Category: Real Estate (page 22 of 266)

I address the idea of scaling in “Nine Empathies” – the empathy for the idea itself that enables us to grow so far beyond other animals: To farm is to feed your family, but to teach farming is to feed millions, and to master and teach the theory of farming is to feed seven billion bellies every day.

Much warned since the days of the Robber Barons, we have arrived at scaled humans: Jack Dorsey can silence the President of the United States, who in his turn can do – what? Jack squat. The tech oligarchs, at least, and perhaps all billionaires – minus Trump – have scaled: They can destroy anyone at will, and no one – not even the man who brought Kim Jung Un to heel – can do anything about it.

In the links, Charlie Kirk is begging Elon Musk to save-us-obi-wan-scoobydoo!, and he thinks he’s just making entreaties among everyday crime bosses. Why Don Corleone is the preferred mafioso – and why he, too, won’t turn on Turning Point – is a mystery, but here’s worse news for Charlie:

Elon Musk has scaled on the tech oligarchs. He has the high perch and the ability to fake meteor strikes – garage-band ‘rods from god’ – and soon he will have nukes in space. At the moment he is sui generis – homo novis, 3G-humanity – and if he wanted to take over everything right now, he probably could.

Damn one dam and it’s a brand new day – for somebody. Swallow hard on that…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts hit highest pace since 2006.

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Homebuyers Undeterred by Declining Listings—Pending Sales up 32%, New Listings Down 10%.

Housing Wire: Hispanic households to grow the most over next 20 years.

The Epoch Times: Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn.

Charlie Kirk: Elon Musk Should Build Us a Better Internet.

Christopher Bedford: The Fracturing Of America: A Weak Government, Complicit Media, And Radical Silicon Valley Might Have Finally Set It All Off.

The year 2020, by far the most momentous since 2001, was eclipsed in its entirety by yesterday, when these unthinkable events transpired:

• America, the land of the free, and all of its people and assets were sold into slavery to the Red Chinese.
• Even more amazingly, America’s national security apparatus, America’s military arsenal and all its military secrets were ceded to the Red Chinese.
• Hong Kong is to have fallen.
• Taiwan is to have fallen.
• And the entire network of American alliances – from Nato to the Five Eyes military intelligence compact – is compromised.

Entirely on script, the first suicide bombing in Baghdad in (ahem) four years took place yesterday. Too much peace. Too much plenty. America got tired of all the winning.

What happened yesterday was Ci reasserting itself. It had an awful 2020, but the entire Trump phenomenon – hugely Ds at the grass roots – has been awful for Ci.

Here’s the good news: Ci is inept in practical realty. It can’t change its own tires, much less its own oil. It depends eternally on people who are not Ci to effect its aims – typically Cs in an ordinary stable theocracy, anyone it can enslave in our current unstable technocracy. What happens when a queen bee is abandoned by her drones. She dies – outraged but nevertheless inept.

Here’s the bad news: Ci in power slaughters thousands and millions of innocents on its way down.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 2.77%.

CNBC: Spike in lumber and land prices causes homebuilder confidence to fall from epic high.

Redfin: Out-of-Towners Moving Into Nashville, Atlanta and Austin Have More Than 30% Bigger Homebuying Budgets Than Locals.

Angelo Codevilla: Clarity in Trump’s Wake.

Frontpage: Capturing the False Flag: What really happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Frontpage: Thank You, Mr. President: You were magnificent.

American Thinker: The ruling class against Trump.

Tristan Justice: Welcome To A Biden White House, And The Next Chapter Of The Trump Era.

John Hinderaker: Trump Fought The Swamp and The Swamp Won.

Heather MacDonald: Words of Division: Cloaked in an appeal to unity, President Biden’s inaugural speech hit all the expected themes of racial resentment and Read more

The headline is not quite true. The Hoplite Greeks who birthed our earliest ideas about human liberty won their freedom not in battle but in neglect: At the furthest fringes of a contracting empire, they were left without overlords – but a country boy can survive. The fathers banded together as equals and developed weapons and tactics that kept their land free of brigands and emperors for centuries – long enough for Ds ideas about family and civil society to grow deep roots.

Dc liberty is all we ever hear about: Bigger, faster, more, more, more. But Ds liberty is borne of the dignity of human autonomy: Not what it might do, but that this is what we are – self-responsible free moral agents. Humans thrive when they are free. Enslaved, they wither and die.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Listing and Selling A San Diego Home The Bloodhound Blog Way. If you list, read this: Brian delivers a brilliant idea for making appraisal contingencies vanish.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications decrease as rates move higher.

Mortgage News Daily: The Real Story Behind The Past 2 Weeks of Mortgage Rate Volatility.

Housing Wire: In defense of the individual real estate agent. I’m a treetop flyer. Born survivor. Usually work alone.

Housing Wire: Yellen vows economic shakeup if confirmed for Treasury.

Joy Pullman: Democrats Are Framing Americans As Domestic Terrorists So They Can Do To Us What They Did To Trump In Spygate.

David Marcus: Don’t Worry, It’s Just Corporate Fascism.

City Journal: Crime and Diminishment: Rising violence may undercut New York’s efforts to rebuild its economy.

Roger Kimball: A Party of Faction and Fantasy.

Every listing is a clinic for me. I don’t list a lot, so I have the time to study things – but I’m the type who studies things, anyway. My goal is to improve my listing praxis, house-by-house, steadily approaching perfection.

I talk about this a lot here, of course, and as with everything else I have to say, nobody listens. But I know I’m getting better, and I know why I’m getting better – this being the entire point of working by praxis, by a mutually-informative collaboration between theory and practice.

So: As a Listing Agent, my objective for my Seller is to identify and contract withe the highest, safest, soonest offer, in that order of priorities. The theory that gets me there is radical transparency, but the practice in the trenches is simply salesmanship: I’ll show you my secrets if you’ll show me yours. I will tell you what to beat in the MLS, but if you phone or text me, I will tell you exactly how to beat the best offer I have.

So here’s a secret for Buyer’s Agents: A over-list offer is not impressive if the appraisal contingency is not waived. Inviting the seller to gamble with his own money can make sense in a down market, but now it’s just pathetic. And yet it’s the go-to move, offer after offer.

What should you do, instead?

You can’t impress me with money you can’t back up, so get to the highest number you can defend, but then fix your focus on safest and soonest.

Those are the places cash is already best, which is how it gets away with discounting, relative to financed offers. Accordingly: If you can beat the cash number and take away the Seller’s fears, you can make a closable deal instead of a deferred disappointment appointment.

So: Waive the appraisal and waive repairs. You’ve still got the ability to cancel, and, since competent adults can contract to any lawful purpose, you still have the power to negotiate about either later on, waivers notwithstanding: Falling out of Read more

It turns out that the funniest thing about this stolen election is how many overseas military ballots were swapped from Trump to Biden. The entire owl of the Capitol complex is now set up as a giant roach motel, guarded by 30,000 troopers. Funnier still, the Pedophile Reject has ‘disarmed’ people who are trained in every form of mortal combat.

If you’re looking for good dads, the National Guard is full of them. Biden is afraid of his Secret Service details, too, with good reason. In truth, though, it is the good fathering of the men assigned to protect him who have kept China Joe alive all along.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: Why Jenna Ryan Is a Test for NAR. Stupid is as stupid does. Brokers supervise. DA’s prosecute. Babbitts should stick to babbitting.

Lee Smith: It’s Not Censorship, It’s a Coordinated Effort.

Charlie Martin: Why Was Parler Censored by Its Competitors?

Michael Barone: The left now just wants to silence conservatives — all of them.

Daniel John Sobieski: Trump’s Silenced Majority – The Voiceless, Voteless, And Canceled Governed No Longer Consent.

Andrea Widburg: As Trump exits, the left doubles down on the White supremacy lie.

The Federalist: Minority Parents Fight The Educrats Erasing Gifted Education In The Name Of ‘Antiracism’.

City Journal: What King and Others Wrought: The titanic achievements of America’s civil rights movement refute claims by the Left that the country remains “systemically racist.”

All social hierarchies run from Irreproachable (cannot be injured from below, can injure anyone below with impunity) to Untouchable (cannot injure above, can be injured by anyone above without recourse). Not just true of people – all social organisms – and if you watch for snubbing and supplication behaviors, it’s easy to tell who is whom.

If you can see with your eyes and not your ears, you know that Donald Trump as president was Irreproachable ex officio, by virtue of the office, but was in fact America’s first Untouchable chief magistrate. He was and is a man without friends, betrayed by almost everyone eventually. Moreover, and measuring, as above, by the simplest of scales: Many of his erstwhile allies have been arrested, tried, convicted and jailed, but only one perpetrator of the continuous coup against Trump has been tried – so far.

What you are seeing now is Trump’s supporters being transformed – by the magic tar brush of ‘racism!’ – into Untouchables. Marxism is Grasshoppers devouring Ants; race is a proxy war, like Vietnam. But all Ants are ‘white supremacists’ – even the black, brown, red and yellow ones – since ‘white supremacist’ turns out to mean, by repeated ostensive definitions: A persistently good person, worth hiring or working for, a good neighbor who always holds up his own end. In other words, a ‘white supremacist’ is an Ant – and Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

So we are all Trump now. When they injure you, that’s ‘law enforcement’ – or, at a minimum, your ‘intersectional’ just desserts. When you resist being injured, you are an exponent of a violent reactionary racist nationalist terrorist group.

How can you tell you’re Untouchable and they’re Irreproachable? First count your wounds. Then tell me what you did about them.

In other news:

CNBC: How Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is luring tech players from Silicon Valley and New York.

Salena Zito: Poll shows New Yorkers want their new mayor to fix NYC — not spout ‘wokeness’.

Jordan Davison: Anti-Science Teachers Unions Push To Keep Kids Out Of Read more

Since 2014, I’ve playing with a contrarian listing praxis born out of my own frustrations representing buyers. Bidding in the dark is dumb. Being coy about what the principals will or won’t do is dumb. Paperwork for its own sake is dumb.

What I do by now is radically transparent and as frictionless as I can make things. I price to the market in round numbers – no screwing around from square one. I disclose when offers will be reviewed, and then I disclose the best offers in the MLS as they come in – Cash, Conventional and FHA. I work by text and phone with the strongest offers, telling the agents exactly what they need to do to beat the other guys. Then I tailor the offer I like by Addendum – not by Counter Offer; a Counter is a rejection and I am all about affection. Then we close.

It’s easy to be a lister now, but try this seven years ago. Even so: It works. If the price is right, you’ll show. If the value is right, you’ll get offers. If you accelerate negotiations by transparency and salesmanship, you’ll find the buyer you want before they find another house they want more.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Criminal charges filed against Texas Realtor Jenna Ryan.

Housing Wire: How Biden’s $1.9T stimulus plan impacts housing.

Reason: The 2020s Will Be the Decade of Deficit Doomsday.

The Daily Mail: Hay big spender! Farmer Bill is now the biggest owner of agricultural land in the US – billionaire Gates buys up 242,000 acres across 18 states.

CNBC: NRA files for bankruptcy, says it will reincorporate in Texas.

John Hinderaker: Did The Democrats Steal The Presidential Election?

Jame Bovard: Collective Guilt And The New Witch Hunt.

Marxism is patricide-by-proxy, but that’s a matter of means and ends. The motivation behind every religious frenzy is the conquest of reality. This is what is actually meant by the phrase ‘narrative control’: Marx’s objectively-atrocious behavior would have been praiseworthy but for his father’s scolding.

Marxist “thought” mainly consists of The Opposite Game – it’s easy and they are lazy ab initio – but the ideas being opposed are Dad’s ideas, the ways a self-responsible father goes about things with his children:

The Marxist solution to everything is simply to do the opposite of what any self-responsible father would do. Accordingly, self-responsible fathers are the first and best defense against Marxism (and every form of criminal domination and subjugation) in a family. Hence fatherhood must be destroyed.

The bad news? Dedicated Marxists – their name is legion, alas – are the steadfast opponents of everything that has made human life rich and safe and gracious and joyous and beautiful – and possible – so far. They are tyrannical toddlers perpetually melting down from infinite unrequited father-love – from an eternally unmet need for loving boundaries.

The good news? They refuse to breed propitiously – and “science” has now made it easy for them to refuse to breed at all. If we can get them out of the classroom – or get our children out of their classrooms – the nursery room will take care of the rest.

In other news:

Redfin: Housing Market Update: First New-Listings Decline in 5 Months Portends a 2021 Housing Frenzy to Rival 2020.

The Guardian: San Francisco office market in collapse as tech workers stay home.

Business Insider: Twitter and Facebook have seen $51 billion in combined market value wiped out since booting Trump from their platforms. If the boards of directors of Twitter, Facebook, etc., do not discipline their hired help, they are complicit and liable in the damage being done to shareholder interests. In a well-fathered world, these crimes would have consequences.

Brad Polumbo: The Mobbing of a Portland Bookstore Reminds Us Why Read more

As with the last impeachment, there is an incontrovertible transcript obstructing the putsch. Perhaps Nancy Pelosi will sit on the Articles again, to give the Red Chinese time to cook up another bioweapon.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Alongside rising yields, mortgage rates increase to 2.79%.

Redfin: Redfin Survey: 60% of Homebuyers Believe the Housing Market Will Fare Better This Year Than Last Year.

Housing Wire: Texas Realtor who stormed Capitol responds to backlash.

Redfin: Home Prices Rose 13% in December, Sales Up 16%.

The Washington Examiner: Boom: 21M guns sold in 2020, up 60%, women, blacks top buyers.

Sultan Knish: California’s Internet Censorship Office Is Watching What You Say.

Christopher Rufo: Woke Elementary.

City Journal: Chicago Teachers, Checked Out.

Intellectual Takeout: Preparing Your Kids for the ‘Re-education Camps’.

Christopher Bedford: 4 Reasons McConnell’s Terrible Impeachment Blunder Is Doomed To Failure.

Zero Hedge: How COVID Paved The Road To Serfdom.

So the ruling class that just spent four years insisting that the election they failed to rig sufficiently was stolen is now insisting that the election that was even more-obviously rigged must be referred to as being “free and fair.”

That’s the Big Lie in action: Either mouth the obvious lie or be persecuted for refusing.

#BrotherYouAskedForIt!

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand spikes 20% as borrowers fear missing out on record-low rates.

Housing Wire: New-year optimism reflected in mortgage applications jump.

The Los Angeles Times: California exodus intensifies as retirees, teachers, musicians seek cheaper, less-crowded pastures.

City Journal: Striking a Blow Against Economic Recovery: Mayor de Blasio plans a ban on new hotels.

Glenn Greenwald: How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler.

PJ Media: If Global Corporations Walk Away from Republicans the GOP Will Have to Listen to New Voters.

Tristan Justice: A Divisive Impeachment Will Only Make Trump A Martyr.

Julie Kelly: Capitol Riot Used to Crush ‘The Big Lie’.

Michael Walsh: An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies.

If a sales clerk in a brick ’n’ mortar store got pushy with his political opinions, I’d be gone forever. Forbade me to express my own views? So much the worse. Shut down the competition? Arson ain’t in me – but I ain’t everybody.

So: Jeff Bezos: My wife, who until this weekend loved Amazon Prime, is in the process of firing you. Had you had sense enough to fire the Marxists who took over your business, you could have kept her – and millions like her.

Oh, well. Here’s you chance to learn to do better going forward.

A simple maxim from retailers of old: “The customer is always right.”

What does it mean? Shut the flock up and take the money.

Try it. It works – where what you’re doing now reeks.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Compass files for IPO.

Redfin: Survey: One-Third of Homebuyers Would Relocate If Remote Work Becomes Permanent; One-Third Already Have. Remote will have become a must-have for recruitment.

Housing Wire: What bonds are telling us about the housing market.

Tyler O’Neil: Parler Sues Amazon, Asks Court to Reverse Illegal ‘Death Blow’.

Jordan Davidson: The Biggest Gun Forum On The Planet Was Just Kicked Off The Internet Without Explanation.

Victoria Taft: The Left Tries Another ‘High-Tech Lynching’ of Clarence Thomas and His ‘Terrorist’ Wife After Trump Rally.

Townhall: Antifa’s Determined to Prevent a Book About Their Tactics From Being Published.

The Washington Examiner: New role for antifa: Biden’s ‘shock troops’.

Ron Paul: The ‘War On Terror’ Comes Home.

Robert Stacy McCain: Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad.

Robert Spencer: Fascism Comes to the U.S.

PowerLine: The Deep State is Rattled.

Matt Taibbi: We Need a New Media System.

Thomas Sowell: Is Truth Irrelevant?

Brendan Eich invented Javascript. So what? So he’s the guy who made the web work. When the internet stopped looking like circus posters with business cards and started acting like software – when the web started working madly as a point-of-sale terminal – that was Brendan Eich.

In consequence, he stands an excellent chance of turning out, in due course, to have been the most wealth-productive person ever to have walked the Earth.

He also donated money to a group opposing gay marriage. For this awful crime, he was doxxed and instantly cancelled. By Mozilla/Firefox. Which he co-founded.

By cancelling Parler last night, Amazon Web Services demonstrates that we are all peons now. Even so, Mozilla/Firefox will not rest in its mission to cannibalize the future…

PJ Media: Mozilla CEO Says Deplatforming President Trump Isn’t Enough.

Rob Hahn: The Big Test for REALTOR Associations and New Speech Code: The Jenna Ryan Situation. Long read. Doesn’t really matter: Everyone targeted by speech codes knows who they’re aimed at – and now everyone else knows, too. “This is not intended to” refers to the abuses to be effected in two years. “We would never, ever, ever” means five years. What would the Venezuelan Association of Realtors do?

Axios: All the platforms that have banned or restricted Trump so far.

Joy Pullman: Big Corporate Uses Capitol Riots To Push Communist-Style Social Credit System On Americans.

Jordan Davidson: Russian Dissident Alexey Navalny Decries Twitter Censorship Of Trump, Compares To Kremlin.

Andrea Widburg: Democrats close in for the kill – not just Trump, but all Republicans.

The Federalist: The Global Consequences Of The Tech-Lash Will Be Severe.

Clarice Feldman:
The Night of the Tech Long Knives.

Roger Kimball: The ‘Virtue’ of the New Totalitarians.

Mark Steyn: Kathy’s World. Kathy Shaidle was an amazing writer and one of the best friends this blog ever had. Light a candle, but don’t waste it. We didn’t listen to her, so you’ll be needing it later…

As I have been warning for a while, big companies are being taken over by their most-Marxist employees. Twitter will turn out to have ditched a huge chunk of its shareholder value by Kristallnachting President Trump and his supporters, and other self-NASCAR-ization stories are piling up like the third turn in a NASCAR race, but the prize blunder of the anti-Trump corporate putsch belongs to Jeff Bezos – at least for now.

What happened? Last night, Amazon Web Services announced that its most-Marxist employees have commanded it to cancel its web-hosting contract with Parler, the alternative-of-the-moment to Twitter.

Why does that matter?

Third, Amazon has now joined Google and Apple in dropping a triple-guillotine on a Twitter competitor – which will make for very juicy evidence in forthcoming anti-trust suits.

Second, many, many millions of pissed-off Americans will now boycott Amazon. Don’t believe me? Ask Fox News. Ask NASCAR.

But first and most astoundingly, AWS has just announced to its thousands of web-hosting clients that its most-Marxist employees have a Papal veto over their content and can put out their lights at any moment.

Billions upon billions of dollars in hosting contracts will be cancelled as soon as practicable until Amazon explicitly abjures content discrimination.

Won’t shareholders self-correct all of these unforced errors? Why haven’t they, so far?

Why would Jef Bezos commit what may turn out to have been a trillion-dollar blunder?

Is his hatred of Trump even greater than his storied greed?

Or is all of this just more China – burning its infowar assets as it goes?

More humbug:

Zero Hedge: Washington “One-China” Policy Dead As Pompeo Lifts Restrictions On US-Taiwan Relations. Just as the Neom announcement foreshadowed all of Trump’s Mideast peace agreements, this may turn out to be yesterday’s biggest news.

Buzzfedd News: Amazon Is Booting Parler Off Of Its Web Hosting Service.

Sharyl Attkisson: CENSORED: Parler founder says ‘We’ll be back Tuesday’.

Tyler O’Neil: The All-Out Assault on Conservative Thought Has Just Begun.

Legal Insurrection: The Great Purge Expands As CNN Sets Its Sights On Fox News’ Cable Providers.

iGeek: Digital Kristallnacht.

Daniel Greenfield: Parler Read more