Category: Real Estate (page 13 of 266)

When I was a kid, I envisioned a newspaper called Actual Facts. Not just no anonymous sources, no bullshit period: No opinion, conjecture, rumors, gossip, trial balloons, campaign narratives – nothing that cannot be independently verified.

I don’t know that anyone would actually read that. The contrary idea – nothing but bullshit – rules what’s left of the “news” business.

So as we are discovering that the “news” media lied to us incessantly about the virus in order to lie to us incessantly about the election, consider this:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a news source that cared about its reputation for integrity?

In other news:

The Sacramento Bee: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article250735029.html.

Paul Bedard: Gun sales: Best May ever, 2021 set to crush record, public ‘afraid of violence, tyranny’.

J. D. Vance: Fighting Woke Capital.

Jason Rantz: Washington State Mandates Critical Race Theory In All Public Schools.

Betsy McCaughey: To Stop Critical Race Theory, Fight To Control School Boards.

Christopher Bedford: How The Media’s COVID Lies Weaken America.

Newsweek: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media.

Vanity Fair: The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.

I don’t represent buyers, not for years, which makes my life very easy. Leasing is work right now, but selling is easy. Soon enough, selling will be hard again – but then we’ll be back to buying.

CNBC, below, is calling all coolers, and I’ve been feeling it, too. The market stalls on over-priced inventory. When the shoe-shine boys are giving stock tips, the Wall Street bubble is about to pop. And when the gonophs list their homes outrageously over market in the hopes of gulling suckers – the worm is turning.

Where our market tops depends on how much worse life in big cities gets, but the gonophs are already out there, and by their actions they are betting that the top is already here.

In other news:

CNBC: Housing boom may be cooling as weekly mortgage demand drops again.

Bloomberg.com: Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home: The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. Easily foreseen, at least here. Every office building surrounded by the homeless is currently worthless. How you gonna get ’em back to their desks? Move the desks to the suburbs, too. Even then, many will never work away from home again – which is excellent news for kids and dogs.

John Nolte: Blacks Murdered at ‘Near-Historic Rates’ in Democrat-Run Portland.

The Post Millennial: Seattle Police expected to lose 300 officers by the end of the month, ‘that’s a third of the agency’.

Julie Kelly: No One Will Pay for COVID Crimes Against Humanity: Big Tech censors and the credentialed public health class, not anti-maskers, are the real Neanderthals, the 21st century’s version of the Flat Earth Society.

The war on Thirteen Privilege continues.

The current target is Latin and Greek at Princeton. The official pretext is that academic excellence makes the black students look bad – in many of the same ways that organized athletics makes the lazy students look bad. The actual objective is to rob virtue of its incentives. The ultimate outcome will be more surgical deaths, among many other disasters.

Why disasters? Because the purpose of excellence is excellence. We study Classical languages not to be Classicists, voted least likely ever to be able to repay a student loan, but to train the mind – especially the memory.

To be a Latinist is to walk the Earth with a surer stride, but to study Latin or Attic Greek at 13 is to be a god, academically, by 18 or 24. For Classicists and concert musicians and surgeons, what you were doing at age 13 matters everything – and the gains made in those tweenage years are very hard to make up for later.

We don’t make war on excellence in sports, yet, but hide and watch. Marxism is at war with all of goodness, all of virtue, all of the wisdom that keeps us alive. The current race jive is just a pretext, like the starving proletarians and the sweat-drenched environment before them. The goal is the destruction of the thing in human beings that makes them strive for better.

And that’s why they want to get ’em while they’re young…

In other news:

CNBC: Millions of Americans could face eviction as housing protection expires in June.

KTLA News: California eyes shuttered shopping malls, big box retail stores for new affordable housing. It’s amazing how many times the taxpayers discover an urgent need to overpay for underperforming commercial real estate. It’s almost as if that’s what government is really for: Discovering untold opportunities precisely where your wife’s brother lost everything.

Just the News: Tale of two economies: Red states roaring, blue states beset by high unemployment.

Chuck DeVore: New Poll Finds All Those Read more

Embracing the pieties of Marxism is bad for business, this being the most obvious statement in the history of everything. Moreover, the Instapundit’s quip – “get woke, go broke” – has proved true since Colin Kaepernick imploded the NFL. If you wonder why corporate poobahs continue to alienate half their customers by publicly kissing Marxist ass, do not discount the idea that they are jockeying for space in the first-class section of the boxcar to the gas chambers.

It doesn’t actually matter. The idiots making these mistakes will surely be replaced. How and by whom is the tell you’re watching for.

As with Chiefs (Chieves?) of Police, if the old big-boss was already very diverse, and if he/she/it is replaced by someone even more intersectionally-sexy – sell. The company’s policy is posturing first, shareholders last.

But if the new head honcho immediately fires the Chief Grievances Officer and all the other de facto Marxists on salary, you’re looking at a true turnaround manager.

But loud terminations are how a big business signals a turnaround – and how small businesses express contrition for their errors. The business of business is business. You’ll know America’s ownership has remembered its fiduciary duties when heads start to roll.

In other news:

Brad Polumbo: Latest economic data show red states crushing blue states — and here’s why.

Derek Thompson: Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market: Rising inventory is one of several signs that we may have reached peak ludicrousness. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Zubu Brothers: Wholesalers Flood Poor Neighborhoods Looking For Distressed Homeowners.

The Guardian: The San Francisco ice cream owner who tried, failed – and now owes $200,000.

Bongino.com: Study: Tech Companies That Made Black Lives Matter Pledges Have 20% Fewer Black Employees.

The Daily Mail: Liberal media FINALLY admit they made a mistake dismissing Wuhan Lab leak theory just because Trump backed it: Washington Post, New York Times and ABC pundits say some ‘have egg on their face’.

Miranda Divine: It’s been a year of Antifa and unchecked anarchy.

The wealth of a nation, ultimately, is its net productivity per head. One hyper-productive person like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk makes everyone richer, even those who produce nothing, even those who are a net drain on productivity. Every better mousetrap enriches everyone whose costs are thereby reduced.

So I come to you this Sunday with a homily of hope: Working from home will have liberated the most productive minds in our economy from the crippling bonds of corporate ineptitude. Yes, the money supply is soaring, but if the last year percolated enough great new ideas, we might-could outrun the brigands yet.

Likewise, the blatant corporate shunning of white, male, straight and unwoke job candidates could spur blindingly brilliant entrepreneurial responses.

Power emerges from the barrel of a gun? Aimed at whom, precisely, comrade? Denouncing virtue as vice does not make vice virtue, but the Grasshoppers chasing the Ants out of firing range may turn out to be a boon full of boons, economically.

In other news:

The Los Angeles Times: Home prices are going through the roof. Millennials piling into the market is one big driver.

Daniel Greenfield: The Richest Homeless in the World.

Greg Lukianoff: Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote!

Andrew Sullivan: Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism: What the “Critical Race Theory” debate is really about.

Roger Kimball: Paying the price of free speech: The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid I have called the crybully.

We now know that Dr. Anthony Fauci is every bit the Marvel Comics super-villain he has seemed to be all along. He deliberately engineered the virus – his behest and funding, not his actual effort – and it remains to be disclosed if last year’s events were actually biowarfare-by-proxy. Just to get Trump? Something even worse?

I have so many questions.

Given one super-villain, previously thought to be purely fictional, that means there can’t possibly be any others, right?

And Fauci’s cheery sociopathy definitely means that all other “conspiracy theories” are false, right?

I, for one, have never found it hard to believe that the Ruling Class is a mutually-blackmailing sex-crimes cult, so I find it reassuring to know that an evil until yesterday thought impossible can have only one locus: Dr. Anthony Fauci and absolutely, positively no one else.

Yes, he can smile and smile and yet be a villain. But that’s just because he is definitely and for sure the only person like that in America. Surely you can trust the science on that…

In other news:

Redfin: Eight out of 10 People Who Relocated During the Pandemic Are in a Similar or Better Financial Position Post-Move.

Zero Hedge: And Now Prices Are Really Soaring: May Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record. The deep dive is the map showing where rents are plummeting – the rioted cities, just as I have argued all along.

City Journal: Civic Education, Rightly Understood: To become responsible citizens, young Americans need a full, accurate, and responsible account of their own country.

Joanne Jacobs: Resisting ‘anti-racist ed’.

James Lindsay: Five Ugly Truths About Critical Race Theory. James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo, linked here often, are the two go-to resources on Critical Race Theory.

Mark Steyn: Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization.

Every day, one or more someones searches this blog on the word “nigger”. That would be scavenging for grievances, much as copyright hustlers scrounge for photos to claim dominion over. Whatever. Seventy people have posting privileges here, but I’m pretty sure the one they’re scavenging for is me.

What do the searchers find? The introduction to Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, for one amazing thing, a discourse on the mechanics of English literature by the man who knew it best: A Pole who learned English as an adult.

There is only one other hit, before today, Freeing Jefferson’s Slaves, a Willie story about people who weaponize words for political advantage.

Bad news, search bomber: The only racist here is you.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates drop below 3% again.

CNBC: Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and other firms are using free food to lure workers back to the office. If it’s not in your contract, it’s temporary.

Housing Wire: Low inventory stifles April’s pending home sales.

The Daily Mail: Post-pandemic New York City is laid bare as homelessness, mental illness and crime escalate and rattled locals and tourists alike believe the town ‘has lost its essence’ while city cheerleaders insist ‘the ship has turned’.

Daniel Greenfield: Great New Lefty Policy Idea: Let’s Destroy Highways.

Breitbart.com: Gov. Ron DeSantis: ‘Overwhelming’ Number of People Moving to Florida Registering As Republican. My contention all along: Ants are moving because they can. Grasshoppers are staying put because the rewards are better where they are. We are witnessing a national Ant migration – caused by the riots, blamed on the pandemic and made possible by the internet.

City Journal: Following the Politics, Not the Science: Scientists and journalists should reckon with their early dismissals of the lab-leak hypothesis.

I think I must have promised to write about the Empathy for the Transaction somewhere along the line. My apologies. I have houses to manage, and it’s been a houseful year. Plus which, I am plagued by a Batman story, and I hope to rid myself of it this Summer.

Even so, we touched on it a little yesterday, me broad-brush in my post and Brian more-granularly in the comments. There is nothing blindingly new in what either of us has to say, but the territory is virtually unexplored, anyway.

A salesman cursed by luck has no reliable systems – ask me how I know. But a cargo cult is not the antidote to chaos.

The second worst problem with cargo cults is their atheoretical idiocy: “The other guys does all the knowing for me.” But the worst problem is the assumption that the other guy knows what he’s doing.

If you don’t know why, you don’t know what. If you got no theory, you got no praxis.

In other news:

Housing Wire: NYC, LA and SF residents are moving to these cities.

Mike DelPrete: Zillow, Power Buyers, and the Challenge of Attaching Mortgage.

Ashe Schow: Former Seattle Police Chief Says Media Downplayed Violence At CHOP To Make It Appear Peaceful.

Brad Polumbo: Here Are the 10 States Where Residents Pay the Highest Lifetime Taxes.

Christopher Rufo: The Woke-Industrial Complex: Lockheed, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sends key executives on a mission to deconstruct their “white male privilege.”

The American Mind: Miserable Women, Purposeless Men.

Greek thought is so much the water we swim in that we never think to think about it. We sort and reorganize and align and trim and we never wonder why we fuss so incessantly about “proper order,” when both words are entirely artifacts of the mind. Nature does not care if your pencils (ahem!) are sharpened, just your math teacher – or your boss.

But Ovid reminds us that the man who is not prepared today will be even less so tomorrow, and I would add that the job that was done badly the last time will be done worse the next.

The Greek ideal of a world without imperfections is absurd, and they knew that. The Christians ripped off the idea and called it heaven, but, regardless, there are still no real phenomena free of all defects.

But that’s what a praxis – your praxis – is for. A praxis is a practice you are actively working to get better at: Sound theory informing your efforts, measured results improving the theory, iteration after iteration. Your objective is to remove defects in your performance, as you identify them. When you can’t find anything else to fix, either find better eyes to judge your work or move up in the challenges you’re taking on.

And that, too, is a very Greek way of thinking. We malign the Greeks as dreamers, but to this day, our way of relentlessly pursuing perfection is the praxis we learned from them.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices haven’t risen this fast since 2005.

Redfin: The Wave of Pandemic-Era Relocations Continued in April, With Nearly 31% of Homebuyers Looking to Move to Another Metro. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. Their own charts show the influence of the riots. Now that the pandemic lies are abating, will real estate demand die down as well? In conversation, I keep saying that near-term results in Phoenix hang on whether we have another “Summer of Love.” Everyone always laughs – an hypocrisy tell.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand falls as Read more

A year ago today, a very bad man graced the earth with his demise.

George Floyd is missed by his loved ones, but surely not by his many victims. He died of a self-administered drug overdose, but the whole world conspired to lie about that obvious fact in order to create a pretext for chaos – targeting Donald Trump’s re-election effort and initiating an on-going color revolution in the United States.

We have spent the past year – and many decades before – demonizing the great people who built this country in order to aggrandize the truly demonic. How’s that working out for you?

Give George Floyd this, though: He’s the shit-test for all the ages. Anyone singing his praises today is not to be trusted: There was nothing praiseworthy in his life until it ended – at which point his demonic impulses metastasized as a national cancer.

Witness: George Washington, America’s Cincinnatus, was a great man – even though, like Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ ancestors, he owned slaves. George Floyd was a lifelong predator and parasite – even though he died in a snuff-porn video. The revolution will have succeeded when you can no longer keep those simple facts straight.

In other news:

CNBC: Home prices in March saw highest growth in over 15 years, S&P Case-Shiller says.

Housing Wire: NAR: Almost 50% of homes sold for more than list price. What’s up with the other half?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Minneapolis to bring in outside help to deal with surge in violence.

The American Spectator: Democrat Policies Have Created a Blue-State Exodus.

John Nolte: Democrat-Run Cities Can’t or Won’t Protect Jews and Asians from Hate Crime Explosion.

Julie Kelly: Time to Confront the U.S. Capitol Police About Its January 6 Lies.

The Federalist: In May 2020, Rioters Rained Hell On Our Cities. One Year Later We Ask: For What?

Lee Smith: Street Violence as a Political Tool.

The New York Times discovered the population bomb over the weekend, so our ugly demographic portents are temporarily news. I’ve been talking about this for a long time, and others, notably Mark Steyn, for even longer.

I can explain this in DISC terms, but the matter is plain on the surface: Given a choice, more risk-averse people will tend to defer reproduction, often beyond the point-of-no-return. Raise the risks, as we did all last year, and childbirth plummets. Chip away at the rewards for being alive, as we have been doing since Marx and before – and childbirth plummets decade-by-decade. The Times should have a look at the corresponding demographic disaster at the other end of life.

Life could be a dream, we are exhorted, if only it were a machine. But inside the machine, you’re either a gear or a gum-ball. Surprisingly only to parasites and predators – given a choice, no one wants to live like that.

In other news:

CNBC: Robert Shiller: ‘Wild west’ mentality is gripping housing, stocks and crypto.

CBS News: The Great Reshuffling: How the real estate market exploded. CTRL-F: ‘riot’; not found.

National Review: Austin’s Revolt against a Homelessness Surge.

Fox News: St. Louis’ murder rate, already highest in US, soared last year; mayor vows to defund the police.

Heather Mac Donald: The Revolution Comes to Juilliard: Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the art.

American Thinker: No Race Has Ever Done More for Another Race than White Americans Have Done for Black Americans. A fun read, and precisely the conversation on race no one wants to have. If this article is not buried, beware of exploding heads.

Issues and Insights: The Population Dud: Paul Ehrlich, Call Your Office.

Most of the personal safety you have known in your life owes to the fathering skills of people born before you: You and virtually everyone else continually effect the self-restraint you mastered as toddlers, and, in neglected consequence, peace and plenty abound.

What about people less masterful at self-restraint? They are constrained by their fear of the future consequences of their actions: Violent retaliation and/or arrest and incarceration.

The anti-Ant crime – and simple ugly malice – we are seeing right now is the further fruit of underpolicing the underfathered.

The police were never the cause of your safety in the first place, but now they cannot even deter bad behavior. Respond accordingly.

In other news:

The Daily Mail: California nightmare: How high taxes, rampant crime, suffocating wokery, streets littered with homeless addicts, and years of liberal policies are blamed for ruining the Golden State… as thousands of families flee to Republican Texas and Florida.

Reason: The California Exodus Is Real.

PJ Media: ‘The Wheels Are Coming Off.’ Deeper Cuts to Austin Police Are on the Way in Mayor Adler’s ‘Reimagining’.

The Conversation: Employees are feeling burned over broken work-from-home promises and corporate culture ‘BS’ as employers try to bring them back to the office.

The American Mind: Baby Bust.

As noted below, hedge funds are still buy-and-hold buyers. Do not ask me why. We have not worked on the buyer side of an investment deal in six or seven years. My style of single-family property has been upside down for a long time.

But we sell to them, happily, when we hit their buy box, which we almost always do. Over the past few years, you can track them as they went from bargain hunters at 85% of list to retail shoppers at list or above. I can’t imagine they’re picking off very many right now, given what owner-occupants are willing to pay, but, as before, I’m not seeing their upside, anyway.

For a reason why, take the satellite view of Bumstead, AZ – and look at all that empty dirt. Zoom out: There’s lots more. All that land and much to the west of it will be houses someday.

Could it be that the hedge funds are putting a corner on tulip bulbs?

In other news:

CNBC: April existing home sales drop, marking three straight months of declines.

Bloomberg.com: Mega Landlords Are Snapping Up Zillow Homes Before the Public Can See Them. Is this opaque to you? Are they buying at retail, off the MLS? Or are the iBuyers wholesaling inventory at precisely the wrong time? And what would be the point of that, anyway – buy high, sell even lower?

Housing Wire: Home shoppers aren’t the only ones using Zillow. I know a lady who meanders neighborhoods in Google Streetview.

Daniel Greenfield: San Fran Legalized Shoplifting. Now Seniors Have No Pharmacies.

Angelo Codevilla: Regime vs. Regime.

Julie Kelly: The January 6 Commission Is All About Revenge.

Karol Markowicz: Back from Florida—To Stay? A lifelong New Yorker wonders if the city can still be home.

This is Marxism in one gerundive:

Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

If you say, “Then what?” – you’re out of the club, but that doesn’t really matter: The goal is not their success but your failure.

Civilization is created by Ants for Ants. What happens when civil order itself turns on the Ants?

I think we’re seeing that now. Since last Summer, the law is all on the side of the Grasshoppers when it comes to petty offenses and property crimes, and it has been a year-long rent holiday in many places. Ants are now openly attacked in major cities, and the father of all anti-Ant agendas – anti-semitism – is now ubiquitous.

Is this the pre-licensing stage for a purge? Seems like a good time to beef up the defenses…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise to the occasion at 3%.

Redfin.com: Half of Homes Are Now Selling Above List Price. And the other half…?

John Nolte: ‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.

John Sexton: Shootings and chaos in Portland.

Daniel Greenfield: An Anti-Semitic Hate Wave Grows in Los Angeles.

Brad Polumbo: Rand Paul Warns America: Time to ‘Wake Up’ to ‘Profound Repercussions’ of Biden’s Spending Binge.

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

Joanne Jacobs: Testing out of college.

The Federalist: Even For Kids With In-Person Instruction, This Was The Worst Public School Year Ever.

I have been teasing friends about the vicissitudes of Bitcoin – how 12x last Friday can turn into 7x by today, and how people who talk about x-ing their “investments” are most often degenerate gamblers, losing slowly and lying about it.

I’m not nobody’s investment advisor, just not yours, but I have zero interest in securities, even, much less hypotheticals. But most of the people I do advise have done very well – by avoiding everything arm’s-length and sticking to the soil and the structures appurtenant thereto. 😉

The house I leased last week was purchased ten years ago for $70,500 – and the extra $500 may well have swung the deal in those days. Financed 80/20 and the investor put around $15k back in as rehab. So $30k cash out of pocket is worth $300k today – but not just today. That would be 10x in ten years, but the house has thrown off rental cash-flow the whole time, a little at the start, a lot by now. Ten years of depreciation, plus accelerated depreciation on the appliances – and someday a tax-deferred exit on the appreciation, assuming China Joe doesn’t frolic that up, too.

How much x in ten years? I can’t x that high – and if we have another Summer of “Love”, how much higher can it go? Nothing lasts forever and there is no accounting for luck. But at least half of all crypto-currency “investors” are net losers by now, where the firemen who rescued the economy by buying the houses no one else wanted are becoming millionaires on their prescience.

It could be there’s a clue in there somewhere. If you breathe deep, you just might catch it…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Investors are buying up single-family homes across the US.

The Washington Times: Five Oregon counties vote to explore joining Idaho.

The Daily Mail: ‘It’s become an outdoor psychiatric ward!’ How California’s scenic Venice Beach has become a homeless hotspot with tent cities, violent crime and rampant drug use pushing families and tourists out.

The Federalist: Nearly 20 Percent Read more