Category: Real Estate (page 15 of 266)

Lucky us, we have had zero real estate problems during the pandemic of panic. We manage a portfolio of rental properties, but we had zero missed or late payments – and we even sold two of them occupied, a third-rail red flag when eviction may be forbidden by law.

If you read me elsewhere, you’ll hear me talking about The Affectionate Display: The default proffering and presumption of good will, and the assumption that any difficulties arise from miscommunication or mistake, not malice. That’s a social strategy – assuming the best about other people – but it’s how we run our business, too. We don’t want conflict, so we don’t have conflict.

I can’t swear that’s why the past year has been easy for us – the entire trick to property management is resident selection, and we have wonderful people living in our rentals – but it’s how we know our properties are secure from negligence or damage.

In other news:

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand stalls as rates rise and fierce competition hurts home sales.

Fox 5 Vegas: Renter trashes Las Vegas house on way out, property managers say it’s a pandemic trend.

Katie Pavlich: Americans Set Another Gun Purchase Record in April.

City Journal: Urban Growth Will Continue.

Mises Institute: How Trillions in Newly Printed Money Created a Labor Shortage.

Angelo Codevilla: Oligarchy, and Remedies.

City Journal: Less Than Meets the Eye: How admissions officers could be setting up minority students for failure.

Robby Soave: In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at Math.

Dana Loesch: A Model for Fighting Critical Race Theory in America’s Schools.

Redfin is coming to Boston – if you consider the remote outer-suburbs Boston. From the link:

Redfin is making offers on single-family homes and townhomes built after 1900 in parts of Middlesex, Norfolk and Plymouth counties. The company expects to expand to additional neighborhoods and property types in the region over time.

Going back to 1900 is ballsy. Everything built before 1935 or so was one-off – not production homes – and subsequent remodels would throw comparability out the window, anyway. But most of the houses on the I-495 outer loop – where RedfinNow is actually going – are post-WWII tract homes, many of them post-1980.

Where is RedfinNow not going? To Roxbury and Dorchester – or anywhere in Suffolk County – where the black people are. RedfinNow is redlining the very whitest part of a very racist, very redlined, very white state to stake its claim in Massachusetts.

Making these big-city boasts is absurd. No big-budget iBuyer works in inner-cities – which is why all of them are redlining, de facto. But redlining Redfin is so far from Boston and its bothersome diversity that it might as well claim Providence, too.

What a tangled web! Be like a real real estate brokerage, Redfin. Stop lying about racism and lie about your results, instead, like everybody else.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Greg Swann: If Zillow is buying its marketing from Fiverr, it should spring for the upsell.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: Clear Cooperation Is a Disaster in the Making. Static market fallacy, along with normality bias. I read this theory two years ago and thought the same thing. When the market turns, the MLS will rise again.

The Hill: Is the US headed toward a new housing bubble?

The New York Post: Expelling Asian Americans from top schools proves NYC education is off the rails.

The Wall Street Journal: In L.A. and San Francisco, Schools Are Open but Classrooms Are Near-Empty.

Is Glenn Kelman the Orren Boyle of real estate?

While Basecamp is graciously showing the world how to be based in business, Kelman is the social savior who has a solution for every problem except Redfin.com’s currently-completely-useless marketing strategy.

The flavor of the micro-second? Pocket listings. I don’t like them, either, but they are no less stupid than selling to an iBuyer – like Redfin – in this market.

So Kelman makes an earnest appeal with a hidden motive: Redfin’s buyer’s agents can’t show and collect on exclusive listings. Their dissatisfied buyers have good reasons to gravitate to big local brokerages instead of Redfin’s national database of Pending sales. The MLS has always been a fallback to direct marketing. Other brokers are where you go when the listing isn’t selling – compensating them appropriately for marketing what you could not. As with compulsory commission-gouging, Kelman’s grand statesmanship amounts to outlawing alternatives to dipshit discounters like Redfin.

Redfin can’t get listings because it sells like employees sell – unimpressively – while shafting buyer’s agents from other brokerages. It can’t sell other broker’s exclusive listings, because they and their sellers don’t need Redfin’s remaining buyers just now. And, apparently, it can’t stop bitching about the brutal unfairness of it all.

Here’s the trick: Get better at real estate, Glenn. That would be what they’re paying you for.

In other news:

PJ Media: Change: Austin Voters Strongly Reject Unfettered Homeless Camping.

Fox 5 New York: De Blasio calls city workers back to offices; some aren’t happy.

Andrea Widburg: A software company comes up with a brilliant corporate speech policy.

Brad Polumbo: Biden’s Labor Secretary Just Threatened Independent Contractors.

The New York Post: Educational malpractice in the name of ‘equity’.

Here’s a fun real estate analysis exercise, one you’re unlikely to see anywhere else:

If a neighborhood has a very high ChaosScore™, will it have better or worse tree coverage than one with a low score?

We don’t have to measure chaos. HUD keeps track of rental housing. Will a community that is 75% renters have better foliage than one that is 25% renters?

Wicked easy, ain’t it? The renter analysis is actually better for understanding tree coverage – which is also racist, lesser minds argue. Trees are expensive, high-maintenance amenities, so all the reasons that make homeowners better about upkeep generally make them better about landscaping, too.

So again, not racism but location, location, location. If you prize wildlife, you pay with a longer commute. If you crave tree-lined streets with rolling lawns, you settle for less house for more money. If you want a lot of house for the least money – either as a homeowner or an investor – you buy where the renters are many and the trees are few.

Everything in economics is a trade-off. You could argue that the tenants in a treeless neighborhood have no better choices. The owners all do. Each one chose the home he bought according to his own hierarchy of values, weighing each material consideration by his own scale. If the home he bought does not yet correspond to his dreams, by fix-up or move-up, someday it can.

In other news:

The New York Post: Long Island man dodges eviction for 20 years, living in house he doesn’t own.

American Thinker: The shifting human tide.

The American Spectator: Florida: The Emerging Super State.

Townhall: Biden’s New Death Tax.

Politico: Some kids never logged on to remote school. Now what?

There really is a Crazy Linda, and she really does call herself that, and she really does go to the puppy store at the Arrowhead Mall every day. I can’t imagine what the past year has done to her – not locked in, but locked out of much of her meandering.

I don’t know what happened to the puppy store, either, but there sure are a lot of new puppies out there. And here’s something else I didn’t know – the big-duh secret sauce of the puppy business: Puppies are financed. Just like used cars – and I mean just like used cars.

How stupid is that? For forty bucks at the pound you can get a better dog, and they’ll throw in a nylon lead. Fussy about purebreds – because you like ’em hot and crazy? Over the years, we scored two Bloodhounds, an English Coonhound and a Redbone Coonhound – all purebred, all rescues.

It happens that I am socializing a four-figure dog just now – paid for in cash, I should note – a French Bulldog named Cleo, and I love her to distraction. But the dog who loved me best in the world was Shyly, a Chow/Labrador mutt, an Arizona disaster with four inches of black fur in all directions, passed on twice by other families. Smart, fun, loyal, always by my side.

A few weeks ago, Cleo and I met a nerdy couple at the park – with their puppy and their dog trainer. The dog was a Belgian Malinois – TV-famous for running down Islamofascist terrorists. Why were they buying dog training? Because they were overmatched by their oh-so-fashionable, hyper-dominant puppy. The dog was literally taking over, blocking their access in their own home – itself probably also too much for them!

Funny to me, anyway – this Scottish Terrier couple with a GI Joe dog. It’s funnier still to think that the dog might be financed – at credit-card interest.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts are rising, Read more

Redfin has more home-price ballyhoo this morning, but it answers none of my standing questions:

• Where is all this new demand coming from, and what so-far undocumented vacancy is it leaving behind?
• What is happening to real estate values in the core – not the ring suburbs – of the rioted cities?
• And while we’re about it, what is a “home” to Redfin in articles like these: Any ownable domicile or just single-family detached residences on bucolic, fee-simple suburban lots?

Lots of new puppies last year, but almost no new babies. If the balloon is bulging for puppy-perfect housing, it is being squeezed somewhere. Redfin knows the answers to my questions – and they can’t just be my concerns. It would be nice if someone were to tell the whole truth.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Pending home sales rebound in March.

Redfin: Newly Built Homes Make Up 26% of All Single-Family Homes for Sale—A Record High.

Michael Tracey: One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is “Murderapolis” Again.

Architectural Digest: This Artist Faked Being a Billionaire to Photograph New York City’s Best Views.

I’m doing CE just now – a month early, because I’m about to get hit with houses and I can’t be late.

So: Dual agency is bad, m’kay? Steady source of lawsuits, including class-action suits. But it’s lawful, as regulated, so that’s what’s taught: Written consent of both parties when limited agency is imminent.

Agency with an interest, anyone? I’ve pointed out that the iBuyers are also going to have this problem: They are badly-veiled self-dealers – pawnbrokers – except that pawnbrokers are not fiduciary to their self-designated clients.

And it occurred to me this morning that much inventory, MLS’d or not, must be moving by dual agency. Yes, I’m that dumb: We don’t double-dip, so I never think about it. Buyers will waive anything, right now, so why not representation itself?

Surely that won’t bite anyone in the ass…

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales rose less than expected in March as prices soared.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise, but remain under 3%.

CNBC: The Fed keeps rates near zero — here’s how you can benefit.

Housing Wire: Skyrocketing lumber prices add $36K to new homes.

Fox News: More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year, many citing anti-police climate. If only there were giant real estate brokerages in Seattle to report on actual facts instead of racist chimera.

The Washington Times: Biden’s racial equity agenda targets ‘exclusionary’ single-family neighborhoods.

The American Mind: The Struggle for Owned Space.

Frontpage: Black Supremacy: The hate that dare not speak its name.

American Greatness: America’s Real White Supremacy Problem.

CNN: Meet the 12-year-old graduating high school and college in the same week.

Masks are obviously stupid. If you can smell perfume – or a dog’s fart – your mask is protecting you from nothing. Except anoxia, of course, the silent killer of brain cells.

Even so, the worst advice “the experts” gave us, over the past year, was not about encasing your face in toxic plastics. No, the worst advice was to stay indoors.

The UVC in natural, unfiltered sunlight kills all viruses, practically instantaneously. And when sunlight hits your skin, it is converted to vitamin D, boosting your immune system.

Ignoring for governmental ineptitude, people will have done better against this virus where the sunlight is strong all year – or where they had dogs-to-walk or work-responsibilities that brought them outdoors anyway.

Why weren’t the homeless wiped out by the virus? Sunlight. Why are Texas and Florida doing so much better than Michigan or New York? Sunlight. Why will the virus abate up north with the onset of Summer? Sunlight.

If you tell me “the experts” have been lying about everything all along, I’m an easy sell. But it is beyond doubt that they have been lying about the benefits – undisputed lifelong holistic benefits – of getting outside.

In other news:

MarketWatch: The No. 1 emerging property market in America isn’t in Texas or Florida — you may never even have heard of it.

Housing Wire: Applications drop, despite falling mortgage rates.

The New York Post: Albany’s ‘Good Cause Eviction’ spells bad news for NY’s housing market.

American Thinker: Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.

City Journal: The Big Empty.

American Thinker: Righteous Recycling.

Betsy McCaughey: The CDC’s reign of error has done incalculable harm to America. Yeah, but how are things working out for China?

My nephew is a locksmith, so I know his children’s futures are secure: Home security is a growth industry.

If you live in a city where the police are afraid to enforce civil order, you need security. If you moved away, but not far enough, you need security. And even if you are no less safe than before, if you are more fearful, you need security.

Young and bored to death with schoolwork? Your neighbors need security doors and iron bars for their windows. Their neighborhoods need security gates and perimeter defenses. Talk all day about the internet-of-things, but there is nothing more brick-’n’-mortar than a wall.

We socialized home security to the police, and that worked pretty well where almost no one was a criminal, anyway. The police are defaulting just when they are needed most, and, hence, self-defense had devolved to from whence it first emerged: You – your self, your spouse, your family, hour homestead, your work, your values. Home security is a growth industry because you know that, ultimately, there is no one to defend the things you love but you.

That’s why Americans are buying guns, too, but passive defenses avoid bloodshed by sending bad impulses elsewhere. That would be ‘privilege’, I should think – and give me excess of it! Civilization is people fighting – and dying, if necessary – to sustain their values.

That’s a heavy burden! If you’re in Metropolitan Phoenix, my nephew – Tim Brannum – can help: Lockology, 623-800-5900.

In other news:

Redfin: Urban Single-Family Homes Are Seeing the Fastest Price Growth as Buyers Return to City But Still Crave Space. More little-riot-lies from Redfin: They are documenting the demi-flight from urban cores to ring suburbs – which I have argued will prove to have been a mistake. Their charts are always fun, since the text yammers on about the pandemic, but the results document the riots. What’s going on with apartments, Redfin? What’s going on in CHAZ/CHOP? If you’re walking on tiptoes over there, afraid to speak the truth out Read more

As we talked about last year, the likelihood of rioting in any particular urban environment is broadly predictable by what I jokingly called a RiotScore™. The best tell is the Chief of Police, but by now we all know many ways of predicting where and why riots will occur.

A more granular way of looking at the same issue – where is the safety the residential real estate market is fleeing to? – is something I am calling the ChaosScore™: How much urban chaos is proximate to this home? That is to say: Is this an area where I am more likely to roll down my windows – or lock my doors?

Plausibly, there are Fair Housing issues here, since real estate agents are instructed to send safety questions to third-party resources – but the ChaosScore™ can be precisely that.

So: Like this: Within a three-mile radius, quantity of:

• Supermarkets/pharmacies
• Abortion clinics/gun stores
• Check-cashing/payday-loan stores
• Convenience stores/gas stations
• Traffic lights/limited-access roadways

The lower the score, the better – unless you are plotting the location of your next McDonalds. I could think of other things to measure, but they’re all about non-residential uses of the land. This again is a color-blind way of looking at the impact of location on residential real estate appreciation: Anyone buying a home where the ChaosScore™ is high should expect worse results, going forward, compared with low-ChaosScore™ neighborhoods. Higher risk of both greater-commercialization and condemnation, as well.

And while I do not ever expect to see a ChaosScore™ on a realty.bot listing, this is the way to do real estate analysis when you are not trying to uphold a demonstrably false, palpably racist agenda.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: How To Fix Florida Homeowner’s Insurance Costs.

In other news:

American Thinker: Portland’s mayor should resign first.

Joel Kotkin: The Green New Deal Will Impoverish America.

City Journal: Capitalist Havens of Free Speech: Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment.

Townhall.com: The Oscar Speech That Went Viral…For a Good Reason.

If you buy a Coke every time you go through a drive-through or hit the convenience store, you’re drinking a lot of coke. You may have to figure out what to eat, but you always know how you’ll be washing it down.

Coke spends a ton of money on marketing and advertising – with every other marketing budget being a mere fraction of Coca-Cola-Incorporated’s spend. And yet they are spending nothing to get your business. You have probably cost them nothing all along, since you were ordering Coke when you did drive-throughs from the back seat.

You are theirs by habit, and, accordingly, you are the bankable part of their business. The marketing seeks conversion and retention, neither of which are needed to keep your money flowing in.

What is needed? Zero interruptions in the habituated behavior. Steady customers are yours for their reasons, not yours. If you piss them off, they will go away and never come back, taking five to twenty-five cash sales a week with them – each.

As if anyone had to be told, that is why pissing off the customer is a poor idea: You won’t even know for sure why they were doing business with you until they’re gone.

In other news:

The Daily Wire: Black-Owned Businesses At George Floyd Square Beg For Help Amid Spiking Crime, Nosediving Revenue.

The New York Post: Are NYPD officers rushing to retire amid city’s anti-cop climate?

Townhall.com: Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.

John Hinderaker: Why Wind and Solar Energy Are Doomed to Failure.

What’s a CEO to do when he discovers that everyone he has hired since 9/11 is a Marxist fifth-columnist?

It’s a funny question, but I confess I do not know the answer. The actual choice before C-suites, Boards of Directors and shareholders is this: Either destroy your business – “get woke, go broke” – or have it destroyed from within by temporally-displaced anarcho-syndicalists. The worst news: The latter auto-cannibalism will happen, anyway.

If I’m smart enough to see this, so are they. But is it too late for them to do anything about it…?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Home prices soared in March amid record demand.

The New York Post: NYC rents are in free fall, now reaching record lows.

Housing Wire: New homes are selling like it’s 2006 again.

Real Clear Politics: New Jersey’s Self-Inflicted Fiscal Woes May Bring Statewide Property Tax.

Townhall: America, Here Comes the Great Depression 2.0.

Monica Showalter: Wokester apocalypse: Public school enrollment plunges in California — and everywhere else.

As I have pointed out too often, Redfin is on a Marxian crusade to prove that poorer real estate results for black homeowners results from racism, rather than from an aversion to the neighborhoods where black homeowners frequently buy their homes.

In other words, why grasp at an inherently specious claim when “location, location, location” provides so many compelling answers?

Here’s a question Redfin will never dare to ask out loud: Where do more-prosperous black homeowners buy their homes?

And here is a better lens for understanding the whole gestalt: Ants and Grasshoppers. Majority black neighborhoods will tend also to be majority Grasshopper neighborhoods, more is the pity, where peace, plenty and an undoubted civility will abound in majority Ant neighborhoods.

Looking for a color-blind test of this obvious market principle? The neighborhoods around large tax-funded universities will be overrun with Grasshoppers – students and former students who prefer the party life to, you know, life. Real estate results in those neighborhoods will tend to trail nearby Ant neighborhoods in much the same way Redfin observes in majority black neighborhoods.

Grasshoppers are poor stewards of real estate because they are poor stewards generally. People who invest in real estate in neighborhoods where Grasshopper values are readily apparent should expect poorer results with respect to the market – and especially with respect to majority Ant neighborhoods.

In other news:

CNBC: Existing home sales suffer second straight monthly decline as tight supply pushes prices higher.

The New York Post: Millennials are moving back into awkward teen rooms in record numbers.

The College Fix: I’ve lived in Minneapolis my entire life. I’m leaving Friday. I no longer recognize my hometown.

Breitbart.com: Report: Black Lives Matter Protests ‘Correlate with a 10 Percent Increase in Murders’ in Areas Where They Occur.

Richard Hanania: Why is Everything Liberal? Cardinal Preferences Explain Why All Institutions are Woke.

PJ Media: The End of Basic Education: Biden Issues Universal Public School Critical Race Theory Order.