on a 221-day blogging streak, so starting today I get to try to beat that number.

I’m glad you’re here. And more and more every day, I’m glad we’re here.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Asking prices of newly listed homes reach all-time high.

Redfin: Homes Sell At Fastest Pace on Record—59% Under Contract within 2 Weeks.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 3.18%.

Rob Hahn: Zillow is Not Your Competition: A Point from My Presentations.

Fox News: Police defunded: Major cities feeling the loss of police funding as murders, other crimes soar.

American Thinker: I Work in the Public School System. Critical Race Theory Is Everywhere.

Andrea Widburg: How not to cower before the COVID police.

City Journal: Test Anxiety: Asian-American parents mobilized to oppose the de Blasio administration’s specialized high school proposal. Now they’re fighting a larger battle.

John Kass, who I swear is anointed in his dreams by Mike Royko’s Ghost, brings us Federal Judge James Ho, who explains quite cogently why all of “anti-racism” is hideously racist:

Once everyone has had full and fair opportunity to be considered, you pick on the merits. Both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act make it clear that it is wrong to hire people based on race.

This would be the opposite of what Redfin.com’s CEO Glenn Kelman and other proud-mouthed openly-racist corporate weenies are bragging about doing.

Played, paid or afraid? Why would these ignominious clowns publicly boast about deliberately making hiring errors? The truth is, they’re simply juveniles, saying what they think it takes to get by.

One can hope for redemption – it’s Easter, after all – but my bet is that these perfectly-appointed perpetually-teenaged jackasses will be spewing their puerile bullshit all the way to the death camps.

In other news:

Housing Wire: The ugly side of housing: low inventory.

Housing Wire: What Biden’s infrastructure plan does for housing.

KXAN TV: ‘We need help’: With eviction moratoriums extended, some landlords are selling.

CNBC: Most evictions are banned through June. What you need to know.

Brad Polumbo: The Biden administration quietly extended a disastrous pandemic policy.

The San Diego Union-Tribune: California legislature tries to eliminate single-family-home zoning, again.

Heather Mac Donald: Mostly Peaceful Mayhem.

Angelo Codevilla: As We Look For Others: Whoever would lead America’s deplorables must head up a national effort to discredit and stop the totalitarian tactics of the Left.

The American Mind: Terms of Servitude.

Continuing his quest to be real estate’s leading champion of the forthcoming anti-Ant genocide, Redfin’s Glenn Kelman yesterday jumped onto the pandering-to-aggrieved-Asians boxcar bandwagon. As I’ve pointed out before, racism is a terrible idea for both Asians and Redfin, none of whom have any excuse for their dalliances with bigotry.

This was my instant reaction to Kelman’s newest anti-Ant admonition:

“We stood with Black Americans against violence then; now we stand with Asians and Pacific Islanders.” –Glenn Kelman, #Redfin.

Hey, Glenn, since you’re up on all the latest bigotry stats: Who is it who persecutes Asians, most often?

Who gains when Asian students or job applicants get screwed?

Hiring the wrong people is obviously bad for business, but do you really think this abject racist pandermania works as marketing? Is there no one else in your life to condemn your deeply earnest bigotry? No one, even, to measure the substandard results?

Fun to think that there is no way for you to talk about anti-Asian racism without admitting who are the worst racists in America, but I doubt any of this will keep Asians, Jews or other competent people out of the boxcars.

I know you had an education, so you cannot claim you don’t know where your racist policies lead. Are you a grown-up, Glenn Kelman, or just another corporate clown?

Glenn Kelman has posting privileges here, but, here or anywhere, I challenge him to defend his racism not to me, not to his shareholders or clients, but to his sons, who someday will face the artificial barriers to success he is erecting – unless they have by then already fallen prey to the anti-Ant pogrom.

In other news:

Redfin: Five Ways the Housing Market Will Change After the Pandemic. More Redfin bullshit. The exodus was caused by the riots, not the virus, as is obvious in Redfin’s own charts. What has happened to real estate values around CHAZ/CHOP? What will happen if Derek Chauvin is not lynched, as planned?

CNBC: Pending home sales fell over 10% in February, Read more

The workers of the world never would unite, but they put the lie to the stories of their exploitation by getting very, very fat.

That’s what gave birth to environmentalism: Free markets are clearly much better for people than “compassionate” slavery, so a new villain was schemed up – the rape of the planet. People got right on fixing all that, of course, so the goalposts had to be moved, again and again, with the threat ever more nebulous but the solution always the same: Still more government.

And that was the state of play until the virus licensed a brand new fear campaign. And who can argue with the results? A full year of voluntary self-imprisonment in response to hysterically exaggerated false proxy signals.

But: Is the jig up? China Joe is begging states to reimpose mask mandates, but the fear factor is clearly gone. The virus kills people who would have died anyway and the morbidly obese. That low-hanging fruit is already gone, sadly, just as we are reaching herd immunity – and just as sunlight is becoming more abundant everywhere.

Frustrated displays escalate and amplify – the maskholiness displays will get worse – and that’s a good thing. It’s how everyone eventually catches on to the scam.

In other news:

CNBC: Some landlords sell properties as CDC extends eviction ban.

City Journal: The Death of Density? To survive and thrive, cities will have to overcome a number of formidable trends.

CNBC: Old golf courses and office buildings are turning into retail warehouses as demand for industrial space keeps climbing. Land seeks its highest and best use. This is a celebration of down-scaling – of disimprovement.

The New York Post: Seattle residents at breaking point with homeless crisis: ‘Makes me depressed’.

The Center Square: Commerce Department report: Red states leading U.S. economic growth.

Brad Polumbo: Free States Faring Far Better Than Lockdown States in One Huge Way, New Data Show.

City Journal: Progressive Parents, Closed Schools: Residents of wealthy, left-leaning communities in New Jersey struggle against the power of teachers’ unions.

I’ve been socializing a puppy in my spare time over the past few months. Her name is Cleo, a French Bulldog. She thinks I’m her favorite playmate. I think she hung the moon.

I’m only with her a few hours a week, typically, but I do have a praxis and a plan: I want for her to have a happier, more playful adulthood than most dogs – more Labrador, less snoozehound. That’s a funny idea, except that I firmly believe that toddlers stumble onto their destiny – unless they are led to it. Can I ‘imprint’ a dog against what is imputed to be ‘her nature’? We’ll see. We’re having fun, regardless.

Cleo is a church dog and this is the Paschal Week, so she’ll be spending a lot of time with me, her church’s designated atheist. That will be fun for her, since work is play to dogs. And it will be wonderful for me, because real estate is kids and dogs.

In other news:

CNBC: CDC will extend national eviction ban through June 30, sources say.

The Hill: Democrats move to crush red states’ rise and threat.

American Thinker: The States Must Resist the Federal Takeover of Elections.

Stark Realities: Study: U.S. Media’s Covid Coverage Slants Heavily Negative.

Fox Business: Biden administration working with industry to develop COVID-19 ‘passports’ as vaccinations progress.

Daniel Payne: Homeschooling numbers soar amid continued school closings, signaling post-pandemic resilience.

Priests and judges dress in drag to overawe you, to stun you into silence by their assertion of superior office. Scientists do the same thing with their lab coats and trifocals. The display lends nothing to the argument, but if you are blinded by it, so much the better.

All three of those branches of authority, plus many others, used to invest a great deal of effort in defending their reputations for probity. Science, in particular, wanted you to know all about the incorruptibility of the scientific method – long since supplanted by the popularity contests known as peer review.

Nobody does that any longer – stands up for probity – and we all know that any particular exponent of authority easily could be and very probably is corrupted – if not by lucre then by ideology. To expect integrity from anyone in a position to betray you for advantage by now just seems naive.

What’s changed? I can give you the answer in one brutal question:

Is there really no one in your life who would be ashamed to see you behaving this way?

We are inducted into the cult of lifelong trustworthy behavior, if ever we are, by the moral exemplars around us in our toddler years. It’s typically dad’s approval we’re living up to, but it could be mom or a grandparent – the person who was gracious enough not to buy your shit when you were still a very poor liar.

Why is no one in authority worthy of trust? Why are young people mutilating their genitals? Same answer to both questions – and to all questions about the discontents of modernity: No fathers, no families, no future. No exceptions.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: The Biggest Flaw in NAR’s Defense of Commissions.

The New York Post: Los Angeles agency votes for $36M police funding boost as crime surges.

Zero Hedge: Where Manhattanites Fled During The Pandemic May Surprise You.

Townhall: Losing the Language, Losing the Argument.

Brad Polumbo: We need to stop overlooking one Read more

I had a plan for this year, but the world got in the way.

I was sure Trump would win and the all-go-no-quit Trump economy would rage on. At the same time, I did not anticipate the NAR opting to take up the race war against its own membership. So in both of those ways, my plans are jammed: I don’t want to grow just to feed cannibals, and I desperately want to get shed of the NAR.

Even so, the first quarter has been good to me, and the whole year is shaping up nice. I’m told there are more Realtors than listings right now, but it is a very pleasant world for a broker with a client base – and listing houses for sale has never been easier than it is right now.

The supply side is my long-term future, and the Southwest exodus will continue as before, after the riot-borne exodus has abated. “Affordable, move-in-ready luxury” – that’s every relo’s dream, easy to sell from afar.

For the short-run, I’m not so sure. For now, I’m content to hide and watch – and play with dogs.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Average home sale price hits all-time record.

American Greatness: Two Major California Newspapers Lost Over $50 Million in Revenue in 2020.

Rabobank: Food Price Surge Is Unlikely to Revert.

American Thinker: Why we might soon see big-time deflation.

Julie Kelly: Where is GOP Outrage Over Justice Department’s Capitol Probe?

American Thinker: The Democrats’ War on Black Americans.

City Journal: Taxation with Representation: A fair and reasonable alternative to D.C. statehood.

I’ve been expecting this news for a while, but I didn’t know how it would play out. Given the incipient housing crisis ballooning on the border, I thought China Joe might make mention of it yesterday.

Vide: There is a huge surplus of effectively-abandoned housing building up in the rioted cities. No one is talking about this, but it is simple math: Massive exodus from urban to suburban leaves empty urbanity behind. Moreover, big cities are now bursting with emptiness in their inner cores, as every Ant who could scurried home and stayed there.

Is the problem that poor people need better housing? Nah. Is it that all of China Joe’s newly-imported voters need places to live? Nah. Do we finally plan to actually “do something” about the homeless? C’mon! Get your head out of your ass.

No, the problem is that the very wealthiest of Americans own a ton of urban dirt – and the value of those investments is – so far secretly – in freefall.

Sometime very soon, expect to hear about a housing initiative that will convert underperforming office towers into grim government-owned tenements, instead.

Two points, I think: First, if big cities become vertical homeless encampments, they will never come back. Second, if you own C- or D-quality rental housing in rioted cities, your best day to sell – forever – is probably today: The government’s handouts will be going to richer landlords in other neighborhoods.

In other news:

The San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. has nearly 16 million square feet of vacant office space. Why can’t it become housing?

Redfin: Housing Market Update: A Record 39% of Homes Sold Above List Price.

Real Clear Education: The War on Merit.

Joanne Jacobs: ‘They sit and stare’.

City Journal: A Big Gamble: The Biden administration downplays the risks of its historically massive spending bills.

Angelo Codevilla: American Exodus: Don’t wait for the oligarchy to let you in. Just walk away.

As with municipal water supplies, government schooling is a terrible idea. Even if it were good – and I’m old enough to remember when it was better, at least – intellectual diversity actually is our strength, especially when the government schools are serving up poison.

So while the past year has been great for dogs and awful for kids, there is a silver lining for about 20% of kids – those lucky enough to be homeschooled or privately educated. This will end up creating an aristocracy of literacy – precisely what the public schools were intended to prevent – but at least your doctor and your pharmacist will both know how to read.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates jump to 3.17% last week.

Brad Polumbo: 250 Top Business Leaders Just Warned Cuomo: NY’s Tax Hike Proposals Will Have One Huge Consequence.

American Thinker: The Government Is Considering a Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Joanne Jacobs: 11.1% of families are homeschooling.

The Federalist: Once Held Hostage By Teachers’ Unions, West Virginia Just Passed The Nation’s Broadest School Choice Law.

Swiss Policy Research: Why the flu has ‘disappeared’.

American Thinker: COVID-19 could lead to telemedicine expansion.

City Journal: Don’t Let Financial Regulators Dream Up Climate Solutions.

If you sniff at a glass of tap-water, chances are you’ll nose out the scent of chlorine. Your local municipality chlorinates your water supply because they know it’s not safe. They’re hoping that introducing toxins into the water supply will kill all the stuff still there that might otherwise kill you.

That would be a kludge if it were merely absurd, but your public water system poisoning your drinking water because they know it’s already poisonous is a blaring confession of ineptitude.

If you’re looking for something government does well, the list stops at killing: Its only useful function is killing bad guys, but it much prefers killing businesses, hopes, dreams and innocents. If it can casually kill you with your drinking water, so much the better.

The obvious course of action would be to get government out of every activity where the objective is not killing people. There’s no guarantee they can even manage national defense, by now, but their ability to screw everything else up is as clear as that milky, smelly glass of water in front of you.

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyer mortgage demand inches higher, but rates hit highest level since summer.

Housing Wire: New home sales plunge 18.2%, but demand stays strong.

CNBC: The national eviction ban is set to expire at the end of March. The CDC likely will extend it.

Mike DelPrete: CAC-attack: The Cost of iBuyer Customer Acquisition.

Housing Wire: Spencer Rascoff outfit Pacaso raises $75 million. I would love to interview whomever thought this was a good idea. I cannot imagine a business model less connected to the reality of living organisms.

The Seattle Times: Washington state’s rise in homelessness outpaced the nation’s, according to report.

Joel Kotkin: The death of the American city: Rising crime and a pandemic-inspired exodus are powering urban decay.

Daniel Greenfield: A Muslim Terrorist From the Capital of ISIS Shot Up a Supermarket. Biden Blames Guns.

Gordon Chang: The Coming Demographic Collapse of China.

City Journal: Open Schools Now: A new CDC report confirms that K-12 schools are not associated with Covid-19 transmission.

Donald Trump was a president of great consequence, most of which was buried under daily fusillades of hysterical hatred.

His greatest accomplishment, best obscured, was peace in the Middle East – which China Joe is doing his best to undo, of course. China first – always – but The War Party can’t resupply weapons that haven’t been used, so war first, too.

The good news – perhaps irrepressibly good? Lion and lamb are already at the bargaining table – no more Trump administration required. Good business makes good sense, so the peace may yet endure even despite its Marxist and militarist enemies.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Existing home sales dip 6.6% amid supply struggles.

Reason: The Dream of the ’90s Died in Portland.

Frontpage: Terrified for NYC’s Future.

Daniel Greenfield: Asian-Americans Worry About Democrat Bill ‘Legalizing’ Mugging.

Ron Paul: Want a Job? Get a Shot!

The ideal of rational political philosophy is to achieve a stable equilibrium maximizing individual liberty and minimizing mob tyranny. But the way that is done is with stable, father-led, monogamous families. That is how trust is engendered – by literally imprinting moral goodness into us before we are capable of informed discretion – and it comes into existence in no other way.

Libertarianism-writ-large idealizes the well-fathered past without knowing it, seeking to replicate the consequences without the cause – just like any other Ci cargo-cult. It exclusively seeks Ci solutions to the on-going Ds problem – the emasculation of fatherhood.

Doesn’t matter in the long run – Ds wins – but all of libertarianism-writ-large looks like a psyop to me by now: Mountains of unreadable books, effectively zero reproduction. Ci is at war with human identity, and to the extent it is Ci, so is libertarianism.

In this context, crypto-currencies are an ineffectual and strategically-inverted stop-gap, much like freezing eggs: Better money will not buy you better fathers – the source of tomorrow’s wealth.

In other (not much) news:

CNBC: Existing home sales fell sharply in February, as supply dropped by the largest amount on record.

Axios: Inside a crowded border patrol tent in Donna, Texas.

City Journal: Death and Lockdowns: There’s no proof that lockdowns save lives but plenty of evidence that they end them.

I do so love being ahead of the news. It’s not hard, if you’re willing to see with your eyes and not your ears.

This is me a month-and-a-half ago, foreseeing this weekend’s very temporary “news” reports:

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

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

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

In big cities, poor Asian people are routinely persecuted by poor black people. It was ever thus: The police have never done a good job of protecting Asian people, not until they move into the tonier neighborhoods. That would be actual racism built into the system, and poor black and brown people have every right to complain about it, too.

But: Since George Floyd found sobriety, the police are standing down, especially in big cities. Every pre-existing crime problem will have gotten worse, including abuses by black people against Asian people. That would be the news, if the purpose of news reporting was telling the truth, instead of sliming Donald Trump, his supporters and white people in general.

For my money, Asian people are fools to get sucked into this racist game, since they are already its designated losers, but perhaps it’s strategy: You can’t join the Grasshoppers without demonstrating a complete hostility to facts, after all.

In other news:

The New York Post: Top finance, tech firms mulling NY exodus over proposed tax hike.

Bonchie: California Couple Buys Their Dream Home, What Happens Next Will Absolutely Infuriate You.

The Libertarian Republic: Dear Read more