Category: Real Estate (page 20 of 266)

I met Sonny through Tony. He had come to Arizona to look at possible rental homes with me, and Sonny, his business partner, came along with him.

This was in 2005, and houses were tough to get. We looked at one that I knew was doable, so I said, “So, are we ready to write a contract?”

Just doing my job, but Sonny said: “Wow. He’s a closer.”

And I thought: “Wow. He’s a cooler.”

I was wrong, though. Sonny caught on quick, and by the next morning he was ready to buy, too.

He and Tony found a FSBO that was holding an open house. Sonny was definitely interested, but they couldn’t figure the seller out.

They asked me to meet him and in six questions I sussed out the scam: The seller was a seminar investor who would get pre-foreclosure borrowers to put him on title, promising to help, then essentially sell their homes out from under them. He was so cagey because he lived in fear of his past victims. He worked out of a Post Office box and met people in parking lots. No kidding.

Those six questions set my star above all others in Sonny’s eyes. We bought the house, and I had to write my own sales commission into the deal, since the property was not listed.

He moved his mother into that house, and she was there until she had to move on. I sold it when she did, and Sonny did all right. Not a killing, but all right – for a house that almost fell into his lap.

And the next one literally did. I was working in a house we had just acquired for another investor when a neighbor popped in and asked, “Are you a real estate agent?”

It can happen – bread cast upon the waters. And it gets better:

The neighbor was Joe, and Joe said, “Can you find a buyer for my house? I don’t want a lot of hassle, I just want to get out Read more

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman has apparently made a fetish of purging his company of the awful influence of creatures like himself – white and male.

If we were to adapt those terms and say instead that he was out to persecute people who are non-white or female, we would recognize at once that he is a hateful bigot – a racist and a sexist. If you didn’t have to make that mental swap to see the truth, call yourself wise – wiser, certainly, than Kelman.

Ignore altogether the Great White Father posturing of a white male so at war with whiteness and maleness that he most certainly must not resign – thus to rid his company of his own malevolently melanin-free toxic masculinity – but must instead remain heroically in charge to rescue all the pathetically helpless black, brown and ovaried people. There is nothing hypocritically ugly in that pose.

Ignore, too, that Redfin and a zillion other corporate villains are bragging about their racism and sexism, all of a sudden. Here’s another clue for you all: The people being unfairly helped were not hurt by the people being unfairly hurt. There is nothing of “justice” in any of this, simply prideful virtue-signaling of the ugliest of human vices. Public preening like Kelman’s is just the real-life enactment of The Hunger Games, where the capricious choosing of the slain masquerades as noblesse oblige.

Consider this, though: The officer roles in a publicly traded company are fiduciary. Kelman should not put his personal politics ahead of the profitability of his typically-unprofitable company – but his doing so creates liability that his shareholders should enforce. Deliberately hiring the wrong people to make a point is the ostensive definition of a fiduciary violation.

But go once further: Redfin is a real estate brokerage. It is fiduciary to its clients for every single activity it undertakes. The claim that the deal having been screwed up matters less than the (reported) skin color or (imputed) gonads of the screw-up seems unlikely to fare well in court. For a Read more

We sold a lot of houses, over the past dozen years, by agreeing to do property management on them. We’re small fish by any scale, but I represent a pool of investors – California middle-class, so Arizona rich – and a portfolio of homes.

We bought for resale value, and over the past few years we have been demonstrating the wisdom of that praxis: My guys are making a killing when they cash out, almost always tax-deferred.

This is a note I sent to them this week:

I never want to bet against Phoenix, but we are nevertheless as adept at crashing to the ashes as we are at soaring to the heights. This market last topped out in 2006, and now, 15 years later, we may be hitting the upper limits of where we can go.

This past year killed for appreciation, with three factors driving our price surge:

1. Fear-driven demand, with population growth from both the virus and from unrest elsewhere.

2. Low interest rates and the fear-of-missing-out on them.

3. Currency inflation; by the time all the checks are cashed, the money supply has grown immensely.

Fear is unpredictable, but Texas is blowing us a cold wet kiss just now: They are not energy-secure, but we are. Interest rates are rising now, and inflation invites its own responses.

The point would be that now may be the time to sell, if you have a way of moving to a safer investment – ideally avoiding the capital-gains tax hit.

We have been selling properties by 1031 exchange – moving from one real estate investment to another with the taxes deferred – but your investment advisor can talk to you about moving from real estate into other investments, by way of tax-deferred retirement-investment vehicles.

I’m not chasing you away. We’re selling a tenant-occupied home now, so we’re about to lose our favorite tenants and it’s breaking my heart. But the name of this game is buy-low, sell-high, and now or sometime soon may be the time to Read more

Here’s a thought that occurred to me this morning: Who’s going to milk the new licensees?

Eighty-five percent of all new licensees in Arizona fail within the first two years: They fail to renew their licenses and drift back into the shadows. Cynical brokers opine that everyone has at least three transactions in him, and those brokers will milk non-salesmaniacal non-entrepreneurs for whatever deals they can cough up, before kicking them to the curb.

The funniest thing about iBuying is that the iBuyers don’t know what business the brokers are in. They think the real estate business is about real estate, when for most brokers the business is milking new licensees into bankruptcy. For a new agent to hit the glide path – more money coming in than going out, consistently – is the rarest of outcomes.

There is much to hate in the agent-milking racket – but quite a bit less at the moment. Without in-person real estate schools, I wonder if there are any new licensees…

In other news:

KOMO News: Amid protests and unrest, demand for security jobs in Washington has jumped. Irony is the hardest of mettles.

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence improves, despite record high lumber prices.

Housing Wire: New mortgage originations totaled $1.2T in the fourth quarter, New York Fed says.

John Daniel Davidson: The Failure Of The Texas Power Grid Is Worse Than You Think.

City Journal: Chicago’s Big Education, Inc: The teachers’ union’s outsize power comes at the expense of students, parents, and taxpayers.

Don Feder: Our Enemy: The Boardroom.

Mark Steyn: The Indispensable Man: Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021.

Housing prices surged, post-pandemic. Redfin, et al, like to blame that ephemeral flu because it permits them to whitewash (ahem) – perhaps to redline (bada-bing!) – all the riot-evacuated neighborhoods.

Our recently-massively-inflated money supply might seem to account for the price increases, but – now more than ever – all real estate is local. The “macro” factors argue against any supply shortfall: Household formation? Birth rates? Substantial immigration? All down, significantly, and for a long time. Our current highly-localized “housing shortage” is caused by an abandonment of still-serviceable inventory in riot-torn cities.

I can’t defend that claim because it is not being documented by the real estate press, but it will turn out that rioted cities will have lost population to non-rioted cities, that more-suburban areas in rioted cities will have gained where more-urban areas will have lost, and that, generally, people will have moved from D- and C-quality housing to B- and A-rated domiciles – leaving many empty former-residences behind them.

The abandoned homes will be gradually subtracted from the available housing stock Detroit-style. This is Bastiat’s seen and unseen – among many, many shiny objects – and we’re not built to notice gradual change. The decline in the rioted areas will be masked by the hyperinflation: “See! Prices are rising in Portland, too, just not as fast!”

The housing shortage is a flight to safety – from every sort of peril, real or imagined. There is no shortage of perfectly adequate places to live in recently-rioted neighborhoods – and there may soon be a housing glut in Texas!

In other news:

Glenn Kelman: Diversity at Redfin in 2020. When is a “struggle session” audit a self-authored confession to a national fair employment lawsuit? What is Redfin getting wrong? It got big enough to be cannibalized.

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications drop for second week.

CNBC: Retailers trade Fifth Ave for Worth Ave as Palm Beach scene thrives with Americans heading South.

Townhall: Texas’s ‘Nightmare’ Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America. Read more

Yesterday, I noted that, “One third of all American dollars are less than a year old.” What’s the implication?

Since the quantity of available economic goods doesn’t change much, from year to year, it is reasonable to suppose that soon the dollar will have lost around a third of its purchasing power.

Hard to measure right now, with the “market basket” so COVID-skewed, but we have massively increased the amount of money chasing goods, so we should expect to see prices of everything rise to meet that “inflated” demand.

Under Trump, economic output was surging everywhere, tempering his complete lack of fiscal temperance. We know the opposite will be true under China Joe, so the inflationary sugar high is likely to have an ugly hangover.

The teeny tiny filigree on fiat money that no one ever reads says this, over and over again: “Hell is to have been paid.” Bank on that.

In other news:

Joel Pollak: San Francisco ‘Feels Like a Tomb’ as Companies Embrace ‘Work from Home’.

John Hinderaker: Why has Texas gone dark?.

Thomas Lifson: Dems introduce legislation to kill the gig economy, destroy millions of jobs.

John Daniel Davidson: Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Care If The Election Was Tainted, But You Should.

Matt Vespa: An Emerging and Tragic Side Effect of COVID Has Hit San Francisco.

Steven Malanga: The Amazon Effect: The Internet giant has been a key driver of job growth and productivity during the pandemic, but unionization efforts could undermine its e-commerce model.

I have an MLS search that is almost always open on my screen: “Coldwater Springs one story no pools no golf one month.”

My naming convention is obvious, and that one little search informs more than half of my world: The majority of the properties we manage fit that profile, as does half or more of everything I sell. I literally am a ‘neighborhood specialist’ without every intending to be.

Here are two things that are interesting about that search:

First, because inventory is in such short supply, I have to look at everything in Coldwater Springs to understand anything. Even going back only a month on Closed transactions is unreliable, with numbers moving so fast. Comping just for comparability sends you too far back in time, so you have to figure out where you stand by order-of-precedence, as well. Oh, well. It’s a great time to be a lister, and it is a wonderful time to be an experienced lister.

But: Second: Being trod upon, the worm will turn. That search has been rock-steady at 9 units for many months. Almost nothing ever Active, and then only for a few days, the rest either Pending or Closed. Now we’re at 14 hits – and climbing, the trend would suggest. One Active, stupidly overpriced so it may last a while. One Coming Soon. And, disturbingly, three Under Contract/Accepting Backups.

Greedy sellers and weak listers go together, but still… Last year’s price surge was fueled by the riots, with displaced urbanites rediscovering their suburban roots with twice the house at half the price. The riots have abated, for now, for the most part, but homeowners in suburban boomtowns like Phoenix might entertain a Californian paranoia: From Phoenix to Dayton or Decatur is also twice the house at half the price.

I don’t know that things have actually changed – “It’s just a gully. Just nerves.” – but if they haven’t they will. One third of all American dollars are less than a year old. That inflation will be paid for. Plan accordingly.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: California is collapsing.

Joel Read more

The Flynn Effect is in the news lately, assuming there is any news lately: Westerners are getting dumber. If you read me, you know why: Fatherhood was fully undermined in the West 50 years ago – 1970 is the knee on a dozen tragic curves. Everything fathers once did very well – especially rearing their own offspring – is now done very badly.

The ‘social’ ‘sciences’ are largely cargo cults: They measure phenomena they never bother to understand. Vide: The Marshmallow Test measures the Cautious need of the child’s parents; the children of nerds don’t eat the marshmallow, but they also know the full alphabet and what faked sound every animal makes. If you want your child to do better on his next official Marshmallow Test, practice at self-restraint every day. That’s what the Cautious parents are doing.

Likewise, the I.Q. test may measure differences among equally-prepared students, but what it measures in practice is the relative lack of preparation among test takers. The Flynn Effect essentially marveled at the stable families of the mid-twentieth century. It is losing its cargo-cultish “predictive” value because dad has been kicked to the curb – and hence his children are arriving at the testing center prepared worse not just intellectually but emotionally.

But: Be of good cheer. The Flynn Effect doesn’t predict anything – no more than the lunch bell predicts lunch. But the underlying reality is revealed by it, anyway: When fathers lead their families, everything is better for everyone, enduringly.

In other news:

AP: Minneapolis to spend $6.4M to recruit more police officers.

New York Post: Democrats in rebellion against Cuomo’s nursing-home coverup.

Karol Markowicz: Cuomo Didn’t Protect Seniors From COVID-19. But it Was the Media That Covered it Up.

American Thinker: A citizen’s list of ‘common core’ actions for election integrity.

RedState: In Must-Watch Clip, Trump Attorney “Michael van der Veen, Citizen” Destroys Media.

Roger Kimball: Yes, Acquittal Is Vindication.

Charles Hurt: After Impeachment Farce Ends, Next Comes 14th Amendment.

I will give you a way of understanding good and evil that should make things easier to understand, if not to abide.

Like this: When you are confronted with inexplicably evil conduct, entertain this thought:

“How tragic it is that there is no one in your life who would be ashamed to see you behaving this way.”

If you say those words out loud, you might get punched, but just by silently intoning them you will have fully-explained your situation: Well-brought-up adults are good by habit, not by repeated resolutions. But they are good by habit because, as children, they did not want to disappoint someone – typically a parent or grandparent.

All of “high-trust” civilization is built on good fathering, and everything everyone decries in the thoughtless or predatory behaviors of modernity emerges from our having undermined fatherhood.

How to fix the mess from here? No need. Just get out of dad’s way. He’ll take care of everything.

In other news:

CNBC: Bidding wars are off the charts, as home listings fall to a record low. Flash news from a grunt on the ground: The worm has turned on inventory.

king5.com: More businesses flee Seattle because of crime and violence. At least 160 businesses have left the city since last March.

New York Post: Millennials buying cheap old homes to escape pandemic cages.

Human Events: Disney Amongst Potential Mass Exodus of Businesses From California.

City Journal: Deficits Don’t Matter—Until They Do: We should be wary about dismissing risks that no longer seem relevant; eventually, they reemerge.

Seth Barron: Cuomo Unmasked: The New York governor’s long-running media celebration was largely based on a fiction—his dramatic understatement of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes.

Less by hook than by crook, the Ruling Class has gotten shed of Trump, so now the truth about the China Virus can start to dribble out.

If you didn’t know you were being lied to all last year, beware of scales falling from your eyes: The testing was juiced to make Trump look bad. Fauci, et al, lied about therapeutics to make Trump look bad. The mad-rush vaccine was delayed slightly to make Trump look bad. Death numbers were massively inflated to make Trump look bad.

And now at last we can be told the obvious truth: Democratic governors murdered thousands of old people to make Trump look bad.

They are ghouls. There is no one they won’t kill in pursuit of power. Recall that Andrew Cuomo was being lionized by the mainstream media while he was covering up this mass murder.

Heads up: If you can’t catch a clue, just sit tight: It’ll catch up to you.

In other news:

Jordan Davidson: Grandma-Killer Cuomo’s Top Aide Confesses State Covered Up Nursing Home Death Toll.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers Turning Obfuscation of Profit into an Art Form.

CNBC: Strength of housing market has broadened out, says CEO of homebuilder Taylor Morrison.

Ezra Klein: California is making liberals squirm.

CNBC: Zillow hopes to turn flood of real estate porn users during Covid into actual sales. Ahem: “We monetize a single-digit percentage of the people that come visit us right now,” Barton said.

New York Times: How the Pandemic Left the $25 Billion Hudson Yards Eerily Deserted.

Frontpage: Dems’ Next Plot Against Trump.

City Journal: Their Cups Runneth Over: State and local government revenues have recovered from the pandemic, and further federal aid is unnecessary.

How lame is real estate marketing? Zillow is making money with this for a tagline:

“When you’re ready for a change, we’re ready to help.”

Of course, they’re not selling to the public. Check the MLS: They’re terrible at selling houses. But at the boiler-room huckstering of gullible self-bankrupting real estate agents, they are beyond parallel.

As I’ve pointed out, technology is well-suited for the paperwork side of the real estate business, but it is lousy at selling and servicing real estate in the real world.

Guess what you can’t sub out or hire? Fire in the belly. No rainmaker, no rain.

The future of Zillow and all big corporations is Nikole Hannah-Jones: Mau-maued to death by consistent, craven C-suite gutlessness. But: Whatever: If you can sell and not just market, you’ll be fine.

In other news:

Housing Wire: For the third week in a row, mortgage rates stay at 2.73%.

Housing Wire: Zillow to buy ShowingTime for $500M. You will be assimilated by The Borg.

Mortgage News Daily: Conforming Loan Standards Loosened in January. From Brian Brady: “Mortgage guidelines loosening. The AVMs are back and appraisal waivers are being handed out like free candy.”

Housing Wire: Zillow revenue grows 22% in 2020.

Seeking Alpha: Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Hell Yes It Is.

City Journal: Yes, Bail Reform in Chicago Has Increased Crime: A recent report makes the connection clear, though its authors and funders claim otherwise.

American Greatness: The Coming Military Purge.

AND Magazine: Killing the Republic – Trump As Tiberius Gracchus.

Daniel Greenfield: In Its Desperation to Get Trump, Senate Created Unconstitutional Precedent for Impeaching Former Officials.

American Thinker: The Democrats’ misread conservatives when they attack Trump.

American Thinker: American Police State: No Questions Allowed.

I listed a house on January 29th that closed yesterday – eleven calendar days, inclusive, and the seller is out of state. The house sold in one day on market. I’m normally not quite that quick – it takes a few days to milk every offer to the limit – but we got an offer that we literally could not refuse.

Vide:

• Full list price
• All cash
• Appraisal waived
• Inspections waived
• Repairs waived
• Closing in 10 days (we lost a day to the HOA)

The house is tenant-occupied, a reddish flag in the midst of eviction moratoria, so it was impossible to pass on a contract where the only possible exits for the buyer were force majeure and acts of god. They literally could not cancel.

I am not your broker, and I am very glad that I am not representing buyers right now. But if you are, there is no posture quite so appealing to sellers right now as coming in completely supine, prostrate, waiving everything.

You can say the buyer of my listing was advised in ways that could lead to adverse consequences – that that’s what buyer protections are for.

My answer: They got the house.

In other news:

nbc4i.com: Just years after building San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, Salesforce will let most employees work remotely indefinitely.

CNBC: Mortgage demand drops as interest rates hit a three-month high.

CNBC: Mortgage delinquencies sink to pandemic low, but distress is far from over.

City Journal: Recall Fever in California: Gavin Newsom might not be the only Golden State politician facing a reckoning. This makes great sense everywhere: Get rid of whom you can and preoccupy the ones you can’t.

City Journal: Come One, Come All: President Biden’s immigration agenda will be a disaster for working-class Americans.

Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism Is the New War on the Working Class.

Dennis Prager: How Many Americans Has the American Medical Establishment Killed?

Michael Goodwin: With acquittal a foregone conclusion, the real drama is what Trump does next.

Michael Walsh: Republican Ineptitude and Democratic Ruthlessness Put Liberties in Danger.

I had a bunch of impeachment links, but I ditched them. If you care, you know what to Doogle. I expect I’ll wait to see the highlight reel. I’m much more curious about Trump and his portents than I am watching the Senate embarrass itself some more, in any case.

I was on the bubble about Trump forever: Di or Id? We know now: Trump’s Achilles’ heel is his reputation – second by second. A Di truly does not care what other people think, especially about him or his work. Ask me how I know? Trump cares a great deal, and so it is easy to push him off his game by threatening him in the next few news cycles.

Idsc, I think, not that it matters. Trump was never the solution, just the stopgap. We’ll find out this week if he can retain that role, but the gap is all but unstopped – at least for now.

In other news:

Housing Wire: 5 million missed rent or mortgage payments in December.

Redfin: Redfin Publishes Commissions on Over 700,000 Homes for Sale. What’s funny about this? Only Cautious buyers care what the Buyer’s Agent makes. Redfin is crowing that its marketing excludes black, brown and poor people generally by disparate impact.

Housing Wire: More real estate agents charged with storming the Capitol.

Rob Hahn: What Did the Judge Mean Here? Questions on the PLS v. NAR Ruling.

City Journal: The Other California: After Covid-19, the Inland Empire offers a way forward for the Golden State.

The Federalist: Leftists Are Colonizing Red Towns Like Mine, And Local Republicans Are Clueless.

FEE.org: The Democrats Just Reintroduced a Labor Law that Would Destroy Uber—And It Could Actually Pass This Time.

National Review: The Fracturing of the American Ideal.

Bill Barr knew all about the election fraud. He wrote and spoke about it in prescient detail months in advance. And yet he did nothing to prosecute the theft of the right of the American people to choose their own leaders. Now we know why…

In other news:

Thomas Lifson: Trump aide Peter Navarro charges AG Barr worked to help Biden issue blizzard of early executive orders.

Redfin: The Biden Administration Could Create Three Times as Many Affordable Homes By Building in Places Already Affordable. The blinders-off admonition would be “Bribe cheaper municipalities!” The problem is, it’s not municipalities the Marxists are funneling bribes to.

Rod Dreher: The Snowplow Test.

Salena Zito: The kids aren’t alright.

City Journal: Taking on “Progressive Prosecutors.” District attorneys who refuse to enforce the criminal law are violating their oath to support and defend the Constitution – and could be challenged on those grounds.

Daniel Greenfield: The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats.

The point of the January 6th fiasco was the January 6th fiasco: Marxists spent all year goading Trump supporters into civil war. They didn’t quite get bupkis, but nothing like the pretext they needed to commence the Ant pogrom.

That’s why they’re confessing now. It looks like a modified limited hangout – slow-walking the confession to take the shock off the big reveal – but I suspect it’s still more taunting. The railroading of Trump is about to become that much more obvious, so if they can’t incite an “insurrection” now, their actual five-year-long coup d’état will be exposed for what it is: A totalitarian putsch poised for genocide.

How do you best them from here: Stay home, stay calm, stay safe. They’re the bad guys – hundreds of millions of murders worth. Don’t muddy the waters.

In other news:

Yahoo Finance: Biden Wants to Shut Down Credit Bureaus – What Would That Mean for You?

J.D. Tucille: Americans Shouldn’t Be Treated Like ISIS Insurgents. Adopting “counterinsurgency” tactics for use against wide swaths of Americans can only make the situation worse.

Conrad Black: Biden’s Rapidly Deflating Honeymoon Balloon: Biden and his media supporters will see the prohibition they have imposed on any questioning of the election result blow up in their faces.

Rick Fuentes: The Art of the Steal.

Michael Barone: ‘Mostly peaceful’ violence and dueling double standards.

Clarice Feldman: Rigging the Election for China and Profit.