Category: Real Estate (page 9 of 266)

The CDC’s completely unconstitutional eviction moratorium ends tonight. I am innocent of any first-hand experience with this mess. We didn’t miss a payment on the rental homes we managed, and we sold three tenant-occupied homes – allegedly the third-rail – for top dollar, with no trouble.

Linked below, the Foundation for Economic Education is making the propertied argument, and it’s one I agree with in principle.

But: Most landlords who get into trouble went looking for trouble.

There is a median for everything, half above, half below. If you shop for tenants above the median on follow-through, you had an eviction moratorium experience like ours – no experience. If you shop below the median – thinking, perhaps, that people with few choices will stay longer, or, worse, planning to evict, thus to rack up another huge financial judgement – I’m guessing the last 18 months have been painful for you.

Dang.

Until some grown-up puts his foot down hard, you can expect more unconstitutional usurpations. But you can improve your results in a crooked game – by giving up crookery yourself. If you want people to treat you right, treat them right. If you want to make an honest living, stop being a bottom-feeder.

In other news:

FEE.org: The Push is On to Extend One of the Federal Government’s Worst Pandemic Power-Grabs: Whenever the order finally expires, crushing bills will come due.

Redfin.com: Prices of the Most and Least Expensive U.S. Homes Are Surging the Fastest.

The Federalist: New York Is A Cautionary Tale About The Dangers of Progressivism.

John Podhoretz: Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City.

The Federalist: Cuomo Is Begging New Yorkers To Come Home, But Why Would They?

Matt Taibbi: From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘No, you moron’: Dems have selves to blame for vaccine hesitancy.

Julie Kelly: ‘Unprecedented, Unreasonable, Unconstitutional, and Wrong’.

City Journal: The Perpetual Emergency: Regular talk of crisis can degrade liberty.

Is today the day we find out the vaccines don’t work? Yesterday, the Biden cabal admitted that the vaccines are Trump’s accomplishment – which would seem to imply blame, not credit.

Until lately, I would have argued that the lockdowns were humanity’s worst-ever unforced error. Can the vaccines relegate last year’s bungling to second place?

Here’s worse news: Cautious tyranny rules by intimidation and lies: “You don’t want me to call you a racist again, do you?” When the lies stop working, all that’s left is the intimidation.

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales drop in June — more evidence of a housing turnaround.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Post Smallest Increase in Over a Year.

CNBC: White House calls on Congress to extend expiring eviction ban.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers Are Back: Purchase Volumes and Prices Soar to Record Highs. The sound effect for every kind of hubris: The Jack-in-the-Box.

Ron Paul: The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us.

American Greatness: The Dissident California Right Is the Future.

Linking to a ZeroHedge article on governors in rebellion against the CDC, I issued this bit of snark:

“Yo, #Redfin, now would be the time to watch for ‘pandemic’-caused relocation – rather than the riot-flight afoot over the past year. Same destinations, but without the corollary gun sales.”

As always, I am apparently the only person in real estate publishing who can say out loud that the real estate surge that followed the inglorious death of George Floyd was caused by the riots that also followed the inglorious death of George Floyd. This is completely obvious, is easily demonstrated in Redfin’s own charts and is corroborated by a corresponding surge in firearms sales. Ignoring reality is a full time job, apparently, but I’m guessing it pays well.

Even so, I think the governors are trafficking in proxy signals: What “We are CDC rebels” really means is: “We are Ant-friendly in every way – especially schools.”

That would be actual dog-whistling, albeit not the kind we’re always warned about: Red-state governors are advertising for freedom-seeking Ants to relocate to their states – not to escape risible mask rules but to escape the color revolution in Grasshopper-led cities.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates creep up slightly to 2.80%.

Matt Welch: CDC Sentences Kids to Another School Year of Irrational Masking.

Katie Pavlich: We’ve Discovered the Real Reason the CDC Is Requiring All Kids Wear Masks in Schools.

Kay Hymowitz: Dr. Biden’s Lesson: Runaway degree inflation reinforces the class divide.

Among American religionists, the most vaccine-resistant turn out to be the atheists. I don’t like most atheists – too often Ci pedantic assholes – but this is an outcome easy to foresee: People habituated to making critical distinctions are not going to be early-adopters on anything. Festina lente all damn day, but contemplation won’t be rushed.

But letting the other guy make the early mistakes is never a bad strategy. Almost nothing new works as planned, and every sort of launch is understood as a shake-out – an opportunity to inflict all the undetected design flaws on unsuspecting dupes.

My attitude, always: I can wait. And I am always happiest when I keep my own counsel.

If you didn’t know paper masks are a joke, your sense of smell was already gone. If you didn’t know the diagnostic testing was juiced to get Trump, you have not been paying attention. And if you thought “MUST-RUSH-NOW!” and universal vaccination were ideas that would go good together, then yesterday must have been the joyous day of your birth.

If Democrats were smart – if dogs could talk – they’d already be smearing Trump with the vaccines. Their failure is imminent and obvious – and part of the plan?; lockdown-lust is also imminent and obvious – so somebody’s going to have to be the fallguy.

Meanwhile: Look out for your own. The way to avoid getting viral infections is to stay away from sick people and to be healthy enough to repel any virii you didn’t avoid. Even if they worked, the vaccines would simply relicense the bad choices that are actually killing people.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates just dropped to a six-month low, and refinances shoot higher.

Housing Wire: Foreign buyers are avoiding American homes: NAR.

Fox News: Seattle mayor calls for more police after six shootings in one weekend.

Victoria Taft: The People Who Brought You CHAZ Get Their WA State Police Reform Wishes Granted and They’re a Hot Mess.

The Daily Wire: Thanks To Inflation, American Wages Drop By Nearly 2%.

Josh Hammer: How to Interpret Section 230?

I spent much of last year hearing the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “King of the World” every time I went to the supermarket: “If I stay inside, I might live ’til Saturday.” So I have been delighted, this year, to again hear the voices of children in stores.

Real estate is kids and dogs, and I engage well with both. It’s them that all of us are working for – the satisfaction of their needs. Plus which, they’re excellent closers: Whey they move in, everybody moves in.

But I read a horrifying article this morning – anecdata, so take it for what you will – about the birth dearth among the Cautious.

I’ve been saying this all along, of course: Where reproduction is optional, the Cautious prefer not to – lifelong marriages with one or at most two offspring for Cs, serial graduated celibacy for Ci.

But: America is a Cs nation, has been since Ibsen’s world premiere performances took place in Minnesota, since Kolachis came to Texas, since the Mormons blazed the Hashknife Trail. Cs is why your grandma was surrounded by six kids at all times, and it’s why your own grandkid is surrounded by six grownups at all times.

But at the end of a year where dogs and even chickens were adopted with what will turn out to be sociopathic abandon, no children were spawned. And now we are well into an inexplicable global vaccination frenzy, and I am wondering what that is doing, de facto, to fertility.

I can belay all suspicions, for now, but I really would like to see some infants. Practical ontology proves nothing, of course, but it does distinguish fact from fiction.

So: Are there any newborns out there?

In other news:

CNBC: Housing boom is over as new home sales fall to pandemic low.

Housing Wire: Why the US MLS system is the envy of other countries.

CNBC: Home prices broke records in May, according to S&P Case-Shiller.

City Journal: Better Red Than Taxed: As government revenues rebound, GOP-led states are cutting taxes while Democratic states ponder increases.

Josiah Lippincott: The Conservative Read more

When William F. Buckley declaimed that The National Review “stands athwart history yelling Stop!” – he was conceding Hegel’s (and hence Marx’s) argument by pretending to defy it. It would be churlish to ask how not challenging political determinism has worked out, but NR has been hugely successful at throwing off new totalitarians – who then make bank as cable news “conservatives.”

Whatever. We are at a moment where actual – not symbolic – athwartnering can do some good.

Assuming electoral redemption is possible – assuming the Grasshoppers have not taken over permanently – what we need right now is the best attainable outcome of government: Nothing.

We need to stand athwart the Biden regime demanding that it stop doing anything until it can be replaced.

The Arizona recount argues that Senator Mark Kelly should be recalled. The endless shenanigans in Georgia demand the decertification of its Senate run-off election.

Assuming neither of those things happen, Americans need to lean on their senators and representatives to make sure nothing more changes until the voters have had a chance to veto the Marxism Biden’s handlers are trying to smuggle in.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Out-of-Towners Moving to Austin Spend $22,500 More on Homes Than Locals.

The Associated Press: Sparked by pandemic fallout, homeschooling surges across US.

American Greatness: How Parents Should Talk About ‘White Privilege’.

City Journal: Year Zero: The roots of the woke revolution.

Roger Kimball: Losing Our Liberty All at Once?

At the time the election was stolen, I advised people to count the cranes on their skylines. They weren’t there three years ago, and three years from now they’ll be gone again, shunted back to Obamaville.

This is practical ontology, apprehending the universe with your own senses, so you cannot be fooled by testimony. If you don’t see trusses on trucks, no new houses are being built, regardless of the hype. If you don’t see cranes silhouetted against the sky, the big developers in your town are betting against your future.

A new structure is a forward-looking hope derived from backward-looking portents. Want proof? Note how many of your becraned buildings-in-progress are multi-family housing. A year ago we learned why that bet might not be as fruitful as it had seemed – when the plans were made three years ago.

Three years ago, the United States and all it myriad mini-states were operating in good order – a good time to plant new flags. Three years from now, who knows what will remain of America, its people or its currency? Projects already underway will be completed, at least for now, but the line for new building permits will grow shorter by the day.

Who needs whom? Taxes, regulations and NIMBYs don’t even get their chance to destroy the future if investors are in despair…

In other news:

The Epoch Times: California is Experiencing a Crime ‘Tsunami’: Sacramento DA.

Kevin Downey, Jr.: The World Has Had It With China Flu Lockdowns: Protests Rock Cities All Over the Globe.

Joel Kotkin: The coming collapse of the developing world: Covid has pushed vast swathes of humanity to the brink of extreme poverty.

James Bovard: The Coming “January 6” Train Wreck.

American Greatness: Critical Witchcraft Theory: “Systemic racism” is not a sociological theory. It is theology. More precisely, it is a demonology: a theory of witchcraft.

If the Coronavirus was a tailored pathogen – germ warfare – against whom was it tailored? People clinging just this side of death’s door, yes? People who were within months of dying, anyway. Tailored or not, that’s who it killed.

Who might you suppose are the costliest beneficiaries of the ever-so-benevolent welfare-state? It turns out that it’s people clinging just this side of death’s door, people within months – but not just days – of dying.

A country has citizens, but a welfare-state just has dependents. Some subjects are capable of warfare, others of clerical work, but everyone is ultimately just a wide-open mouth and an oscillating rectum. Money is always a problem – under every form of Marxism, the looting goes up as the productivity goes down – so shedding costs is always a priority.

When first I heard that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was sending infected patients back into nursing homes, my instant assumption was that his motive was mass murder for budgetary purposes. Whether or not the virus was intended to kill the elderly, it did so perfectly, anyway.

Cuomo’s crimes were replicated in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan – at a minimum – all palpable mass murders committed to shed the welfare-state of promises everybody knows it cannot keep.

As we should expect by now, these murders will not be prosecuted – nor even investigated.

Why is that? So they can be repeated, of course.

In other news:

SFGate.com: Californians are arriving in Montana in droves. But they’re not welcome.

Karol Markowicz: Read my lips: We’re not going back to masks and lockdowns again.

Christopher Rufo: Critical Race Theory’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Julie Kelly: A January 6 Detainee Speaks Out.

Angelo Codevilla: Why Not Award Ashli Babbitt’s Killer the Medal of Honor?

I mock Redfin a lot, but it’s only because they deserve it. Probably, Zillow has been lying about the rioting for thirteen solid months, too, but Redfin just has the more-mockworthy Marxist take on things.

So, as everybody knows, the red-hot real estate market that succeeded the demise of George Floyd was caused by the subsequent rioting, not by the pandemic. This is obvious from Redfin’s own charts, and, as noted, they can heat-map price-appreciation by inaccessibility-to-rioters.

Again: The real estate market’s year-long frenzy was caused by the rioting. Ants who no longer had to live near their employers escaped Grasshopper urbanity at its ugliest – most of them never to return.

As if anyone needed proof of this – the truth, by now, is what no one dares to talk about – the real estate market is settling down just as gun sales are doing the same.

There is no election this year, so the remaining rioting is random dingleberrys, operating without political cover or financial support from the Democratic party. The heat is off in the rioted cities, and hence real estate and firearms sales are calming down.

This is even more obvious to Redfin, but they can’t tell the truth. I can.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates plummet to 2.78%.

CNBC: Sales of existing homes rise slightly as more listings finally hit the market.

Redfin.com: What is Dual Agency and How Does it Work? Shoe pinch? Hide and watch. Every Wall Street brokerage will be eaten alive for double-dealing, even as they are eaten alive from within by their Marxist staffers. None so deserving.

Housing Wire: Housing inventory slowly coming back as frenzy fades.

Mike DelPrete: Opendoor’s Mortgage Attach Rate Jumps, But At What Cost?

City Journal: Venice Beach Doesn’t Have a Homelessness Crisis. It has a quality-of-life enforcement crisis.

Kenny Xu: Silicon Valley’s Cynical Treatment of Asian Engineers.

City Journal: The Social Justice Network: Facebook announces sweeping new restrictions on criticism of protected groups.

Somewhere in the city of the night a lone rebel makes his mark, raising his fist in defiance of big-tech censorship as he slashes out his message:

“Graffiti is the social network of the perma-banned.” –Buck Phiden

Yes, Buck Phiden, the magatagger, the clean, serene meme-machine, the paleo-artisanal wall-blogger. Description? Never seen. M.O.? Telling the truth in the only way still allowed: Graffiti.

“When justice is outlawed, only outlaws have justice.” –Buck Phiden

Buck Phiden demands to be heard – in just the way you hear him: Telling truths the Deep State can’t figure out how to suppress. Please share any Buck Phiden graffiti you see to social media. Or just scrawl it on the nearest wall. Buck Phiden longs to be free.

“Everybody knows.” –Buck Phiden

In other news:

Redfin.com: Investor Home Purchases Hit Record, Surpassing Pre-Pandemic Levels.

City Journal: Universal Basic Wealth? If you want to reduce inequality, these new proposals aren’t the way to do it.

American Thinker: The Antifa/FBI Coalition.

Senator Tom Cotton: Breaking the Crime Wave.

If you sold a home to an iBuyer over the past 12 months, you were probably rooked – and you may have grounds for litigation.

If the iBuyer did not explicitly disclose to you that listing on the MLS would be to your best financial interest in a madly accelerating market, you were overtly and objectively misled. A licensee misleading a customer creates agency – omission is deception, deception is advice. Arguably, you were gulled out of a substantial portion of your equity in an undisclosed dual-representation: You were advised to make a mistake by the party – agent AND principal – benefitting from the error.

Until now, class action lawsuits for undisclosed dual-representation have been the belles of the real estate litigation ball. But how about a class action lawsuit against an entire class of gonophs? All of the iBuyers can and should have their licenses put to the test: Are they fiduciary – and hence massively-redundant double-dealers – or are they somehow exempt from the real estate licensing laws?

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuilder confidence is still high, but it slipped this month as construction costs grew.

Redfin.com: Interest in Relocating Remains Elevated, With Nearly 1 in 3 Redfin.com Users Looking to Move to a Different Metro.

CNBC: Homebuyers aren’t seeing savings from falling lumber prices – here’s why.

Mike DelPrete: The Rise of Power Buyers. See above and add two more rookings: The buy-side and the financing.

City Journal: A Nation of Rentiers: The notion that homeownership should be a primary tool for building wealth is mistaken.

Helen Raleigh: Public Schools’ Systemic Problem Isn’t Racism Or Money. It’s Teachers’ Unions.

If you’ve never shopped from behind bulletproof plexiglas, your opportunity may present itself soon – but it won’t last.

I lived in Fun City, where the rule of thumb is, if it’s not locked up, it’s counterfeit. When I took my wife to my old home town in Illinois, she was amazed to shop in her very first plexiglas convenience store: You can touch the merch once you’ve paid for it. And a decent RiotScore™ for any neighborhood could be established from the number of plexiglas-shielded cashiers.

Plexiglas means the merchant believes the law can’t keep up with the crime, and he is not only almost certainly right, he was almost certainly late in every passive protection he put on his inventory. Almost no one steals, but those who do will steal beyond all reason if not actively opposed.

Witness San Francisco, where the plexiglas will only briefly precede the “Final Closeout Liquidation!” sales.

What bulletproof plexiglas really means is: Last sucker standing. But you can’t outrun the bottom-line, so even the suckers will be gone soon.

Good luck getting you prescriptions, granny. Good luck getting food. The police are no longer on your side.

In other news:

John Hinderaker: California Nightmare.

SocketSite.com: Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco.

The Federalist: More Americans Could Live In Beautiful Neighborhoods If The Right Stopped Propping Up Suburbia.

Roger Kimball: Are You Having a Free Speech Emergency?

City Journal: The Panic Pandemic: Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

LidBlog.com: Why America Is Losing To Marxist Democrats In Two Sentences.

After actually reading his settlement statement, not as common as you’d think, a seller remarked that I had paid 60% of the sales commission to the Buyer’s Agent. Why hadn’t I taken the lion’s share, or at least split 50/50? My answer was simple, one you will have read here before: Don’t bind the mouths.

Brian Brady is going to show Buyer’s Agents how to bring home the bacon by first delivering the goods, but I prize Buyer’s Agents just the way they are for their aboriginal and sine qua non function: Brokerage.

Brokerage is at its essence the introduction of buyer to seller, and Brian is correct that just that much is very easy to do without Buyer’s Agents by going to the Realty.bots. That’s how we recruit tenants for the rental homes we manage, since we don’t want Tenant’s Agents coming between us and the principals, anyway.

But we do all our own vetting on rental applicants, so a Tenant’s Agent is doing literally nothing of value to us but introducing his client to us.

Not so Buyer’s Agents. Their introductions come with elaborate qualifications – along with someone to do most of the scut work, while absorbing much of the downstream liability. In short, a Buyer’s Agent is a Sub-Agent for whom I bear no legal responsibility. I pay them 60% of the sales commission and they do 80% or more of the actual effort it takes to get to closing. I don’t hate those numbers at all – and we always pay the whole damn pizza, regardless of what I’m getting.

With a Tenant’s Agent, I’m paying for the referral and nothing else – pure brokerage – and therefore we don’t pay: I can attract thousands of semi-focused looky-loos for ten bucks a week on Zillow – and I only need one motivated, qualified party to score.

But with a Buyer’s Agent, I am temporarily onboarding a very dedicated, very focused, very highly-motivated personal assistant/transaction coordinator – for this one transaction. We’re as careful about the agents Read more