There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Real Estate (page 31 of 266)

Overnight News: Hey! Be nice! Don’t poke the Pooh bears! They’ve got big money to lose – and you can help them squander it!

Ya think it's easy?

“We have alpacas in our neighborhood, but I’d just as soon break into the fridge.”

For all of me, I prefer to think of iBuyers as whales, the very rich dumbasses who unknowingly fund the entire gambling ecosystem. But bears works, too – poorly-adapted, slow-witted, no match for three or four smart dogs working together. When they get lost and wander down into the desert, they leave nothing but sun-bleached skeletons behind.

So, yeah: Poke! Do your worst, Pooh bears. Your wins are imaginary. Your losses are legion – so far.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Eric Blackwell: Zillow: Whatever you do. Don’t poke the bear. Lol. Poke!

Brian Brady: Mortgage Refinancing and Forbearance: Three Balls, You Walk, One Strike, You’re Out.

As for the rest of the world…

Redfin: Home Prices Just. Keep. Climbing. National Median Now Up 14% from Last Year. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: New home sales crush expectations, but the supply is running out. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Redfin: New-Construction Home Listings Drop 4% in August, Reversing Course From July’s Rebound. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

SFGate.com: Bay Area applicants flood program that pays them $10,000 to leave California.

Fox News: Gun sales in major swing states up nearly 80% this year: Will it have any bearing on election outcome?

The Daily Signal: Public Schools Across Country Promote Black Lives Matter, Organize Protests.

TaxProf Blog: Welcome To The Turbulent Twenties.

Anchorage Daily News: Brown bear breaks into Alaska Zoo, kills alpaca named Caesar.

Overnight News: Why would the world’s dumbest real estate investor hire himself as his own broker? Because the emperor is definitely not naked!

“The money-making secret to real estate brokerage? Socialize the risks to the seller – not the broker.”

Yesterday’s big news? “The Incumbent” doubles down on dipshit. Dipshit-aficionados rejoice.

Housing Wire: Home prices post record two-month gain, FHFA says. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Redfin: Sacramento, Austin and Phoenix Are the Most Popular Destinations For People Searching For Homes Outside Their Metro Area. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Renovation loans get pandemic boost as homeowners want home offices. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Coronavirus pandemic fuels affordability crisis for homebuyers. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Dave Stevens: 5 reasons why mortgage rates are going to rise in 2021.

Seeking Alpha: Zillow Offers Will Expand Services in 2021.

Housing Wire: Zillow iBuying program brings real estate transactions in-house by licensing Zillow Homes employees.

Joanne Jacobs: Not indoctrinated, just ignorant.

City Journal: Merit on the Ropes.

Angelo Codevilla: Revolution 2020. Incidentally: CTRL-F ‘riot’; 6 found.

And our own Brian Brady! San Diego Union Tribune: I’m a Republican. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death is both a loss and a legal opportunity.

The news is not that Zillow is going to have agents. It’s going to have newbies for agents.

Housing Wire:

A Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that these people are already employed with Zillow, and will be getting real estate licenses. Zillow said it will not be recruiting for these positions.

“The normal career path is real estate agent to barista, but Zillow’s changing all that!”

It’s a boiler-room job – in the same article, George Laughton says Zillow still won’t be getting its hands dirty. But boiler-room selling and legally-compliant real estate brokerage are two different things.

Whatever. This morning I wrote this to my favorite pricing algorithm, soon to be disintermediated by exuberant, clueless college grads:

Of course this was the plan all along. The funny part? They think they’ve lived through a downturn with Coronavirus. Now they get to play catch-a-falling-knife with their own inventory.

The press release reads like they think the local brokers, like Laughton, are hoarding all the good leads from the failures and fallouts. I hope that’s the reason, just because it’s extra stupid.

Note that the 18 or so local brokers who were not screwed today now know what they have coming.

All of the iBuyers working in Phoenix suck at resale marketing. They make bone-headed marketing errors, common to many poor listers, but they make them by the hundreds. Pulling even more of that work in-house, when Zillow is so bad at it, seems daft – even absent the opportunity to make thousands upon thousands of regulatory infractions.

Prove me wrong, Zillow? You look like nothing but dead money to me.

Overnight News: So what’s up with the listings that DIDN’T close?

“From a dog’s point of view, putting trees in houses is just begging for misunderstandings.”

When you report the great news about closed listings, what are you leaving out? News about the listings that didn’t close. There is huge demand for suburban, exurban and rural housing because demand has cratered for urban housing. Why? Mass exodus from vertical to horizontal. Why? Urban rioting.

See that? All the way from A to C with zero fatalities. Logic is only hard if you need it to be.

Housing Wire: Sales of existing homes surge to a 14-year high. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Existing home sales jump to 14-year high, as prices set another record. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Wow — 6 million existing home sales! However, context is key with 2020 housing market data. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Mortgage demand from homebuyers now up 25% from a year ago. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Daily Caller: ‘Financially Devastated’: 87% Of NYC Bars, Restaurants Couldn’t Make August Rent.

Joel Kotkin: Blue today, bluer tomorrow.

FEE.org: New Report Shows How Congress Has Screwed Over Young People.

Evie Magazine: Critical Race Theory Is The Root Of Our Current Unrest, And They’re Teaching It In Schools.

Forbes: Interventions Meant To Slow The Spread Of Covid-19 Have All But Stopped The Spread Of Flu.

City Journal: The Moral Case for Reopening Schools—Without Masks.

The Independent: Notre Dame cathedral update: Carpenters wow public with medieval techniques.

Departures: NYC’s Newest Proposed Building Would Be the City’s Tallest—And Will Act as a Carbon Emissions Filter.

A fun fact about #iBuyers? Every buy-box is redlining.

“Totally not redlining!”

The image is a map of Zillow’s sold iBuyer homes in the densest parts of Metropolitan Phoenix.

See that Madonana-like shape running West from the I-17 Freeway. Looks like a pregnant single-mom, doesn’t it? The poster-child of fair-housing law, right there on the map.

Looks like redlining, doesn’t it?

I’ve been watching Zillow’s iBuying results for years now. It always looks like redlining. I warned them about it when I was working as a pricing algorithm.

Is it really redlining? It’s the further fruits of a buy-box that wisely avoids old, small and irregular housing. For all of me, Zillow’s buy-box is much too loose, but the net consequence is that much of the housing Zillow excludes is in contiguous neighborhoods emerging West from the I-17.

Is it really redlining? The neighborhoods Zillow and the other iBuyers exclude in Metropolitan Phoenix are far browner, blacker and redder than the neighborhoods they include. That’s redlining de facto, by disproportionate impact.

Is it possible for investors to work from a buy-box that does not redline in disproportionate impact terms? I don’t see how. The buy-box my investors work from is much more stringent, to the point that we only work in a few subdivisions, by now.

Is it possible for licensed real estate brokers to work as investors without committing hundreds of de facto materially-damaging fair-housing violations by means of redlining? I don’t see how.

That’s why investors should not be licensed, for one thing, but I think it illuminates how poorly thought-out are all the “black lives matterers” among the iBuyers.

Have fun when the lawsuits start – particularly since you’ve all already declared what racists you are.

Overnight News: CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

“How can you tell the country is not being torn apart by rioting? Because Joe Biden is just fine!”

Sorry if I seem to be beating a dead horse, but the refusal of the “real estate industry” to admit the existence of the riots while writing all about their secondary consequences is my kind of fun. Hypocrisy abounds, alas, but hypocrisy on high is especially comical. The scum who presume to “lead” us have their homes and headquarters in the riot zones – could they be gaslighting the world until they can sell out? – yet somehow they purport to be amazed that urban counties are bleeding, suburban counties are bulging and moving vans are unobtainable. Jeepers! How’d that happen?

What’s the trick to assimilating the news – all news, not just real estate news? Read everything that seems worthwhile – and assume that everything you read is lying to you in ways you may not suspect. Certainly every story written about real estate results right now is lying, since none of them will admit to the impact – or even the existence – of the rioting.

United States Department of Justice: Department Of Justice Identifies New York City, Portland And Seattle As Jurisdictions Permitting Violence And Destruction Of Property. Riots!?! Who knew?!

Redfin: Affordable Areas Outside Big Cities Are Heating Up the Fastest As the Pandemic Changes Homebuyers’ Priorities. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: What’s Causing Home Prices To Skyrocket – Low Rates Or Wanting More Space? CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: Homeowners gain over $620 billion in equity in second quarter. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Home equity surges as demand soars and mortgage rates hover near lows. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

CNBC: Millions can’t pay rent. Landlords making less than $50,000 a year are caught in the middle.

MarketWatch: The COVID-19 lockdown is squeezing real estate from all sides and threatens to burst the housing and mortgage bubble.

The Federalist: Aftershocks Of Summer Riots Are Making Kenosha Scared To Rebuild.

The Ohio Star: NYU Prof Says More Than 20 Percent of Universities Could Fail Because of the Lockdowns.

City Journal: The Nemeses of Cities.

Yahoo News: Read more

Three facts about big-shot “real estate industry” executives and racism in America.

What’s funniest about the “real estate industry’s” riot-denial? Where are the riots happening?

Witness:

  1. Big-shot real estate industry executives deeply abhor the “systemic” racism in the real estate industry – even though they have not identified or paid fines for any specific, independently-verifiable racist crimes.
  2. America’s big cities have been beset by riots all Summer, resulting in the destruction of many homes and businesses and leading to a mass exodus from these communities to safer, more-suburban locales. We may be seeing the de facto abandonment of vast swaths of America’s housing stock. Homeowners who cannot flee will be hurt worst as prices plummet, with many of these stranded homeowners being black Americans – only just recovered from their last round of real estate haircuts.

  3. About this catastrophic exsanguination of the black middle class, the big-shot real estate industry executives say: Boo. Not quite so, alas: Instead, they have actively pretended none of this is happening.

Imputed, ephemeral, non-demonstrable racism? Right on it!

The actual destruction of the best of the best of black America? Crickets.

That’s how much black lives matter to them.

Overnight News: The new normal? 911 is a joke.

“They craved paradise, propped up another Pol Pot.”

What’s the really important news? Stock up on non-perishables, especially items with complex supply chains. And figure out how you’re going to eat, if the food deliveries are interrupted. Welcome to the Third World, y’all…

Forbes: More Homeowners Are House Rich As Equity Rises In 2nd Quarter. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: The Great Rent Strike Of 2020: Shaping The Future Of Commercial Lease Agreements.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: New look at police stats shows the spread of violent crime across Minneapolis this summer.

New York Post: Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio sure seem bent on pushing you to flee New York.

HotAir.com: Portland Emergency 911 Call Goes Unanswered For More Than An Hour And A Half.

The College Fix: As colleges go bankrupt due to COVID, higher education will actually get better: op-ed.

PowerLine: Princeton Squirms.

American Greatness: Americans Know What Time It Is.

My experiences with actual – not imagined – racism in real estate.

“I’ve had better haircuts, but never cheaper or faster…”

That’s me to the right, a certified selfie with today’s hair and today’s shave. I am my own barber, in the age of the Coronavirus, and I am delighted to say that I’m improving faster than I expected. A year from now I could be as good as awful or even barely-adequate.

But: I have been a Realtor for nearly twenty years, a broker/owner for fifteen. I have sold a few hundred homes and overseen or advised on the sale of hundreds of others. I have met with or spoken to thousands of customers, making hundreds of them my clients or tenants to the rental homes we manage. I am my only agent for now – I sub out anything that does not require a license – but, with my wife Cathleen on board or without her, we have always been scrupulous about fairness – not just fair-housing but fair-dealing as such. I hate predators. I never want to be one.

So what is my experience of actual, specific, objectively-real racism in real estate?

I once had an out-of-town investor in my car who said things I considered red flags, so I drove him back to his hotel. This is the same thing I do with irrationally optimistic investors – except I’ve met dozens of them.

Want more? When I first started, working as an apartment locator, I had a very racist elderly black woman as a client, but I just laughed at the things she said – and in the end she found a new place without me.

I have one more: We used to use a centrally-located Fidelity office for most of our title work. In those days, that was the “Spanish” office, the one where all deals that were to close in Spanish were sent. Over the years, I saw several contracts fall apart on Friday afternoons, with the whole family coming down to sign, only to find out that no one, until then, had told them what their monthly payment would be and how much cash they needed to close. Not Read more

Overnight News: “Systemic racism” in real estate? Demand specifics.

“My dying wish? Not to be dead. That won’t work, either.”

Is no news good news? It seems there is no real estate news, nor any other kind of news except Supreme Court news.

The Washington Examiner: Racist? Under Trump, black people and Hispanics join suburbs and home ownership up.

National Review: Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

Townhall: How Woke CEOs Traded Our Future For BLM Approval.

City Journal: Show Us Your Systemic Racism, Princeton.

Those four stories together suggest a strategy: Until this weekend, since George Floyd was canonized, half of all real estate news has consisted of over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats insisting that real estate is systemically racist – both the buying, selling and hypothecation of homes and the management of the brokerages and lenders.

Is that so? Demand specifics.

Demand that they back up their bullshit claims. We know they are lying on the transactions side: The fines are huge but they are almost never collected. Regardless, self-identified violators are required by law to document their violations – if any – to regulators. How many bellowing grand poohbahs have self-reported their purported fair-housing infractions?

If they are not lying about their own personnel management, why haven’t they resigned? If there is “systemic racism” in real estate management, the problem would be “the system” – the very over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats making the specious claims.

Demand specifics – and assume the worst about anyone who will not provide them.

Daily Mail: UK, that is, where they know how to pack up a headline. Trump’s Supreme Court frontrunners: A mother of seven who adopted two children from Haiti and belongs to a Christian sect that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale – and a Cuban American whose father was stopped from becoming a lawyer by Castro.

Breitbart.com: Nolte: Passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Permanently Resets 2020 Election.

Daily Wire: ‘Evil Is Real’: North Carolina Police Officer Pens Heartfelt Resignation Letter To Community Amid ‘Unprecedented’ Exodus From Force.

City Journal: Heiresses on the Barricades.

Overnight News: Mocking Redfin about The Dystemperor’s New Unriots is funny – until you think about what our studied negligence is doing to the black middle class.

“Red Americans got rooked once and completely. Black Americans get rooked with every spin of the ‘economic cycle.’ That’s how you know Black Lives Matter.”

As I noted yesterday, these are not just riots we are seeing across the country, they are carefully-mismanaged riots. Where the police department is allowed to function according to well-understood crowd-control theory, there are no riots. Cf., e.g., Detroit. As with acknowledging the riots themselves, taking note of this deliberate mismanagement is useful: It is the key proxy signal needed to determine any given neighborhood’s RiotScore™.

Redfin: Housing Market White Hot After Labor Day: Home Prices Up 13%, Pending Sales Up 27%. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: MBA: 11 million households fell behind on rent or mortgages in second quarter.

CNBC: Refinancing your mortgage will cost more thanks to an ‘adverse market’ fee.

Forbes: The Paradox Of The U.S. Black Home Ownership Rate.

John Wake is an old friend of mine and of BloodhoundBlog’s. He doesn’t address it here, but a further consequence of the rioting will be a decimation of black homeownership in the riot-wracked cities: The homes that were not destroyed are bleeding equity with every departing U-Haul van. The middle class is how we grow – as traders but also as neighbors. Strangers learn to love each other from trade – that’s how polyglot cities have always worked – but traders cultivate their neighbors by their good example. The social capital this Summer’s riots have destroyed far exceeds the physical damage.

So take just a moment, right here in the middle of the news, to reflect upon the hypocrisy of the so-called “leadership” of the so-called “real estate industry.” Redfin pimps an ugly, racist hiring preference for its Board of Directors and the grand poohbahs of the big brokerages actually promise wholesale violations of fair employment laws – all to make up for the “systemic racism” for which they are the actual and ongoing “system.” And yet, not one of them is standing up to defend the black middle class as it is being exsanguinated right before our eyes. We are “led” by scum – the sleaze Read more

Hey, big-talking big-datafied AI-enhanced machine-learning Realty.bots, give us what we really need: A neighborhood RiotScore.

If it’s not obvious, the big ugly question is my addition.

Redfin is back with new disinformation about the current national state of housing turmoil. It turns out it is not just the pandemic that has incited this frenzied reordering of housing priorities. No. Forest fires are responsible, too.

That is to say: Yet again: CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

I was snarking about yesterday’s disinfo on Facebook, thusly:

If #Redfin were of a mind to do something actually useful, this matters:

Some cities that might be considered riot-prone effected the time-honored policing strategy of taking the hotheads down fast and decisively, snuffing off the conflagration before it could start. Two I can think of are Detroit and Lancaster, PA.

My question: What is the relative difference in the riot-induced exodus in cities like that, compared to the ones which indulged their rioters?

That would be useful information – and a refreshing reconciliation with the truth. Simply classifying cities by their riot-friendliness would be a mitzvah.

And a friend popped off with this:

A riot score next to the walk score?

Bree-izz-illiant! A RiotScore is much more valuable than a WalkScore. If you’re running from trouble, how can you be sure you’re not racing from the frying pan straight into the fire?

Easy to compute. Redfin tried to pretend yesterday that that silly Red/Blue nonsense is meaningful. In fact, Blue cities (cities that are full of very red Marxists, so we lie and call them Blue) are surrounded by Blue suburbs, leading to a Blue-to-Blue exodus that is apparently confusing to people paid to be confused.

What matters more is the factor cited above: How do the local police respond to pre-riot activity? A riot is a critical mass of hotheads that is enflamed by one or more super-hotheads. Pinch off those match-heads right away and there will be no riot. Blue suburbs with reliable cops will have a very hot seller’s market. Those less vigilant will be eclipsed by Redder (less Marxist) exurbs further out.

Another obvious tell: Was the steely-eyed, up-through-the-ranks, by-the-book police chief recently replaced by a newcomer who is (check as many boxes as possible) black, hispanic, Read more

Overnight News: Riots? What riots?

“The hardest thing to know is when, precisely, to pretend not to know…”

You got news? I got news: Present company excepted, the real estate industry seems to be terrified to talk about the riots. You know, the ones roiling the never-more-local real estate markets? Evidence abounds and none dare call it by its right name. The simplest explanation to fit the facts – is the one nobody wants to talk about. Very sad.

Redfin: Hot Housing Market Spans the Political Spectrum, with Prices Up Double Digits in Blue, Red and Swing Counties. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. Red and blue is stupid. Single-family versus multi is better, with average age of the community’s housing stock perhaps being the best tell. Elderly, vertical, mortar or steel: Down. Post-war, horizontal, stick and stucco: Way up. Real estate analysis is easy. Lying about the further consequences of rioting takes work.

Jalopnik: Ahem. Moving Truck Prices In LA And San Francisco Are Skyrocketing Due To Demand.

Housing Wire: First-time homebuyer activity decreased in Q2, but there’s still plenty of buyers out there.

CNBC: Government mortgage bailout numbers improve slowly, but the real test is ahead.

Housing Wire: Builder confidence reaches 35-year high in September.

Joanne Jacobs: Paying for at-home education.

RedState.com: Emails Reveal Nashville City Government Hid COVID-19 Info from Public to Keep City In Lockdown.

City Journal: Problem: Overcrowding.

Watts Up With That?: Irrefutable NASA data: global fires down by 25 percent.

Reason: Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect.”

How do you beat the Realty.bots? The 3 key weapons of the Guerrilla Bloodhound: Brick and mortar, ink and paper – and flesh and blood.

“I wasn’t always a Realty.bot. I used to drive a driverless-Uber. Hardly ever hit anyone.”

I spent an hour on the phone with Brian Brady yesterday, always a tonic for my spirit. We are both of us guerrillas, both counter-marketers, always looking for ways to use the enemy’s strengths against him.

When we first met, Brian was using the internet to take business away from white shoe lenders and I was using it to scare up clients who wanted to avoid the sleaze of the supermarket-magazine-advertising Realtors.

That is to say, we were using the internet as guerrilla marketers against competitors who were not – or who were not any good at it, anyway.

How now, russet Bloodhounds?

The opposite, yes? Now our most-threatening competition is very adept at marketing by internet.

The Guerrilla Bloodhound’s response: The three ideas in the headline can be subsumed by one idea: In Real Life. And that notion is best understood in longtime BloodhoundBlog contributor Jeff Brown’s formulation: Belly-to-belly.

Be here now? You’ve got it, they don’t. Your best marketing advantage, by now, is that you are not on the internet, that you are present in real life and can address the issues paperwork exists to paper over.

Until they burn up all the excess wealth fools accord them, the Realty.bots will take as much business as they can from Driven and Cautious principals. The former value time over money, while the latter seem to think computers can’t cheat. Those folks may not be completely gone from your life, but they are all of online-shopping’s target market. Your value propositions and their values are a poor match, going forward.

The Incandescents will always be represented. If you’re good at selling luxury, historic, architectural or other jewelry-box homes, your world is secure. Bots can’t do what you do as a real estate analyst, but they can’t even touch what you do as showmanship.

And that leaves the Sociables, who are wise to wonder – continuously! – if they are being taken. They are yours and you are theirs because they do not trust a transaction this huge to what might as well Read more

Overnight News: Redfin: “Why isn’t this historic seller’s market holding back buyers?” CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

“Prices always shoot up for no reason!”

Housing Wire: Fed says expect low rates through 2023. Much better crystal ball than the one we have…

Forbes: Will The Latest Stimulus Proposal Stop A Potential Housing Crisis In 2021?

Redfin: Home Prices Rose 11% in August—Biggest Gain in Over 6 Years.

Housing Wire: More young adults live at home now than during the Great Depression.

Forbes: Topeka, Kansas Is Looking To Lure Remote Workers With A $10,000 Incentive.

Yahoo Finance: Analyst: Neither Trump or Biden care about soaring federal debt, deficit.

City Journal: Apocalyptic rhetoric about climate change is undermining the fight for pragmatic solutions to the West’s fire crisis.

Reason: Homeschooling Hits a Tipping Point.

FEE.org: George Floyd Riots Caused Record-Setting $2 Billion in Damage, New Report Says. Here’s Why the True Cost Is Even Higher.

The Federalist: Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.

City Journal: Against Wokeness: Conservatives must understand the threat posed by critical race theory.