There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Marketing (page 27 of 191)

Dear Spencer Rascoff: How many rich people do you know who like sharing things?

Understanding wealthy people and their real estate needs.

Looking for a real estate startup that is having its very best day?

Launching today, Pacaso – how many great names were passed over for this? – wants rich people to buy expensive second homes – and then share them with other owners.

VRBO meets time-shares, except that nobody actually likes staying in temporary spaces. It turns out there really is no place like home.

People hate sharing their most intimate spaces. They hate sharing driveways, for goodness sakes! I find it hugely implausible that any significant fraction of one-percenters will buy a second home to share with strangers.

Geekwire: Ex-Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff jumps back into real estate, launches startup with former colleagues to help people buy second homes.

PRNewswire: Pacaso Launches to Create New Category of Second Home Ownership; Secures $267 Million in Funding

The website: A better way to buy and own a second home.

Sorry, Spencer: My read is that this is the very worst iBuying idea I have heard so far. Prove me wrong.

Overnight News: Real estate media amazed to discover riot-panicked buyers are different, somehow…

Ya think it's easy?

“I wonder what made all those people on the Titanic suddenly want to take a swim…”

The lockdown on acknowledging the riots continues, as does the riot-spawned real estate panic. You now know who you cannot depend on to tell you the truth – none of them.

Housing Wire: Pending home sales at an all-time high! Now what? CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: August pending home sales soar to a record high, fueled by rock-bottom mortgage rates. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: New York City Real Estate In Q3 2020: The Slow Beginnings Of Revival. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: No housing market slowdown as real estate agents report a busy fall. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. How obtuse, you ask? Subhead: “Homebuyers not following the school calendar this year in many markets.”

Forbes: 2020 Has Been A Terrible Year For Big City Life. Will Urban Real Estate Ever Recover? CTRL-F ‘riot’; 1 FOUND!

City Journal: Defending the Integrated Suburb.

Forbes: Wildfires Put Nearly 2 Million Homes At Extreme Risk Of Property Losses.

HotAir.com: A New Academic Paper Explains How Anarchists Use Social Media To Instigate Violence.

RedState.com: AP Stylebook: Please Don’t Call That Riot a Riot. How the sausage gets made.

Reason: The Media’s Nervous Breakdown Over Race.

Summit News: Calls For Joe Rogan to Moderate Next Debate Intensify After Chris Wallace’s Disastrous Performance.

Forbes: Some Business Leaders Should Face A Firing Squad, Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Suggests In Angry Tweet. The purpose of the riots, assuming you don’t know, is revolution. Summary execution is the next step. The Marxists have been gracious enough to show us the seething totalitarian within. Respond accordingly.

City Journal: No Need to Wait for Herd Immunity.

Overnight News: What ELSE happened yesterday?

Ya think it's easy?

“Television is always boring until someone rings a doorbell.”

Catch any TV last night? Catch up on what you might have missed:

Housing Wire: Home-price index gains the most since 2018. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: The Housing Market Inventory Shrinks While Home Prices Climb. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Mortgage demand falls nearly 5%, even as interest rates set another record low.

Housing Wire: Consumer confidence posts biggest surge in 17 years.

PJMedia: Tulsi Gabbard Raises the Alarm: ‘Ballot Harvesting Has Allowed for Fraud and Abuse.’

FEE.org: The President Has an ‘Internet Kill Switch.’ A Bipartisan Group of Lawmakers Wants to Change That.

HotAir.com: In Louisville, Blackmail Lives Matter.

City Journal: A Primal Struggle for Dominance.

The American Mind: No Coup For You.

City Journal: Bush v. Gore Redux?

The Federalist: This $1,500 Robot Will Talk To Kids So Parents Don’t Have To.

And: Future bleak humor in the making:

Vanity Fair: “This Does Feel Like A Different Moment”: As Public Support For Black Lives Matter Drops Off, Will Corporate America Stay The Course? American corporations are making themselves captives to their worst hiring decisions. None so deserving – but someone should tell the shareholders.

“Apparently, Opendoor and Zillow and Knock and Flyhomes and Offerpad have been wasting hundreds of millions on all those data scientists and CompSci Ph.D.’s from Stanford.” –Rob Hahn

That sounds right to me. 😉 The waste is not their salaries but the financial havoc they wreak as the very-most-backseat of drivers. That is to say, iBuyers suck at real estate investment, and their hubris prevents any sort of improvement.

“Are YOU notorious? Have you ever BEEN notorious? Well, I have… Not necessarily wise – but compensated.”

Yes, I’m Trump-quoting real-estate consultant The Notorious Rob for fun in the headline, just like the TV “news” does.

But: It turns out Eric Blackwell knows where to poke the Pooh bear’s mincing minions.

My experiences with Rob Hahn have not been pleasant, and this and his other posts are tl;dr, even assuming he knows anything worth reading about, an assumption I do not make.

What’s funny is that Señor Notorious is right here, despite his snark: As soon as the market turns, all of those poindexter models collapse.

And note well: There is ALWAYS something to howl about at BloodhoundBlog.

Digging into a very graphic love poem to get a handle on active, imagic, metaphorically-rich writing

“Could it be me? Could it be me, baby? Could you be in there, too?”

[This is me in August of 2007, and I am reposting rather than revising it because I am changed since then. I’m writing about storgic love here before I even knew its name, and rhapsodizing verbs before I had gotten around to cataloging them – a task I hope to return to, someday. And if you’ve been following my strange relationship with Thalia, there is a flagrant kiss-blowing incident right here. Even so, I have nothing to add to this argument. If anything, events are avenging me with heart-stopping acceleration – much, much more is the pity. And yet: There is hope: For if you can read this, then you yourself are the savior of the truly human life. –GSS]

 
It’s late and the kids are in bed — do make sure the kids are in bed — and I feel like digging a little deeper into the idea of writing. This is a love poem I wrote ten years ago:

let’s make love like velcro baby
it’s the best thing we can do
you stick to me like strapping tape
i’ll stick to you like glue

i’ll cast my anchor in your harbor baby
thrust my shovel in your earth
cling by claws to your cavern walls
take me test my worth
 
        love’s just a hint baby
        love’s just a scent
        just a sniggling squiggling clue
        could it be me
        could it be me baby
        could you be in there too
 
let’s make love like velcro baby
let’s do it ’til we die
grab me grasp me clutch me clasp me
hook me with your eyes

This is fun, first, simply because it’s such a goofy idea. The word play itself is fun, but, even before that, it’s fun because it’s such a clumsy, clinical premise for a love poem, the polar opposite of the sunsets and silences and solitudes of the sonnets: Let’s make love like velcro, baby.

The poem is built from very simple stuff. English words, not stuffy Latinate polysyllables. Active verbs, along with nouns and adjectives rich in imagic particularity. This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to Read more

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

Ya think it's easy?

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

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

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

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

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

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

As for the rest of the world…

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

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

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

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

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

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

TaxProf Blog: Welcome To The Turbulent Twenties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Alpha: Zillow Offers Will Expand Services in 2021.

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

Joanne Jacobs: Not indoctrinated, just ignorant.

City Journal: Merit on the Ropes.

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

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

The news is not that Zillow is going to have agents. It’s going to have newbies for agents.

Housing Wire:

A Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that these people are already employed with Zillow, and will be getting real estate licenses. Zillow said it will not be recruiting for these positions.

“The normal career path is real estate agent to barista, but Zillow’s changing all that!”

It’s a boiler-room job – in the same article, George Laughton says Zillow still won’t be getting its hands dirty. But boiler-room selling and legally-compliant real estate brokerage are two different things.

Whatever. This morning I wrote this to my favorite pricing algorithm, soon to be disintermediated by exuberant, clueless college grads:

Of course this was the plan all along. The funny part? They think they’ve lived through a downturn with Coronavirus. Now they get to play catch-a-falling-knife with their own inventory.

The press release reads like they think the local brokers, like Laughton, are hoarding all the good leads from the failures and fallouts. I hope that’s the reason, just because it’s extra stupid.

Note that the 18 or so local brokers who were not screwed today now know what they have coming.

All of the iBuyers working in Phoenix suck at resale marketing. They make bone-headed marketing errors, common to many poor listers, but they make them by the hundreds. Pulling even more of that work in-house, when Zillow is so bad at it, seems daft – even absent the opportunity to make thousands upon thousands of regulatory infractions.

Prove me wrong, Zillow? You look like nothing but dead money to me.

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

“Totally not redlining!”

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

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

Looks like redlining, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Review: Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

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

City Journal: Show Us Your Systemic Racism, Princeton.

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

Is that so? Demand specifics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

City Journal: Heiresses on the Barricades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a friend popped off with this:

A riot score next to the walk score?

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

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

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

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

Overnight News: Riots? What riots?

“The hardest thing to know is when, precisely, to pretend not to know…”

You got news? I got news: Present company excepted, the real estate industry seems to be terrified to talk about the riots. You know, the ones roiling the never-more-local real estate markets? Evidence abounds and none dare call it by its right name. The simplest explanation to fit the facts – is the one nobody wants to talk about. Very sad.

Redfin: Hot Housing Market Spans the Political Spectrum, with Prices Up Double Digits in Blue, Red and Swing Counties. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. Red and blue is stupid. Single-family versus multi is better, with average age of the community’s housing stock perhaps being the best tell. Elderly, vertical, mortar or steel: Down. Post-war, horizontal, stick and stucco: Way up. Real estate analysis is easy. Lying about the further consequences of rioting takes work.

Jalopnik: Ahem. Moving Truck Prices In LA And San Francisco Are Skyrocketing Due To Demand.

Housing Wire: First-time homebuyer activity decreased in Q2, but there’s still plenty of buyers out there.

CNBC: Government mortgage bailout numbers improve slowly, but the real test is ahead.

Housing Wire: Builder confidence reaches 35-year high in September.

Joanne Jacobs: Paying for at-home education.

RedState.com: Emails Reveal Nashville City Government Hid COVID-19 Info from Public to Keep City In Lockdown.

City Journal: Problem: Overcrowding.

Watts Up With That?: Irrefutable NASA data: global fires down by 25 percent.

Reason: Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect.”

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

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

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

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

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

How now, russet Bloodhounds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overnight News: Redfin: “Why isn’t this historic seller’s market holding back buyers?” CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

“Prices always shoot up for no reason!”

Housing Wire: Fed says expect low rates through 2023. Much better crystal ball than the one we have…

Forbes: Will The Latest Stimulus Proposal Stop A Potential Housing Crisis In 2021?

Redfin: Home Prices Rose 11% in August—Biggest Gain in Over 6 Years.

Housing Wire: More young adults live at home now than during the Great Depression.

Forbes: Topeka, Kansas Is Looking To Lure Remote Workers With A $10,000 Incentive.

Yahoo Finance: Analyst: Neither Trump or Biden care about soaring federal debt, deficit.

City Journal: Apocalyptic rhetoric about climate change is undermining the fight for pragmatic solutions to the West’s fire crisis.

Reason: Homeschooling Hits a Tipping Point.

FEE.org: George Floyd Riots Caused Record-Setting $2 Billion in Damage, New Report Says. Here’s Why the True Cost Is Even Higher.

The Federalist: Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.

City Journal: Against Wokeness: Conservatives must understand the threat posed by critical race theory.