Category: Real Estate (page 11 of 266)

It’s almost Independence Day – our wedding anniversary – and this is definitely the year to celebrate the independence of the fee simple domicile.

I’ll get to that on Sunday. For now let’s address something more-fundamental:

You should celebrate, embrace, enfold and exalt your independence – because there is no alternative to it.

All organisms persist in their defiance of entropy from the inside out. Each and every one of them – including you – is exclusively internally motivated, unmoved by any external causes beyond physics itself. Yes: It was you who didn’t do the dishes. Who knew?

If you resent your essential, inescapable autonomy, I don’t know what to do for you: There is no alternative to reality. But if you do as I advise and truly honor your independence – that is when you will discover America.

In other news:

Housing Wire: DOJ withdraws from settlement with NAR.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Slide as New Listings Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels.

CNBC: Manhattan real estate prices reach new record as buying ‘frenzy’ takes hold.

Stacey Lennox: Atlanta’s ‘Marxist Land Grab’ Is a Preview of Joe Biden’s Nefarious Plans for the Suburbs.

The New York Post: Biden’s ‘family’ plan is all about hooking the middle class on handouts.

Lee Smith: America’s New Political Prisoners.

The American Mind: Who’s Next? The Biden Administration’s Domestic Terrorism Strategy is an announcement that they’re coming for you.

Frontpage: It’s 1776 All Over Again: Corporatist elite power vs. individual liberty.

In the West, it’s truth alone that counts.

Our culture, going back to the Greeks, honors objectivity and intellectual integrity – and mocks their contraries. Not money, not popularity, not threats make lies true. Lies are to be rooted out and exposed, while truth is to be enshrined and burnished and always improved upon.

This would be the epistemological ideal in a culture explicitly built on the idealization of the good, the true and the beautiful.

But just as the Supreme Court trashed property rights on Monday, the University of North Carolina yesterday caved to a blatant fraud, granting tenure to a race-baiting propagandist in an outrageous betrayal of everything the academy – named after Plato’s playpen, please do recall – is alleged to stand for.

Kudos to professional bigot Nikole Hannah-Jones for closing hard. She expected to be the Rigoberta Menchu of the new pogrom, never thinking that anyone would check her work – or even read it. Oops. But even after she was exposed as a racist shill, still the UNC offered her tenure – thus to buy better spots for themselves in the boxcar to the crematorium. They regretted this idiotic move too late – note, for fundraising reasons, not for anything approaching principle – then caved ignominiously like Supreme Court mannequins.

Score one more victory for Marxism and for all of savagery. To demonstrate just how thoroughly Nikole Hannah-Jones understands her victory over her new subordinates – her prideful volunteer slaves – she literally bitched out UNC’s board of untrustworthies for the way they caved to her fraud.

Look out for your own. The Ruling Class is captured.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates dip back down to 2.98%.

CNBC: Home sales rebounded last month to highest level since 2005, shocking even the Realtors.

Housing Wire: Pending home sales reach highest May mark in 16 years.

The American Spectator: The Population Bomb Doomsday Scam: The narrative we’ve been force-fed for decades is being abandoned by its strictest adherents.

Brad Polumbo: Households Face Up to $14,000 in ‘Hidden’ Federal Taxes Every Read more

The Supreme Court handed down a very important decision yesterday:

Property rights in the United States emerge from popular opinion and have no basis in the United States Constitution, federal or state laws or the common law of property going back to the Roman Forum.

That’s what they bellowed – oh, so silently – in refusing to shout down this ridiculous year-long rent moratorium – not just a “taking” but lawless expropriation by a non-governmental organization, imposed nationally by an equally-lawless circuit-court judge.

How could any of this be LESS lawful?

And so the Supreme Court says what? Literally bupkis.

This is not a small thing. The CDC has zero police powers. It is not a part of government, and it had no right to impose an eviction ban. No federal district court has the power to make national law – which obvious fact the Supreme Court scrupulously overlooked during four years of Trump-kneecappings. And every bit of this was fear theater – crippling the world’s economy – all to get Trump. If there was ever a time for any remaining grownups in government to assert themselves, yesterday was it.

Are we led by liars, cowards and fools? No. We are led by no one. The entire Ruling Class is captured, compromised. “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Yesterday the alleged grownups put their imprimatur on every license to chaos.

In other news:

CNBC: As housing boom begins to fizzle, weekly mortgage demand falls nearly 7%.

KPIX-TV: Poll: San Francisco Residents Consider Relocating As Crime Worsens, Quality Of Life In A Decline.

CNBC: Coldwell Banker CEO says investors snatching up homes is not a driving force in hot housing market.

American Thinker: What Was California Thinking?.

The Washington Examiner: The Minneapolis effect.

Breitbart.com: Joe Biden Attempting to ‘Destroy’ Suburbs with Infrastructure Package, Proving Trump’s Prediction Correct.

UPI: Pandemic may have created ‘baby bust’ instead of boom. No such thing as panic breeding? Who knew…?

I would dearly love it if some impresario would put me on a stage with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, so we could discuss his strategy of race piracy as a business plan.

As discussed, I find the bigotry repellent, not the least because, as with every other Black Lives Mattering, Redfin is deliberately misleading black people – ultimately in order to prey upon them.

Accordingly, Redfin has just produced a dubious study purporting to prove that black wannabe home buyers are beset by racism – rather than by the accumulated consequences of habituated poor choices.

Witness:

That chart is intended to prove that black homeowners’ brows bead up with more-photogenic sweat, as they toil for their houses. What it actually shows is that – among Redfin’s very small, self-anointed data set – the white homeowners made much wiser decisions: Saving rather than spending, not paying extra taxes as a diminishing return and not robbing the family of quality time.

I’d love to see the questions, but I’d rather add my own:

• Did you grow up with both of your parents?
• Are they still together?
• Are you legally-married?
• How many family transitions occurred while you were trying to buy a home?
• At what age were you taught to swim?

It is beyond doubt that, considered contrafactually as groups, black Americans tend to be poorer in intellectual and social capital than white or yellow Americans, but blaming that on anything other than parental negligence seems specious to me. It is both false to fact and contrary to good sense: The only way to fix unmade beds is to make them.

Redfin is a liar in a choir of liars: It laments what upwardly-mobile black people are getting wrong while obscuring these obvious facts and refusing to share the good news: If you manage your family, career, time and money like your white and yellow colleagues, you will achieve the same results financially.

Since Redfin is not doing anything like that, it is safe to assume that they are lying and pandering in order to prey upon black consumers – just like every other corporate Read more

Most of the people you will have read on the subject of love – for all of human history – were demonstrably terrible at it.

That’s the seen and the unseen where you never expected to find it! Even so: You could look it up. People who rhapsodize romance typically have many, many failed romances to rhapsodize – or at least to fictionalize.

An apple is nothing without the tree it grows on, but ultimately it is nothing unless it becomes a tree from which other apples grow. The romantic or ludic love we idolize in fiction is at best the juvenile seed of the grown-up storgic love we forgot to revere in real life.

We love by, in and for families. Every other so-called love ultimately comes to nothing.

In other news:

City Journal: Backlash by the Bay: San Francisco residents are fed up with city officials’ lack of action on open-air drug use.

Bari Weiss: When a Free Society Becomes a Police State.

“What’s six times seven?”

I ask that question of school-age children – up to age 15 or so – everywhere I go. And since real estate is kids and dogs, I meet a lot of children. Guess how many kids know the times table?

Excluding the Testudo families: Zero.

Yes. Zero – the unfathomable quantity. School-age children know nothing, with this situation having gotten substantially worse in my lifetime. (I have to smile at myself, writing so much into a world where fewer and fewer can read.)

Even the bright sparks – which once would have meant the nerds but now apparently means the Marxists – know nothing beyond their indoctrination. The idea of the well-rounded man possessed of a broadly liberating education is now upheld solely by cranks like me.

We’ve been here before. We have Catullus because very dumb monks mistook a Roman of the Romans for a monotheist. No joke. But we ought not be here now.

It is absurd to have to say that there should be no matters of controversy in compulsory eduction. So how much more absurd is it to insist that children actually learn something of the facts of existence in the 10,000 hours they waste at school?

In other news:

CNBC: The future of home ownership is Latino.

Real Clear Energy: Blackouts Loom in California as Electricity Prices Are ‘Absolutely Exploding’.

CNBC: The most liberal and conservative tech companies, ranked by employees’ political donations.

The Daily Mail: Read this and you won’t click ‘I agree’ ever again: We’re being spied on by phones, computers, TVs, cars – even the doorbells. Worse, argues Oxford professor CARISSA VELIZ, we’re doing it to ourselves by giving away our data.

TechnoFog: It is Time to End Compulsory Public Education.

Lee Smith: America’s Top General Read Marx, but Does Not Understand How It’s Destroying America.

One of my favorite Christmastime frauds, perhaps by-now socially-distanced out of existence, is the wrapped-gift bucket-brigade: On the local TV news, hundreds of ‘volunteers’ in ugly sweaters are scrunched into a wide-angle shot in which they are shown passing wrapped gifts, one to another – as if there were any reason for such anti-productivity except the “news” coverage.

That’s charity theater, and it’s not the last thing I hate about organized charity. As always with me, trim the outliers and carry them off, if you like: The people most-adept at attracting charity are hurt rather than helped by it – and the people most-interested in bestowing charity are hurt rather than helped by it. We are self-made, all of us, each of us, since there is no contrary to internal self-motivation – this being true of all living things, not just us. The best help you can offer any stranger is to get out of his way – and you could do a lot of that.

But my contempt for charity theater has its own special home in the housing biz: Habitat For Humanity, which painstakingly builds new homes, one at a time, for poor people it carefully segregates from the ‘volunteers’ – amateurs operating straight outta the labor-theory-of-value playbook: If I worked on it, it must be valuable.

Ahem.

The labor that goes into one of those houses, split into four-hour blocks of handyman time, could help hundreds of families, all in one day, not just one family at a time. Even better, it would put the ‘volunteers’ into actual contact with their putative beneficiaries and/or presumptive victims – who might, in due course, become true friends.

A new garbage disposal for an old sink is not as showy as a brand new house, but it’s a great big deal if you’ve never had one: A couple hundred bucks plus labor for an instant hygiene-booster/odor-killer for everyone nearby. That would be improved habitability for real human beings. What it wouldn’t be is a phony virtue display all dressed up for the cameras.

In other news:

CNBC: Read more

The secret to flipping houses is suckering the seller. True fact.

If you do rehab or upgrades, you may recoup about double your outlay. That’s a profit margin, but not much of one. There are no more sucker-bait buyers, so you can’t sell high. So the big bucks come from buying low.

I expect there are very few homeowners who sold to flippers – or to iBuyers, who actually should be called eFlippers – in 2021 who do not regret their choice, having watched their neighbors do so much better by listing.

The good news is that ordinary flippers and eFlippers have to pay more and more, just to be able to buy anything. The eFlippers, in particular, have convinced themselves that they are suddenly good at real estate, because they can actually move inventory in a whirlwind of demand.

Has that whirlwind died down? We’ll see. But if it has, real flippers will find it easier to buy low – while the eFlippers will find out what it’s like to work in real estate.

In other news:

Redfin.com: iBuyer Home Purchases Inch Back Toward Pre-Pandemic Levels.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates jump back up to 3.02%.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homebuying Demand Slipped Below 2020 Levels for the First Time This Year.

City Journal: Stop Extending the Eviction Moratorium: It’s a heavy burden both for landlords and for tenants who play by the rules.

Housing Wire: Biden renews foreclosure ban.

Julie Kelly: Deprogramming of January 6 Defendants Is Underway.

Christopher Rufo: Exposed: The Washington Post’s attempt to smear me and my work on critical race theory fails spectacularly.

The surge in sales of fee-simple suburban housing and the bonanza in sales of firearms and ammunition have marched together in lockstep since George Floyd socialized his self-destruction. This is the truth the real estate press won’t tell, but both housing and guns sales over the past year were driven – hugely – by the riots the mainstream media lied about for them.

But that marriage may be over. Slow Joe Biden announced yesterday that the Ruling Class will use fighter jets and nuclear weapons, if necessary, to sustain its dominance. That’s going to sell a lot of guns and ammo, but I cannot imagine what it will do to the housing market. More of the same? That’s a safe bet, since – ‘when in danger or in doubt’ – a flight to safety is more about the flight than the ultimate safety.

But the great thing about having an addlepated wreck as “president” is that he can’t keep Marxism’s secrets: Grasshoppers hate Ants more than anything else on earth. Should the Ants come to realize that despoliation today means extermination tomorrow – and should they resist – they are to be vaporized.

Consent of the governed? Not so much…

In other news:

Housing Wire: New home sales fall to lowest pace in a year.

CNBC: You can now choose and design a newly built home and put it in your shopping cart, as big builders launch virtual homebuying.

Andrea Widburg: California’ Marin County is seeing the return of the NIMBYs.

Housing Wire: Supreme Court finds FHFA structure unconstitutional. Appropriate. Now do CFPB.

“They spray-painted all over our building – in our own incomprehensible jargon!”

The quote is a joke, but, alas, the news story is not. If that’s not a fake hate crime, bill me for one edible hat. If instead it turns out to be a fund-raiser, try to cultivate some wisdom from your wishful thinking.

I don’t care for hate crime laws, since they seek to police thought instead of action, and since, as here, they engender fake hate crimes – which should only be understood as actual hate crimes against the fictionalized villains.

Bah! The one thing we can count on, as every species of corruption proliferates, is that no one will call bullshit on any fake hate crime – since to do so would both undermine the thought police and spotlight how rare non-fake hate crimes are. Get away from big cities and universities and there are none of either.

The funny thing about these stunts is how invested people become in denying the obvious. Just that much could be cured with a betting site: If you insist the “hate crime” described in the story is not fake – bet against me. Your bet is your vote on the probity of the claimants, where mine is a vote for a statistically-demonstrable pattern of maliciously tendentious behavior. So, please: Bet against me.

I love me them ‘Faye’ names, and FayeKate.com is available. If someone smarter than me builds it, I will come. I can’t imagine the payouts will be that great, betting the odds on 19-1 propositions, but the statistical reporting over time will be edifying: People actually do learn better, if there are consequences for being in error.

Why are there so many fake hate crimes? Because, so far, it seems to be paying off. In this instance, the evil awful spray paint is held to be emblematic of ever-so-much worse hatred, the evidence for which, alas, is unavailable for inspection – but which, nevertheless, can be at least partially-palliated by PayPal. “Nothing happened, Read more

I work for investors world-wide, so I’m nobody’s “neighborhood specialist.” Even so, I’ve done 23 deals in Coldwater Springs – a golf-centric master-planned community in the near-southwest quadrant of The Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun. Half of the properties we manage are in there.

I was a skeptic, at first. I was bearish on everything south of the I-10 in Avondale – and that kind of “redlining” is not wrong for investors: Values will lag if there are already too many rentals in the area. This is nothing but economics, so it might be kinder to call it “greenlining.” Regardless, Coldwater Springs not only enriched the community, it has pulled up its entire corner of town.

This is ongoing, first with better-heeled new subdivisions in competition nearby, then with commercial development along Van Buren Street and Avondale Boulevard, and now with a new freeway exit, a coming-soon fire station and easy access to the best charter school in the state.

Coldwater Springs is a bet that continues to pay off. If you’d like to own a piece of it, I have an investor opportunity going on the MLS on Thursday. Occupied by wonderful tenants, under lease until 1/31/2022 and eager to renew, the house is the 1524sf Lavender floorplan – very popular, consistently punches above its weight – on a premium corner lot. I hate to lose the house and the tenants, but we’ll be in the neighborhood for another twenty years, at least.

In other news:

CNBC: May existing home sales drop for a fourth straight month as affordability squeezes buyers out.

The New York Post: Most big cities have become more racially segregated: study.

Daniel Greenfield: The Small Secessions of the New Civil War: Neighborhoods secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states.

Brad Polumbo: We Just Got Even More Proof that Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired.

Joel Kotkin: The battle between the two Americas.

Time-sharing real estate brokerage Pacaso made The Daily Mail, America’s last reliable news source. They’re also in The Wall Street Journal, but that link is paywalled.

Both stories are about efforts in Napa Valley to keep the carpet-bagging time-sharing interlopers out, but my own interest today is broader:

Why is Pacaso, a very small boutique time-share real estate brokerage, capitalized at $90 million, said to be worth $1 billion? What turns ninety dollars into a thousand bucks?

Ballyhoo, perhaps? In the Daily Mail article, Pacaso admits to having sold 200 time-shared units, to date. Each unit is one eighth of a time-shared house so Pacaso’s nationwide internet startup time-share real estate brokerage has sold the equivalent of 25 houses, so far.

Much more than I would have guessed, for what that’s worth. But even assuming I am wrong about all known organisms and their unwillingness to share with strangers, Pacaso’s total market consists of a fraction of the one-percent. Even if people actually liked sharing intimate things, Pacaso’s pitch is to a niche of a niche.

Not that they pitch well, anyway. Using CEO Austin Allison as TV spokesmodel was a mistake. His arguments are defensive – sharing time in a home with strangers is definitely not time-sharing! – and his affect autistic. Nerds are impressed by nerds. Everyone else can change a tire and get a date without staff support.

The internet angle seems specious to me, too. No form of real estate flipping requires the internet – as the other iBuyers have already discovered. Accordingly, Pacaso’s web site and smartphone app end up being a national wishbook for underfunded looky-loos – which is exactly what they brag about in their statistics, web site visitors, not sales.

The big lawsuits won’t be over neighborhood concerns – nor over the use of the term “time-share” to describe Pacaso’s time-share business model – but over the vigorish – the secret sauce in the management contracts that makes investors think their ninety bucks can be traded for a thousand of your dollars.

Pacaso’s time-shares Read more

What to make of marketing? One business after another has thrown Claude Hopkins, et seq., under the bus – in pursuit of what, exactly?

None more daft than Victoria’s Secret, surely. They have elected to reflect their actual clientele, rather than the aspirational impulses of the mates of those matronly mini-manatees. In consequence, they will beat the rest of the mall to bankruptcy by a wide-assed margin.

Especially brilliant of them to blow up their business on Father’s Day weekend. In households where this move is celebrated, I expect dad won’t be getting a steak or that other Father’s Day treat, either.

Lingerie is tits and ass, and who doesn’t know that? Real estate is kids and dogs. Never doubt it – and never forget it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: House flipping hits lowest level since 2000.

The New York Post: ‘Exodus of the rich’ to Florida threatens disaster for NYC.

Housing Wire: Juneteenth holiday sparks chaos for lenders, LOs.

CNBC: Invitation Homes CEO says he’s not worried about a housing bubble despite price spikes. Here’s why.

John McWhorter: You Are Not A Racist To Criticize Critical Race Theory.

Andrew Sullivan: Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It.

Donald Trump: A Plan to Get Divisive & Radical Theories Out of Our Schools.

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

Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog I have been socializing since Thanksgiving, is with us all weekend – a huge treat for me. What’s more, there will be a new Willie story for Father’s Day, and she’s in it. Under her own name, too.

I love this dog and she loves me, and that’s the first thing that’s first, but I love to study her, too, and I have had time with her like with no other dog. She has disabused me of any number of academic claims about animal behavior, while teaching me a great deal about the mammal-brain origins of thinking-brain obsessions. Expect to see more of her in Willie stories, because she’s funny.

Meanwhile, she both commands attention and rewards it, as do I with her, so I’m off to play with my little buddy.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices still rising in Phoenix, Austin, Sacramento.

CNBC: Mortgage rates shoot higher after Fed Chairman Powell’s comments.

Housing Wire: New home sales fall due to low inventory and high prices.

The Denver Channel: Colorado Springs house deemed ‘little slice of hell’ by realtor selling for $590,000 cash.

Jack Posobiec: Entire Portland Police Rapid Response Team Resigns After Officer Indicted for Breaking Up Antifa Riot.

The New York Post: Thieves now mock the rule of law in ‘progressive’ cities like San Francisco.

City Journal: Critical Race Theory and Academic Freedom.

Charles Murray: Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America.

Larry Elder: Father’s Day: Fatherlessness Is America’s Top Domestic Problem.