Category: Real Estate (page 12 of 266)

There is privilege in being born an American, granted, and, as discussed, there is great privilege in being born a native speaker of English. And I am persistently aware of the privilege that accrues to people lucky enough to be educated under the Union Jack.

That American public school education sucks is suddenly news, but, alas, it is not new. Schooling is now awful and racist, where before it was just awful – “progressively” so since the 1880s, when the de facto Jesuit curriculum was supplanted by various flavors of social engineering, mainly Marxist in origin.

Union Jack privilege owes to the inertia of ineptitude: Henry the Eighth swiped the Church of Rome in England, then operated it as if nothing but the signage had changed. For centuries Great Britain built wonderful Jesuitical schools everywhere it went – fortuitously ditching the Jesuits but keeping the curriculum unchanged.

In consequence, the children of the victims of “the colonizers” are the best-educated ordinary people on Earth. They are deeply and widely read, and they are adept at reason because they did a lot of demanding homework – knowing that their work would be checked and challenged.

The “privilege” granted freely to schoolchildren all over the world, wherever the Union Jack flies, costs ten grand or more a year in the U.S. – and you’re more likely to find it at Presbyterian or Lutheran schools than in Catholic parishes, by now.

Worth grailing for, regardless: That kind of education – the kind Loyola wanted for everyone – is an inestimable head-start in life.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue their fall, to 2.93%.

Redfin.com: More Than 31% of Homebuyers Are Looking to Move to Another Metro, With Pandemic-Driven Migration Pushing Up Prices in Popular Destinations. Good lord, give it a rest! Why did the pandemic sell so many guns?

Business Insider: Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they’ll run out of people to employ, according to a new report.

Joel Kotkin: The Killing of Kern County.

City Journal: The Golden State’s Progressive Anti-Housing Warriors: Left-wing interest groups are often Read more

I took back a rental home two weeks ago today, rehabbed it in twelve days and started showings for a new lease last night.

That’s not news, just my job. What was newsworthy for me was one touring party: Dad, mom, four kids – and if there was 18 months between any two of them, I’d be amazed. They looked like what I call a Testudo family, too: Everyone following dad’s example of shielding out the outside world.

None of that matters for real estate purposes – but I’m a suburban real estate broker and real estate is kids and dogs. Plus which, I am fascinated by the future portents of our contemporary wars on both fatherhood and fecundity.

The future belongs to the people who show up for it. Your grandmother was an adult surrounded by six kids. Your grandchild is a kid surrounded by six adults. The fathers who breed propitiously – abundantly and wisely – are the authors of the future of humanity.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: REVEALED: ‘Airbnb has secretive ‘black box’ team paying out $50 million a year to keep disaster stays out of press and gives staff blank checks to help rape victims and clean-up dismembered human remains’.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment drops to 10-month low, as construction costs drive prices higher.

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications increase as 30-year rate falls.

CNBC: Rents for single-family homes just saw the largest gains in nearly 15 years.

CNBC: Producer prices climb 6.6% in May on annual basis, largest 12-month increase on record.

City Journal: What’s Keeping Women Out of the Workforce?

City Journal: Getting Back to Business: Supporters of our free-enterprise system should beware those who would use government to overhaul it.

Peachy Keenan: Critical Conspiracy Theory: In This House We Believe: In Nothing.

Someone once told me that people savor meat because they like the taste of fear. I don’t know if that was supposed to put me off my feed, but it didn’t. I’m perfectly willing to credit the proposition, accepting it as a fortuitous genetic adaptation: We relish the food we thrive on. Big duh.

Odysseus is beefing about bugs in dog food today, and those weak, meek, short, frail, skinny, mousy people are always yammering on that one protein is just as good as another – but this is obviously not so. We get more from meat than its proteins, and that something more may be the literally-ruminative flavor of savage predation – paleo-drool-bait.

Whatever. We are meat-eaters – omnivores who dine on his contributions and hers: Meat and anything else, otherwise. Likewise our pets. Dogs eat what we eat because that’s why paleo-mom let them stay indoors in the first place – to eat our garbage before the bugs get to it. Cats eat meat and fish – period.

People who would cause a pet to be born only to torment it for life with a virtue-signaling diet are instantly suspect, in my estimation. People who would inflict that kind of diet on their fellow men are monsters.

In other news:

Stephen Moore: The Insurrection in Chicago.

The Daily Mail: The blue state exodus: How Americans fled New York and California for Republican states of Arizona, Idaho and the Sun Belt to escape lockdowns and skyrocketing crime.

SFGate.com: Boise could be the next hot spot in the Bay Area tech exodus. But resentment is growing.

USA Today: Bug infestations, tent-lined streets: California’s homelessness crisis is at a tipping point. Will a $12B plan put a dent in it?

City Journal: Don’t Universalize Housing Vouchers.

A recession might be awful, but it’s not all bad: The cause of the downturn will be poor investment choices, usually, and trimming those weeds makes the whole garden healthier, just by itself. But the downturn will also incentivize and spotlight better ideas, with the result that the economy emerges from the recession not just richer but wiser.

These are two of the things that happened last year. I can’t tell you which business closures were not awful – all of them were to the owners and staff – but I can tell you that many of those firms were de facto Coronavirus patients, anyway: Already dying of something else. Meanwhile, a lot of ships got tightened up and a lot of new ideas got traction.

We know we’re headed for inflation: What was one-dollar-one-donut is now a two-buck commitment – shooting for five. The thing to watch for, going forward, is better, cheaper donuts.

We screwed-up big-time last year – and yet no one in America missed a meal. “There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” said Smith, and in that we are lucky. But there are riches in recessions, too. We can but pray that the productivity gains we can so far barely glimpse will outpace the Treasury’s printing presses.

In other news:

Victoria Taft: The Number of Small Businesses Destroyed by COVID Lockdowns Will ASTOUND You.

The Daily Mail: Police retirements have soared 45 PERCENT since BLM protests erupted and Atlanta homicides have surged another 60 percent up from historic high in 2020 after 200 cops quit.

Zero Hedge: Lumber Prices Record Biggest Weekly Drop Ever As Supply Increases.

Even now, tho’ we are not the America that was, it is the very luckiest of fates to have been born here. We wax and wane as pretend friends of liberty, but it remains that someone like me is unpersecuted, at least so far, which would be true in no other country on the planet, not for all of human history.

But an even better privilege than being born an American is to be born – anywhere – to English-speaking parents. Chaucer’s tongue is not just the actual lingua franca of our frantic planet, it has linguistic carte blanche everywhere.

There was a time when French truly was a contender as the international language, as was Latin before that. But English eats everything. It feasted upon Latin at six different gorgings, and it absorbs by rapine serendipity everything it desires from every other language.

Our grammar is easy, compared to Latin, and our nouns and adjectives are all very-memorably genderless. But we have more irregular verbs than other languages have verbs altogether, and our spelling rules are apparently contrived solely to frustrate. To learn English as a baby is to blow raspberries in garbled Shakespeare. To learn it as an adult – to encapsulate all the Earth within the moon that is any other language – is functionally impossible.

True fluency in English-as-a-second-language is a genius tell, but even then smoothly-flowing discursive prose is out of reach for all but the Joseph Conrads of this polyglot world: If you were not born swimming in these waters, they will always seem acrid and cold to you. That would be “systemic linguisticism” – the imposter syndrome that becomes ever-more-obvious the more you try to explain it.

Yes, I am smug, but I am right to be smug: I was born awash in the world’s richest currency: English, the language of much of the best of humanity’s past – and of all of its future.

If you really want to see the world for all that it is, take the time Read more

I told my wife that Pacaso is bragging about having a million visitors to their web site since they launched last October. She is web- but not dev-savvy. Even so, her instant retort: “What’s the bounce rate?”

You lead with your best card. Pacaso isn’t bragging about sales, nor even about significant web-engagement with one-percenters, its sole client base. Instead, it’s touting a meaningless gawker stat – in a press release about a change to the iBuyer’s pay-plan.

That last bit matters: Pay-plans change when business models underperform, with the goal being either to squeeze out more juice per deal or simply to juice more deals – ideally at no cost. Pacaso’s bold new incentive is the latter kind: They will gladly pay you someday in stock that may or may not have any value for a – closed – lead today.

This is me noodging founder Spencer Rascoff on LinkedIn – a place where anyone can ask hard questions and no one does:

I figured out where the web traffic is coming from. Your enemies seem likely to proliferate.

Are the homes on the web site all of those you have purchased, so far? I count twenty available properties. Are there more?

How many closed end-user sales have you made to date? Fewer than a hundred? Fewer than twenty?

Every good salesman knows to sniff around when the pay-plan changes. I thought you were wrong – about the fundamental nature of all known organisms – on day zero. Has the marketplace proved me a fool? Or are you trading promises of future equity for leads?

Capitalized to $90 million, claims to be be worth a billion, claims to be profitable – but again Pacaso only brags about web site visitors.

None of this has ever smelled right to me: Organisms-as-such – not just people, not just mammals – share happily only within their own storgic groups: Pack, clan, kin-group. Storge is Greek; it denotes the enduring love of families, among the distinguishable types of love. Absent storgic love, the shared use and enjoyment of anything will Read more

If you pursue the comments on Pedro Robinson’s article, linked below, you’ll see me prophesying on every rooted thing.

If you read me here, you know my take: The Ants who can work from home are fleeing everything Grasshopper as fast as they can. Gun sales are slowing, so that may imply that the Ant flight to safety is abating, but the trend will continue – much as every other disruptive influence in real estate will continue: Malls will die, taking cinemas with them, and, assuming the Marxists don’t devour the gig economy, the relative value of car-focused commercial real estate will continue to decline.

With one exception: Low-rise office complexes surrounded by their own parking lots have a bright future, I expect.

The reason is simple: Security is now the boss’s job. It used to be the police who kept the bad guys away from the taxpayers, but that’s all gone to hell – even in comparatively-sane places like Arizona, Florida or Texas. Accordingly, the office of the future will offer these amenities:

• Suburban location with easy freeway access
• Low-rise construction; no more beehives
• Vigilant, multi-layered security

If necessary, the parking lot will be fenced and gated – and video-monitored, regardless. The common areas will be patrolled and monitored – with pre-existing pass technology limiting access passively, continuously, anyway.

The point would be to take away the fears not-working-from-home colleagues have of returning to a grim vertical office tower surrounded by vagrants and shunned by respectable taxpayers.

I think employers should focus on maximizing value from their working-from-home employees, but if they’re going to insist on having offices, sprawling mini-fortresses are the offices they are going to have, going forward.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates slip back down to 2.96%.

Pedro Robinson: What the Hell is Actually Going on with Housing??

Joy Pullmann: What Happens When Hedge Funds Buy Up Neighborhoods? I’d like to put a damper on this hysteria by quoting this article’s subhead: “A real estate firm estimates ‘that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by Read more

A recidivist dipshit writer for the Los Angeles Times has come up with a quick ’n’ dirty RiotScore™ – real estate listings should report neighbors who own guns. She doesn’t mean actual doxxing (yet), just a report on nearby gun-ownership:

The metric would be simple.

Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m).

That’s quoted from a Tweet, and I would expect that subsequent Tweeters pointed out the absurdity of comparing very-low-crime Staten Island to very-high-crime The Bronx. Even so, the essential difference is population density, not firearms ownership: Friction begets fractiousness.

But in typical Marxist Upside Down game fashion, the double-dip dipshit is on to something, she just has it ass-backwards. Her claim is that legal gun ownership denotes bad neighborhoods, which would only be true in big cities – where measuring gun crimes would be a better RiotScore™ tell.

But that one metric might be all the RiotScore™ that’s needed: Gun-crime arrests in a one-mile radius in the past year – with any number above zero being a red flag.

Gun owners don’t commit crimes, criminals do – with whatever weapon is at hand.

In other news:

CNBC: Homeowners got $2 trillion richer during the first three months of the year.

Mike DelPrete: Offerpad and Its More Profitable Flavor of iBuying.

Santa Barbara News-Press: Feckless Santa Barbara: woke, broke and on fire.

The Bend Bulletin: Oregon will allow homeless individuals to pitch tents on public land.

J. D. Tuccille: Insane Lumber Prices Show How Governments Break Economies.

CNBC: Deutsche Bank warns of global ‘time bomb’ coming due to rising inflation.

Pedro Robinson: You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy…Yikes. From whence does single-family detached housing derive its market value? Asked another way, what happens to values in fee-simple neighborhoods when too many homes are investor-owned?

Real Clear Investigations: Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society.

Kenny Xu: Critical Race Theory’s Poisonous Roots Trace Back To Harvard University.

I am rehabbing a rental property just now, in preparation for a new lease. We’ve only turned this house over twice in the past ten years, so it’s getting a lot: New paint, carpeting, blinds, plus fit and finish everywhere. I’m hoping to be done for less than $8,000 – where I would have been finished at $5,000 last year.

It’s a boss’s job, and I like it: My goal is to do the best I can with the money I have in the quickest time possible. But it’s funny to me how little of my time goes into a job like this. I don’t charge my investors for this kind of work – I list and lease; I don’t nickel and dime – but my part consists of knowing what I want and whom to hire and putting them to work.

I do almost all of my planning and coordination by texting from my phone – from anywhere I happen to be. There is almost nothing in the way of paperwork, and the clipboard-jockey part of the job comes down to scheduling, so people aren’t impeding each other’s progress. Not even much in the way of management-by-walking-around, since I would just be in the way. I work well alone, and I work well with people who work well alone.

But if I don’t work, no one works. Like the poor-in-character, the Marxist Labor Theory of Value will always be with us, apparently, but all you have to do is rehab a house – or just paint one – to discover why nothing gets done without management.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates drop, but not enough for priced-out homebuyers.

Housing Wire: How fix’n’flip loans could help expand housing inventory.

Zero Hedge: Nobody Wants To Work: Job Openings Soar To All Time High 9.3 Million As Record Numbers Quit Their Job.

City Journal: Call An Audible on Economic Recovery: Policymakers are using the same old playbook to solve a different challenge.

Daniel Greenfield: How Democrats Created a Carjacking Outbreak.

City Journal: Bonkers on the Bay: Educational leadership in Read more

America has always been a Calvinist nation, and remaining one has been a hard stunt for the Ruling Class: What does a post-Calvinistic atheist do to get ahead?

Or: Rather: To demonstrate having gotten ahead, since the Calvinist work ethic is more about competition than work itself. As with Marxism, stripped of the filigreed bullshit, Calvinism is ultimately pretty small: “I’ll show you my predestinate, unavoidable and unchangeable ultimate status in heaven!” The difference would be that the burning need to prove success brought forth a cornucopia of success.

Keeping the will to strive alive is hard to do, absent a putative pre-established status roster in the afterlife. One key clinging point for would-be elitists is The Marshmallow Test – which is seen as a more-mundane expression of the same inalterable ranking of souls.

While the test allegedly measures impulse control in children, it actually measures their parents’ parenting skills – to that point. Immediately afterward, the test tests the test, as you can easily demonstrate by administering it daily – resulting in perfect performance among a dozen kids in two or three days. If you want your dogs to sit at attention before meals, it could take a little longer, but, regardless, training is training.

What a crushing blow to Cautious and Driven parents: Their child’s self-control is their self-control, inherited as intellectual capital – not genes, talent, grace or destiny. A salve for their wounds is that teaching self-control to babies and toddlers sets them up for a life of success and satisfaction. This is the actual “privilege” the Marxists are bitching about.

All of the social sciences are built around stupid cargo cults – many, like this one, desperately seeking a Calvinistic predestinate determinism to absolve the cultists of the awful burden of free will. But the truth is so much better than any clinician’s cloying wishes: You can train your dog to wait for his dinner, train Read more

Passions cool because they must: You can’t floor it forever. But it matters a lot where and how they cool.

There are daily riots in Minneapolis right now, and, sad to say, that’s good for the Phoenix real estate market. There are shootings every day in Chicago – and the slow demise of the city with drooping shoulders has always been good for Phoenix. The urban northwest punches itself in the nose every day to make sure it is bleeding ever-redder – and no one in any vertical city will choose to return to work in an office tower surrounded by homeless people.

Every mistake big cities have been making, progressively, for decades, has been good for Phoenix, with the last year being a bonanza of urban ineptitudes for the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun.

Our governor is a nimrod, but he won’t last. But: Cooled passions or not, the Ant exodus away from Grasshopper dystopias will continue – and that will be very good for the Phoenix real estate market.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Get over yourself and start living.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Homebuyers are growing weary of the housing market.

PJ Media: Trump Was Right: The Biden Administration Is Intent on Destroying the Suburbs.

Daniel Greenfield: The Democrat Model For The Future Is The Worst City In America.

Zero Hedge: More Than One-Third Of Small Businesses “In Jeopardy” Of Closing This Summer.

Tyler O’Neil: Biden Is Carrying Out the New ‘War on Terror’ Right Under Our Noses.

Frontpage: The Left’s Urgent Mission to Sexualize Children.

I have been my own barber for the past year, and I don’t see that changing. My hair looks like hell – but I never cared, anyway. Except for dating and job interviews, grooming is more about effort than outcome. And while I resent all of the custodial functions of the body as time-wasters, hair growth is at least passive in its constant incursions.

Whatever. I think I may never go back to the quick-’n’-dirty stylist at the strip mall ever again. Here’s why: Even though the people behind the virus may turn out to be wholesale genocidal maniacs, I learned things from them about how to avoid getting sick.

I’m talking easy stuff, which Fauci and the CDC mainly lied about: Sunlight, D3, zinc, C – anti-every-viral, and as easy as having breakfast on the patio, at least if you live in Arizona. We were already doing all of that, and I have been a fanatical hand-washer since my school days handling caustic photo chemicals. Even maintaining distance was not news, but managing it as a consistent praxis was.

I don’t work with buyers right now – but, mea culpa, I have worked with sick buyers, and, worse, worked sick with buyers – and it is easy for me to keep my distance selling and leasing. Eliminating most daily direct social contact has been easy, and it promises to get even easier.

Hence, no more Great Clips for me. Doctors and dentists cannot be avoided, but hair stylists who breathe right into my face will continue to live without my money, perhaps forever. I have professional-quality calipers, amateur-quality zeal and a quiet pride in saving both my time and my money – while saving my own life.

In other news:

California Globe: Facing Dry Year, CA State Water Board is Draining California Reservoirs.

David Marcus: How Biden is raising the minimum wage by the back door.

Rough Cut: The New Clerisy: Faith in science is an oxymoron.

Michael Goodwin: A battle over the future of truth in news. Arguing over tenure fro this fraud is choice: She was Read more

We are living through Act I of what promises to be an Ant genocide. The officially-named targets of slaughter will be “white people,” but all Ants will be persecuted. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers, after all. Karl Marx said so.

Making racist genocidal statements in public – at Yale University! – might normally be regarded with suspicion by the FBI, but since the hate-speech was directed at white people, the entire apparatus of law enforcement and social opprobrium will dutifully turn a blind eye to conduct they would surely condemn and find some way to prosecute, had it come from one of the Deep State’s imaginary boogeymen, a “white supremacist.”

If Aruna Khilanani was shouting these words from a big-city street corner in a dirty trench coat, clutching a bottle of Colt 45 in a brown paper bag, her views would not be acceptable – but at least they would be where they belong. Yale is soiling itself in hopes of getting a better spot in the boxcar to the gas chambers.

But: Do be alarmed: Rhetoric like this need not necessarily lead to genocide, but it always precedes it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: May jobs report a mixed bag for housing industry.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Is Relief From The Red-Hot Market On Its Way?

Joy Pullmann: In The Last Year, Congress Sent A Typical Family $27,000 To $110,000 In Cash.

City Journal: Rock Bottom: How progressive reforms helped level a historic part of black Detroit.

Julie Kelly: Government Seeks Retribution for the Biden Resistance.

Andrew Sullivan: Our Politics And The English Language: What would Orwell say about our debased discourse?

Real estate is kids and dogs. Shorties need a back yard, but what matters more is that residential real estate is a safe haven for kids and dogs.

So it’s doubly funny that Redfin is promoting how to celebrate “Pride Month” at home: Make huge, outsized efforts to annoy your neighbors with your prismatic Marxism.

I apologize for picking on ever-more-Redfin again, and, of course, what adults do with their sex parts in private is their business. But private business is not public business even if you insist it’s a matter of pride.

Your neighbors do not want to have to explain to their kids what you are proud of. They bought a house in the suburbs to get away from the pernicious sirens of adulthood. They like their pride and yours inside the house, where it belongs, not out in the front yard.

Funny, too, for Redfin to assume that their entire potential customer base is onboard with “Pride Month.” I would expect rather more the opposite. Doesn’t matter, I guess. Redfin doesn’t have any clients, anyway.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise but stay sub-3%.

CNBC: More than 14% of renters are still behind as national eviction ban comes to an end.

Josh Hammer: COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed Americans’ Trust in Ruling Class ‘Experts’.

American Thinker: Our Government Is Evolving into Something Horrifying.