Category: Marketing (page 19 of 191)

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

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

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

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

In other news:

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

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

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

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

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

Don Feder: Our Enemy: The Boardroom.

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

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

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

I can’t defend that claim because it is not being documented by the real estate press, but it will turn out that rioted cities will have lost population to non-rioted cities, that more-suburban areas in rioted cities will have gained where more-urban areas will have lost, and that, generally, people will have moved from D- and C-quality housing to B- and A-rated domiciles – leaving many empty former-residences behind them.

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

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

In other news:

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

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications drop for second week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news:

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

John Hinderaker: Why has Texas gone dark?.

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

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

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

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

I have an MLS search that is almost always open on my screen: “Coldwater Springs one story no pools no golf one month.”

My naming convention is obvious, and that one little search informs more than half of my world: The majority of the properties we manage fit that profile, as does half or more of everything I sell. I literally am a ‘neighborhood specialist’ without every intending to be.

Here are two things that are interesting about that search:

First, because inventory is in such short supply, I have to look at everything in Coldwater Springs to understand anything. Even going back only a month on Closed transactions is unreliable, with numbers moving so fast. Comping just for comparability sends you too far back in time, so you have to figure out where you stand by order-of-precedence, as well. Oh, well. It’s a great time to be a lister, and it is a wonderful time to be an experienced lister.

But: Second: Being trod upon, the worm will turn. That search has been rock-steady at 9 units for many months. Almost nothing ever Active, and then only for a few days, the rest either Pending or Closed. Now we’re at 14 hits – and climbing, the trend would suggest. One Active, stupidly overpriced so it may last a while. One Coming Soon. And, disturbingly, three Under Contract/Accepting Backups.

Greedy sellers and weak listers go together, but still… Last year’s price surge was fueled by the riots, with displaced urbanites rediscovering their suburban roots with twice the house at half the price. The riots have abated, for now, for the most part, but homeowners in suburban boomtowns like Phoenix might entertain a Californian paranoia: From Phoenix to Dayton or Decatur is also twice the house at half the price.

I don’t know that things have actually changed – “It’s just a gully. Just nerves.” – but if they haven’t they will. One third of all American dollars are less than a year old. That inflation will be paid for. Plan accordingly.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: California is collapsing.

Joel Read more

The Flynn Effect is in the news lately, assuming there is any news lately: Westerners are getting dumber. If you read me, you know why: Fatherhood was fully undermined in the West 50 years ago – 1970 is the knee on a dozen tragic curves. Everything fathers once did very well – especially rearing their own offspring – is now done very badly.

The ‘social’ ‘sciences’ are largely cargo cults: They measure phenomena they never bother to understand. Vide: The Marshmallow Test measures the Cautious need of the child’s parents; the children of nerds don’t eat the marshmallow, but they also know the full alphabet and what faked sound every animal makes. If you want your child to do better on his next official Marshmallow Test, practice at self-restraint every day. That’s what the Cautious parents are doing.

Likewise, the I.Q. test may measure differences among equally-prepared students, but what it measures in practice is the relative lack of preparation among test takers. The Flynn Effect essentially marveled at the stable families of the mid-twentieth century. It is losing its cargo-cultish “predictive” value because dad has been kicked to the curb – and hence his children are arriving at the testing center prepared worse not just intellectually but emotionally.

But: Be of good cheer. The Flynn Effect doesn’t predict anything – no more than the lunch bell predicts lunch. But the underlying reality is revealed by it, anyway: When fathers lead their families, everything is better for everyone, enduringly.

In other news:

AP: Minneapolis to spend $6.4M to recruit more police officers.

New York Post: Democrats in rebellion against Cuomo’s nursing-home coverup.

Karol Markowicz: Cuomo Didn’t Protect Seniors From COVID-19. But it Was the Media That Covered it Up.

American Thinker: A citizen’s list of ‘common core’ actions for election integrity.

RedState: In Must-Watch Clip, Trump Attorney “Michael van der Veen, Citizen” Destroys Media.

Roger Kimball: Yes, Acquittal Is Vindication.

Charles Hurt: After Impeachment Farce Ends, Next Comes 14th Amendment.

I will give you a way of understanding good and evil that should make things easier to understand, if not to abide.

Like this: When you are confronted with inexplicably evil conduct, entertain this thought:

“How tragic it is that there is no one in your life who would be ashamed to see you behaving this way.”

If you say those words out loud, you might get punched, but just by silently intoning them you will have fully-explained your situation: Well-brought-up adults are good by habit, not by repeated resolutions. But they are good by habit because, as children, they did not want to disappoint someone – typically a parent or grandparent.

All of “high-trust” civilization is built on good fathering, and everything everyone decries in the thoughtless or predatory behaviors of modernity emerges from our having undermined fatherhood.

How to fix the mess from here? No need. Just get out of dad’s way. He’ll take care of everything.

In other news:

CNBC: Bidding wars are off the charts, as home listings fall to a record low. Flash news from a grunt on the ground: The worm has turned on inventory.

king5.com: More businesses flee Seattle because of crime and violence. At least 160 businesses have left the city since last March.

New York Post: Millennials buying cheap old homes to escape pandemic cages.

Human Events: Disney Amongst Potential Mass Exodus of Businesses From California.

City Journal: Deficits Don’t Matter—Until They Do: We should be wary about dismissing risks that no longer seem relevant; eventually, they reemerge.

Seth Barron: Cuomo Unmasked: The New York governor’s long-running media celebration was largely based on a fiction—his dramatic understatement of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes.

Less by hook than by crook, the Ruling Class has gotten shed of Trump, so now the truth about the China Virus can start to dribble out.

If you didn’t know you were being lied to all last year, beware of scales falling from your eyes: The testing was juiced to make Trump look bad. Fauci, et al, lied about therapeutics to make Trump look bad. The mad-rush vaccine was delayed slightly to make Trump look bad. Death numbers were massively inflated to make Trump look bad.

And now at last we can be told the obvious truth: Democratic governors murdered thousands of old people to make Trump look bad.

They are ghouls. There is no one they won’t kill in pursuit of power. Recall that Andrew Cuomo was being lionized by the mainstream media while he was covering up this mass murder.

Heads up: If you can’t catch a clue, just sit tight: It’ll catch up to you.

In other news:

Jordan Davidson: Grandma-Killer Cuomo’s Top Aide Confesses State Covered Up Nursing Home Death Toll.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers Turning Obfuscation of Profit into an Art Form.

CNBC: Strength of housing market has broadened out, says CEO of homebuilder Taylor Morrison.

Ezra Klein: California is making liberals squirm.

CNBC: Zillow hopes to turn flood of real estate porn users during Covid into actual sales. Ahem: “We monetize a single-digit percentage of the people that come visit us right now,” Barton said.

New York Times: How the Pandemic Left the $25 Billion Hudson Yards Eerily Deserted.

Frontpage: Dems’ Next Plot Against Trump.

City Journal: Their Cups Runneth Over: State and local government revenues have recovered from the pandemic, and further federal aid is unnecessary.

How lame is real estate marketing? Zillow is making money with this for a tagline:

“When you’re ready for a change, we’re ready to help.”

Of course, they’re not selling to the public. Check the MLS: They’re terrible at selling houses. But at the boiler-room huckstering of gullible self-bankrupting real estate agents, they are beyond parallel.

As I’ve pointed out, technology is well-suited for the paperwork side of the real estate business, but it is lousy at selling and servicing real estate in the real world.

Guess what you can’t sub out or hire? Fire in the belly. No rainmaker, no rain.

The future of Zillow and all big corporations is Nikole Hannah-Jones: Mau-maued to death by consistent, craven C-suite gutlessness. But: Whatever: If you can sell and not just market, you’ll be fine.

In other news:

Housing Wire: For the third week in a row, mortgage rates stay at 2.73%.

Housing Wire: Zillow to buy ShowingTime for $500M. You will be assimilated by The Borg.

Mortgage News Daily: Conforming Loan Standards Loosened in January. From Brian Brady: “Mortgage guidelines loosening. The AVMs are back and appraisal waivers are being handed out like free candy.”

Housing Wire: Zillow revenue grows 22% in 2020.

Seeking Alpha: Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Hell Yes It Is.

City Journal: Yes, Bail Reform in Chicago Has Increased Crime: A recent report makes the connection clear, though its authors and funders claim otherwise.

American Greatness: The Coming Military Purge.

AND Magazine: Killing the Republic – Trump As Tiberius Gracchus.

Daniel Greenfield: In Its Desperation to Get Trump, Senate Created Unconstitutional Precedent for Impeaching Former Officials.

American Thinker: The Democrats’ misread conservatives when they attack Trump.

American Thinker: American Police State: No Questions Allowed.

I listed a house on January 29th that closed yesterday – eleven calendar days, inclusive, and the seller is out of state. The house sold in one day on market. I’m normally not quite that quick – it takes a few days to milk every offer to the limit – but we got an offer that we literally could not refuse.

Vide:

• Full list price
• All cash
• Appraisal waived
• Inspections waived
• Repairs waived
• Closing in 10 days (we lost a day to the HOA)

The house is tenant-occupied, a reddish flag in the midst of eviction moratoria, so it was impossible to pass on a contract where the only possible exits for the buyer were force majeure and acts of god. They literally could not cancel.

I am not your broker, and I am very glad that I am not representing buyers right now. But if you are, there is no posture quite so appealing to sellers right now as coming in completely supine, prostrate, waiving everything.

You can say the buyer of my listing was advised in ways that could lead to adverse consequences – that that’s what buyer protections are for.

My answer: They got the house.

In other news:

nbc4i.com: Just years after building San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, Salesforce will let most employees work remotely indefinitely.

CNBC: Mortgage demand drops as interest rates hit a three-month high.

CNBC: Mortgage delinquencies sink to pandemic low, but distress is far from over.

City Journal: Recall Fever in California: Gavin Newsom might not be the only Golden State politician facing a reckoning. This makes great sense everywhere: Get rid of whom you can and preoccupy the ones you can’t.

City Journal: Come One, Come All: President Biden’s immigration agenda will be a disaster for working-class Americans.

Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism Is the New War on the Working Class.

Dennis Prager: How Many Americans Has the American Medical Establishment Killed?

Michael Goodwin: With acquittal a foregone conclusion, the real drama is what Trump does next.

Michael Walsh: Republican Ineptitude and Democratic Ruthlessness Put Liberties in Danger.

I had a bunch of impeachment links, but I ditched them. If you care, you know what to Doogle. I expect I’ll wait to see the highlight reel. I’m much more curious about Trump and his portents than I am watching the Senate embarrass itself some more, in any case.

I was on the bubble about Trump forever: Di or Id? We know now: Trump’s Achilles’ heel is his reputation – second by second. A Di truly does not care what other people think, especially about him or his work. Ask me how I know? Trump cares a great deal, and so it is easy to push him off his game by threatening him in the next few news cycles.

Idsc, I think, not that it matters. Trump was never the solution, just the stopgap. We’ll find out this week if he can retain that role, but the gap is all but unstopped – at least for now.

In other news:

Housing Wire: 5 million missed rent or mortgage payments in December.

Redfin: Redfin Publishes Commissions on Over 700,000 Homes for Sale. What’s funny about this? Only Cautious buyers care what the Buyer’s Agent makes. Redfin is crowing that its marketing excludes black, brown and poor people generally by disparate impact.

Housing Wire: More real estate agents charged with storming the Capitol.

Rob Hahn: What Did the Judge Mean Here? Questions on the PLS v. NAR Ruling.

City Journal: The Other California: After Covid-19, the Inland Empire offers a way forward for the Golden State.

The Federalist: Leftists Are Colonizing Red Towns Like Mine, And Local Republicans Are Clueless.

FEE.org: The Democrats Just Reintroduced a Labor Law that Would Destroy Uber—And It Could Actually Pass This Time.

National Review: The Fracturing of the American Ideal.

Bill Barr knew all about the election fraud. He wrote and spoke about it in prescient detail months in advance. And yet he did nothing to prosecute the theft of the right of the American people to choose their own leaders. Now we know why…

In other news:

Thomas Lifson: Trump aide Peter Navarro charges AG Barr worked to help Biden issue blizzard of early executive orders.

Redfin: The Biden Administration Could Create Three Times as Many Affordable Homes By Building in Places Already Affordable. The blinders-off admonition would be “Bribe cheaper municipalities!” The problem is, it’s not municipalities the Marxists are funneling bribes to.

Rod Dreher: The Snowplow Test.

Salena Zito: The kids aren’t alright.

City Journal: Taking on “Progressive Prosecutors.” District attorneys who refuse to enforce the criminal law are violating their oath to support and defend the Constitution – and could be challenged on those grounds.

Daniel Greenfield: The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats.

The point of the January 6th fiasco was the January 6th fiasco: Marxists spent all year goading Trump supporters into civil war. They didn’t quite get bupkis, but nothing like the pretext they needed to commence the Ant pogrom.

That’s why they’re confessing now. It looks like a modified limited hangout – slow-walking the confession to take the shock off the big reveal – but I suspect it’s still more taunting. The railroading of Trump is about to become that much more obvious, so if they can’t incite an “insurrection” now, their actual five-year-long coup d’état will be exposed for what it is: A totalitarian putsch poised for genocide.

How do you best them from here: Stay home, stay calm, stay safe. They’re the bad guys – hundreds of millions of murders worth. Don’t muddy the waters.

In other news:

Yahoo Finance: Biden Wants to Shut Down Credit Bureaus – What Would That Mean for You?

J.D. Tucille: Americans Shouldn’t Be Treated Like ISIS Insurgents. Adopting “counterinsurgency” tactics for use against wide swaths of Americans can only make the situation worse.

Conrad Black: Biden’s Rapidly Deflating Honeymoon Balloon: Biden and his media supporters will see the prohibition they have imposed on any questioning of the election result blow up in their faces.

Rick Fuentes: The Art of the Steal.

Michael Barone: ‘Mostly peaceful’ violence and dueling double standards.

Clarice Feldman: Rigging the Election for China and Profit.

If you’ve been following along here, you know the election was rigged. I don’t argue the case much, but I link liberally to excellent resources. The actual dispositive rigging was the emergency fallback ballot stuffing – because Trump’s landslide was so huge that he beat all of the combined Deep State and all of its freelance henchmaniacs.

Time magazine is so proud of the Deep State’s machinations that it boasts about everything the Ruling Class did to subvert democracy – to prevent Americans from choosing their own leaders.

You knew they were scum all along – before you watched them kill thousands of people last year to get Trump. Now they are bragging about creating a legitimacy crisis.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind…

In other news:

Raheem Kassam: TIME Mag: “Trump Was Right. There Was A Conspiracy… Well-Funded Cabal, Powerful People Changing Laws, Steering Media & Controlling Information.”

Housing Wire: Homebuyers put pets first when shopping for homes. Kids and dogs, but this one time I got one of my wife’s buyers off the dime by pointing out that she didn’t need a perfectly-safe home she could never find, she needed a firearm to make any home safer. She got a 1911 and it changed her life.

The American Mind: Are stocks real?

City Journal: Under the Gun in Philly: As murders mount and public pressure grows, city officials continue to look for answers in the wrong places.

Brendan O’Neill: Is AOC the most dangerous politician in America? Since the Capitol riot she has been whipping up a culture of fear that could have dire consequences for liberty.

The world I live in is routinely selling at around 5% over market: If a house lists at or above its current Fair Market Value, when it closes it will turn out to have sold for ~105% of FMV.

That’s bidding wars, and it’s less the agents’ skills than the buyers’ frenzy.

But what that frenzy means is that it is beyond foolish to sell to iBuyers or any other sort of “instant” cash buyers right now. It can make sense to go to a pawnshop when no one else is buying. But when everyone is buying, not taking a very brief test of the marketplace is a betrayal of your own estate.

And here’s what’s funny: The iBuyers know that. They know that it is a mistake for you to sell to them right now. They know you are leaving at least 5% of your hard-won money on the table by trafficking with pawnbrokers.

Why is it funny? All real estate licensees are fiduciary. Deliberately leading a client into error is a fiduciary violation. Replicated hundreds or thousands of times a year. Per iBuyer.

Their buy-boxes redline. Their marketing targets only nerds – hugely exclusive by disproportionate impact. And every house they buy is another opportunity to ignite a national class action suit.

Oh, and the Vampire Party is hungry. Very hungry…

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: What Professor Alexander Kurov Gets Wrong About Gamestop and Bubbles.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue to stay low at 2.73%.

Redfin: Asking Prices Hit a New High, Up 10% From Last Year.

Housing Wire: Urban home values growing faster than ‘burbs in Midwest. This is more of Redfin hiding the riots, FWIW: Most “cities” are mainly suburban. What’s going on where the riots actually hit?

City Journal: Climate Change Follies: President Biden’s war on fracking will raise electricity prices while accomplishing nothing on climate.

John Hinderaker: Democratic Governors Have Devastated Their States.

Glenn Reynolds: Why are Democrats so scared of Donald Trump when they just defeated him?

City Journal: Unity or Union Loyalty? President Biden’s early Read more

The idea of ‘systemic’ racism is stupid. People who habitually make poor choices always blame everything but themselves. But if you’re looking for ubiquitous, constant, inescapable racism, I can point you to it:

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 other news:

Redfin: Austin, Atlanta & Tampa Are Attracting Homebuyers From More Expensive Cities, Contributing to a Housing Supply Crunch.

CNBC: Want to own an apartment building? Buy a distressed hotel for pennies on the dollar.

The American Mind: Biden Doesn’t Need Woke Help to Destroy America.

John Kass: Erasing classic literature for kids.

City Journal: Science Betrayed: The propaganda infecting K–12 science curricula, especially on the environment, won’t go away.

American Mindset: Contra Experts.