Category: Real Estate (page 6 of 266)

I’m rehabbing a house right now, and I’m good at it. I’ll end up spending $15K, a lot for me, over two weeks, but in that time I’ll take the property from trashed to treasured – and then I’ll sell it wicked fast.

As with everything, a praxis is just theory plus the practice to put it to the test, but the orchestra of effort that goes into doing that much that fast – it’s fun for me to watch, even as I’m waving the baton.

Here’s the funny part: I’ve never gotten paid for my end of this work. I’m always turning over a rental property or prepping a home for sale. I can, could and should be flipping, but for now all I’ve done is all the executive work for none of the compensation.

That will change, over time. The inventory shortage shows no sign of abating, which makes new wine in old skins taste vintage. And I know how to do a job, quickly and economically, that others find daunting.

I could not be more self-employed, already, but I’m looking to make my world even less dependent on people who imagine they have power over me.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Red-hot US housing market begins to cool.

CNBC: America is short more than 5 million homes, and builders can’t make up the difference.

Mike DelPrete: The Real Estate Disruptors Serious About Mortgage.

Alex Berenson: Quite frankly: The arrogance of Anthony Fauci, and what it means for the rest of us.

American Thinker: The Disposable Children of the Pandemic.

Before the lockdowns, I used to shop at Fry’s. A little grubby and crawling with dragged-along kids, but close to home. When Arizona went into temporary insanity mode, a manager at Fry’s decided he had to impose traffic flow – crowding people outside in the cold, doubly stupid – so I switched to Safeway.

Also a trade-off – everything in commerce is – since they’ve never known how to take the money there, the sort of retail mistake I normally like to punish all the way to bankruptcy. But their viral hysteria was better contained, and I’ve been going there since – weekly, since I took over the big-bulk shopping as my own bit of hysteria.

Here’s what’s interesting to me: Safeway has its own viral rituals – plexiglas, arrows on the floor for a while, social-distancing guides. They also have people assigned to go around spraying things with disinfectant, since religious rituals, once enacted, are thereafter impervious to facts. They were lying about surface contamination, y’all. Sweet Doctor Birx was lying her ass off about everything, and Doctor Fauci won’t stop lying until he lands himself in prison.

But: In the early-morning hours, the kid in charge of diligently spraying and wiping down uncontaminated surfaces weighs at least 400 pounds. His circumference easily exceeds his height. We are each of us shards of perfection, but I cannot imagine why this individual was hired in the first place. Nepotism? Exceptional zeal in the job interview? Fear of fair-hiring persecution? Was there actually a manager in a store that can’t take the money who said, “Dagnabit, health insurance costs be damned, the future of Safeway is rotund!”

But: Yet: Even so: Which manager thought it was wise to put the employee most likely to die of COVID in charge of COVID clean-up? Is that a sick joke, or just more of the same cluelessness?

My bet is on the latter, sadly, No one, anywhere, is penalized for being a fool, and, accordingly, we are led at Read more

Legitimacy, ultimately, is a bargain: In exchange for my not fighting City Hall, City Hall agrees to do its deal as efficiently as possible and to stay out of my business otherwise.

What happens when City Hall gradually reneges on the deal? Not rebellion out right, certainly not right away, but mutiny – graduated rebellion – instead.

This does Fiasco Joe invite.

Job-separations are hard to tally, easy to obscure over time. Watch retail sales: Everyone whom Fiasco Joe has taxed of the confidence of future income just stopped spending. That news, too obvious to hide, will hit America around Columbus Day.

The actual, objectively-discernible sound of Atlas shrugging? That would be the sound of silence. “Brother, you asked for it.”

In other news:

Rob Hahn: On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11.

Mark Steyn: The Years We Wasted.

The New York Post: Biden’s disastrous handling of Afghanistan cast a cloud over this 9/11 anniversary.

Suzy Weiss: American Homeschooling Goes Boom: Meet the parents yanking their children — some five million of them — from schools that they say aren’t working.

This is the day for commemorating 9/11, but, really, why bother? We can just wait for the next one.

By doing what should have been done by Dubya – very publicly exterminating the big bosses – Trump had Islamofascism on its heels. The Arabs could see how rich Israel has gotten – without oil and with constant harassment – and finally figured out which side of the bread has the butter on it. From the announcement of the Neom deal, the War on Terror was over.

Until last month, when Fiasco Joe rearmed the terrorists – reenergizing them, too. And that was only the third-worst fiasco in the Afghanistan capitulation: Surrendering Taiwan was second, but first and worst was delivering all of the American military technology in Afghanistan to Red China.

It seems likely that the catastrophes brought down upon us by Fiasco Joe will extend far more than twenty years into the future, so there is no need to look backwards: From both Islam and Marxism – also reinvigorated by Fiasco Joe – there is worse to come.

In other news:

Unherd.com: Will the Amish take over America? Historically persecuted religious sects are winning the demographic war.

FEE.org: Non-Compliance Is an American Virtue That Stretches Back to Abolitionism (and Beyond).

Victor Davis Hanson: What Made Them Do Their Duty? At the Twin Towers, cops and firemen showed they really were New York’s Finest, New York’s Bravest.

Julie Kelly: Justice Department’s Foremost Felony Charge May Be on Thin Ice: Even in this toxic political atmosphere, will American juries consent to criminalize previously lawful political protest in the nation’s capital?

I smile.

The society with which I have almost nothing to do threatens to shun me. What shall I do?

We spoke about Irish Democracy before, but now you’re going to see plenty of it: If your argument was any good, your policy wouldn’t be mandatory.

America is Cs and D-ish. I wish it were more Ds, and it is at its best, but all of that D is indomitable. To the contrary, assertion of dominance itself incites resistance. Ask me how I know.

Cs America takes the vax and pays the tax. We’re about to find out what them D boys might do.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: The Fading Family: The world’s major economies face a serious demographic crunch.

Bonchie: oe Biden Threatens the Unvaccinated and Announces His Unconstitutional Vaccine Mandate in Disturbing, Dictatorial Speech.

City Journal: Dismal Sequels: Twenty years after 9/11, Afghanistan has reverted to the Taliban and America has disappeared down a rabbit hole.

John Daniel Davidson: The 9/11 Attacks Ultimately Proved A Lesser Threat To America Than The Totalitarian Left.

To read me is to study DISC-my-way by default, because that’s what I’m doing. This is me yesterday on Facebook:

History, until lately, was either Ci theocracy or Dc oligarchy. Gaius Marius, the Nazarene and the Apostle Paul inadvertently fathered Ds civilization, which is everything you think of as being actually civilized.

Marxism is Ci subverting Ds – long-since in abdication – along with Calvin and Luther’s Cs, a new theocracy taking over. But: Ci is terrible in chaos, as we are seeing, and Dc is poised to take over everything with Dc speed and precision.

You’re looking for a Ds leader – Trump (Id) is not him, nor is Rand Paul (Cs) – and if you don’t find one, that could be it for Ds as a civilizational strategy.

I won’t live to see this play out, lucky me, but this is an epochal moment in human history: We must decide if we are one species or two.

Why are there no Ds leaders in politics – or business for that matter? You have to have a lot of either C or I to fight Ci – plus which, the man you seek has kids of his own to look out for.

Credit Loyola, too, but there was a Pauline genius in denominating “fathers” who did not themselves have children. That ideal, leadership as family – what’s best for all of us is what’s best for each of us – is absent from government and commerce for the same reason it is absent from the home: Almost none of us is wise enough to want it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates stuck at 2.88% amid rise in COVID cases.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyer Profits At Risk With Falling Home Price Appreciation.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Despite Declining New Listings, Pending Sales Still Up 6% From 2020.

City Journal: From Empty to Empty: After 9/11, New York didn’t rebuild wisely – and that failure hurts the city in the current crisis.

Theodore Dalrymple: What We Have to Lose: Our civilization is more precious, and Read more

Fiasco Joe has by now lasted 15 days longer than I thought he would. Even as I admonish myself to abjure all predictions, still I keep expecting the world to drop that old shoe.

Here’s what’s what: Traitor Joe has the yips. Always has had, and the yips might well be the source of the ‘stutter’ he is alleged to have had. I’m not sure if he really has senile dementia or if he’s faking it to hide all the treason, but his response to all challenges – hiding – is only making the yips worse.

As is the world. A golfer with the yips is only looking at one ball. A batter with the yips is only staring down the next pitch. But the world will not stop throwing emergencies at Sleepy Joe, and hiding from them not only makes them worse – it makes everything worse.

I know Walkaway Joe is toast, because the preference cascade against him will swell with his every abdication of responsibility.

Hide and watch: A president with the yips is an ex-president.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage demand falls to lowest in two months as rates stagnate.

Mark Helprin: Defense Rests: We cannot survive without the defense of our sovereignty and independence.

City Journal: When Flags Waved: The stirring response by New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is a reminder of what the country used to be – and can be again.

Roger Kimball: ‘Adults,’ ‘Progress,’ and Disaster: Historians will look back at the Great Afghan Fumble of 2021 and say it was there and then that the United States took a large public step towards its own diminishment.

As a matter of news, OfferPad went public last week – meaning none of the iBuyers are now backed by wide-awake entrepreneurs, just pie-eyed punters. The “offering” was done by Wall Street chicanery to avoid even the casual due diligence white-shoe investors normally do.

But, of course, no due diligence will be possible for any iBuyer until the market has turned. Despite all the hoopla, the scam lives or dies on the rate of exsanguination caused by (stupidly) owning real estate.

When iBuyers buy at 95% of fair-market value and sell at 105%, they cheer themselves as real estate geniuses – when, just for right now, at the end of a nationwide feeding frenzy, everything is selling at 105%.

What story will they tell when they buy at 95% and sell at 85%?

What will shareholders say when they discover they were told only half the truth? – the only half that can be known in a market run-up that began before the iBuyers existed, but which will end resoundingly, hopefully not enduringly so.

Zillow and Redfin were already publicly-traded. OpenDoor and OfferPad have both just gone public in a mad rush – but why? If the idea is good enough to thrive in a down market, proving that fact would make the company worth much more, would it not?

I think the plain vanilla iBuyer idea is eclipsed by the move-up iBuyers – hence OpenDoor and OfferPad are both targeted poorly. But none of these notions have answered a real estate market when no one is calling, and, until they do, marketing them to arms-length investors strikes me as being predatory – like Dan Drew shedding himself of his watered (live)stock.

In other news:

CNBC: 48% of renters worry they won’t ever be able to buy a home, survey finds.

City Journal: No More Government Unions? A proposed California ballot initiative would outlaw public-sector labor groups.

Jason Rantz: Mass Resistance Arises As Washington Makes It Nearly Impossible To Get Vaccine Exemptions.

Since the advent of flat-screen HD-TVs, I’ve been telling my clients that the future of common spaces in the home is the sports bar: Not one big screen, but one big one with two or three smaller ones.

That joke’s on me, as TVs proliferate in our house. For now we have two glaring – but only one blaring – in the living room. On Saturday, Miss Chioux and I didn’t watch Nashville reruns on one screen while college football was painting the room in pretty sunlit colors on another – over-the-air and without-sound.

Normally on weekends I watch golf for TV that I’m not watching – TV that’s a window to look up to from a screen more-actively-engaged – but football was a flower show on every network. A big effusion of indifference to COVID fear-porn, too, even though sunlit events always end up disappointing the death collectors. Cathleen saw a little bit of the Wisconsin game, noting all the missing masks and the supreme whiteness of the people in the grandstands, compared to the people on the field.

And I’m glad for the football fans regardless of the knots of hypocrisy they have to gnaw through to get to a good time, but it remains that the future of fun is more private that public.

Those colors didn’t kill the cinema, nor did the virus: It was dying, anyway. But the virus has hastened long-standing trends away from commonly-shared spaces generally, while the TV and more-interactive screens take away many of the rewards and most of the drawbacks of going to the mall or the stadium or the cineplex. Why would I want T-Rex when I’ve got TV?

So here’s the future I don’t share with my clients: HDTV has a scarcity problem, amidst all its abundance, and a multiplexing problem. The solution will be home-level TV – all input sources available at all destination TV-monitors.

The big screens will be really big: One screen, not three or four, with a big window for the show you’re watching, smaller ones for the things you’re monitoring – or for the video Read more

Our Afghan friends just won’t stay out of the news. I’ll leave out the salacious stuff, but it’s fun to watch diversicrats encountering too much diversity.

But: If the Afghan leak-ins are more of the Ant-replacement strategy, I think the whole program might be bonkers.

First, non-fanatical Muslims are Ants, not Grasshoppers. It seems unlikely that Fiasco Joe is importing very many abortion fanatics, for example, or flamboyant pansexuals – from Afghanistan or anywhere.

And second, America is her own best sales rep: Even if you came here for the hand-outs, you might find yourself staying for the opportunities.

The job of the middle class is cultivating the middle class. A whole bunch of brand new Americans are here – like it or don’t – but they haven’t been infected by American public schooling.

The Democrats despise immigrants, expecting them to be nothing but replacements for the welfare slaves they aborted. If you cultivate your new neighbors, where and how you can, you will help them discover the America all of us are yearning for.

In other news:

Associated Press: More than 50,000 evacuated Afghans expected to be admitted into US.

Tristan Justice: California Wildfire Devastation Was Entirely Preventable Through Proper Land Management.

RedState.com: Why Can’t Joe Biden Stop Lying?

I sing the praises of practical ontology because we live in a cacophony of lies: You either take personal responsibility for understanding what is actually happening around you, or you mimic the mouthings of professional mouthpieces. Do you see why? If you have no way of checking up on reality, you have no way of checking up on them, either.

So: Ignoring whatever might be the cause – which is most emphatically not the point – is the Earth warming? Or is it cooling? How could you tell, one way or another, all on your own, using only your own senses as your measuring apparatus?

Here in the Sonoran Desert, we are gifted in late Summer with a seasonal delight we call the monsoon. South Asians quibble about terminology, but the monsoon used to have an objective definition based on the waxing and waning of persistently high humidity (for us): Wet air for weeks with big storms in the late afternoons and early evenings.

The source of the moisture is the Gulf of Mexico. When the Gulf gets very warm in late Summer, the airflow moves from East – around Florida, up the coast and off to Europe, the Gulf Stream – to West – across West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, all the way to Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

That’s the monsoon, for the whole of the desert Southwest. England and France flock to the beaches in August because their bad weather comes our way for a while. In Phoenix, the monsoon used to commence around July 15th, ending around September 15th. That rule-of-thumb has been failing for a while, such that they revised the official definition to hide all the missing moisture.

What is happening, observably to the senses and apprehensible in secondary consequences – e.g., changes in barometric pressure put my guitars out of tune – is cooling, not warming. The Gulf gets warm later and for a shorter span of time, sending less moisture West and more East – not out and under Florida Read more

I wondered yesterday with Cathleen if the Texas abortion law would have an impact on migration.

I was looking at a photo of voluminously unmarriageable women demanding their right to abort the pregnancies they didn’t incur from the dates they didn’t have. Will they be moving to states friendlier to infanticide? I can’t see why.

But Florida is the new Texas in this way, too, and other states – like the Four Corners of the Mormonosphere – are likely to restrict abortion, too. Legislation is no way to treat your neighbors, but the Red/Blue division between the states just got that much more intense – now with a bright-line quality of life issue: Pro-family versus pro-career.

Have the corporate weenies and NCAA types weighed in, yet? “Relent or it’s nothing but rodeo and pro-wrestling for you!” Frankly, their better argument is free egg-freezing – the low-cost way to pretend you’re not throwing them away.

But that’s where the migration will happen: Not now, among very-well-planted women, but going forward, as young women plot their life’s plan.

Real estate is kids and dogs. I don’t like laws, but the long-term effect of restoring federalism to infanticide laws will be immensely beneficial in the places where kids and dogs are already thriving.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates stuck in a rut at 2.87%.

Housing Wire: iBuyer Offerpad goes public at $2.7B valuation.

American Thinker: Afghanistan fiasco may have been the result of blackmail. Or, you know, China Joe simply sold America and all of its interests to a foreign empire…

Hydroxychloroquine worked all along. This was obvious all last summer, through all the lying on TV. Ivermectin apparently works, too, given the chorale of hysteria against it. We have foreign news sources to tell us what our own propaganda stooges won’t, and we have their spitting-in-unison to paint a negative image of the truth: Everything they denounce is worth looking into.

So we’ve known all along that having a healthy immune system matters more than anything: Fit, not fat, sunlight, D3, zinc, minimal alcohol, real food. Advice from the choir? Silence.

Obvious but well-concealed is the enduring immunity resulting from recovery from the virus. Sweden was half-right by not locking down – why we never hear about them any longer – but the other half we all missed: Corona parties for the healthy: Get it, prove it, kill it with therapeutics, herd immunity kills the virus. Since we’ve heard nothing at all about this, not even hysterical denunciations, I’m wondering if it might have worked.

Here’s what we can safely infer from the Deep State’s well-paid choir of liars: The stop-gap approach to health is suicidal. The people who took these vaccines may be stuck taking “boosters” for life – and the suppression of reports of side-effects is yet another disturbing choral sound-effect – but the whole vaccinated approach to human life is failing us.

The people who will have thrived, when the Age of the Coronavirus is a piece of history, are the free-range humans: Hard to kill because healthy from within. The rest of us are stuck praying that we’re not taking the wrong advice.

In other news:

CNBC: Here’s why experts believe the U.S. is in a housing boom and not a bubble.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: 9% Increase in Pending Home Sales is Slowest Growth Since June 2020.

American Thinker: Events in Afghanistan are about to destroy our American complacency.

I saw a tweet that perfectly expresses the tragic futility of Marxism, why it seeks only the impossible.

Vide:

nobody with a white mom should be happy. ever.

The racism is grandfathered in: Pretend-pissing on white people is every poser’s LoserPass™. As teleology, it’s just stupid; refuted in reality billions of times, as evidenced by the historical fecundity of the offspring of white mothers.

But what’s interesting is the open admission that the objective is the socialization of emotional states – which is not possible.

You don’t get to have my hare-brained happy childhood, and you can’t stick me with what you got. You can try to steal what I own, but you can never steal what I know, what I envision, what I’ll build when I’ve dispensed with you.

Marxists are miserable because they are at war with the good – in vengeance against their too-stern or too-absent fathers. By means of looting and cargo-cult costumery, they ape their victims – never doubting that the pose is just that.

Inadequacy fuels resentment, but that just makes things worse. The victims are ultimately just tokens, too. The cancerous conundrum for every Marxist is that you can’t steal any of the things that make life worth living.

In other news:

Housing Wire: US home price growth hit record level in June.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage-refinance demand drops as interest rates stall.

Brad Polumbo: Stanford Study: More Businesses Have Already Fled California This Year Than in All of 2020. California has regulated and taxed its once-thriving economy into a coma.

City Journal: Failure at Every Stage: What the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan tells us.

Helen Raleigh: Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19.

I expected Fiasco Joe’s resignation a week ago tonight. This evening’s good, too, and China Joe’s reputation sinks with every hour he remains in office.

But I am well-advised by myself to dismiss normality bias – the absurd belief that, since yesterday was good, tomorrow will be, too. We are the prized pets of a Diamond Jubilee Golden Age – that has now come to an end. Where once men who aspired to the ideal of honor made honorable exits, by now ‘governance’ comes down to lying about catastrophes and clinging to power by any means available.

So: What next? Who knows? Kamala Jong-un is as clueless as Slow Joe, without dementia as an excuse. What the Democrats have actually done, almost 250 years after this experiment began, is demonstrate how the U.S. Constitution can can be corrupted from within.

And, just like that, “What next?” is a much bigger question, isn’t it?

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers sign fewer contracts in July, as high prices chill the summer market.

Joel Kotkin: Jim Crow returns to California: The Golden State’s climate policies have enforced racial segregation.

City Journal: No Liberty? No Problem: Australians shrug at their government’s draconian pandemic response.

Michael Anton: Importing Enemies: The demand to resettle Afghan refugees brings the war home.

Charles Hurt: Biden’s War: Image of President in Fetal Position Has Enemies Quaking.

Just The News: Homeschooled children increased from 13K in 1973 to 5M in 2020, report finds.