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Category: Supplanting the NAR (page 2 of 10)

August 8, 2011

Greco-Roman Rejection of Rotarian Socialism Is The Cure For What Ails the United States

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Europe has tried all sorts of Statist approaches to the PIIGS problems.  Today, Europeans are considering “liberalization”:

As the European financial crisis moves into its next phase, there’s a new word to learn: “liberalization,” and it’s likely to be even more unpopular than “austerity.”

Leaders in Europe are promising to “liberalize” their economies in an effort to grow those economies, but they face an enormous wall of vested interests that don’t want anything to change.

Greg Swann talked about cutting regulations a year ago.  My comment:

There are close to 400 licensed occupations. Compile a list of half of them, introduce legislation that outlaws states (and Feds) to regulate any of these professions.  Repeat each quarter. Within a year, you’ll only have 25 regulated industries. Within two years, the unemployment rate will drop to 6%, and there will be some 2 million new businesses created

Ohmygosh, cut the licensing regulations?  Does that mean that someone, who hasn’t taken a 400-hour licensing course, will be charging money for weaving hair in their living room?  The horror.  How will the public ever be protected from bad hair-weavererers?  Reputation management is already happening in the free market.  Read Greg’s response:

Check. There’s more that can be done, much of it to the benefit of very small businesses. Consider this: When you’re trying to decide if you should take a chance on a restaurant, who do you trust more, a city inspector who may be on the take or nine fiercely independent Yelpers? The dollar cost of preventing injuries that almost never happen is half of our economy — which is nothing compared to the opportunity costs and interest value of those lost opportunities. We’ve got a dinghy loaded up with admirals and we can’t figure out why it’s slowly sinking.

Who then would stand in the way of  “liberalization”?  Let’s go back to the CNBC article:

Leaders in Europe are promising to “liberalize” their economies in an effort to grow those economies, but they face an enormous wall of vested interests that don’t want anything to change.

Take the case of Simon Galina, a 38-year-old taxi driver in Rome. His profession is one Read more

July 12, 2011

Wall Street Journal: “A home is a lousy investment.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ahem: “Today’s young people would be foolish to imitate their parents and view ownership as the cornerstone of personal finance.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

At the risk of heaping more misery on the struggling residential property market, an analysis of home-price and ownership data for the last 30 years in California—the Golden State with notoriously golden property prices—indicates that the average single family house has never been a particularly stellar investment.

In a society increasingly concerned with providing for retirement security and housing affordability, this finding has large implications. It means that we have put excessive emphasis on owner-occupied housing for social objectives, mistakenly relied on homebuilding for economic stimulus, and fostered misconceptions about homeownership and financial independence. We’ve diverted capital from more productive investments and misallocated scarce public resources.

Between 1980 and 2010, the value of a median-price, single-family house in California rose by an average of 3.6% per year—to $296,820 from $99,550, according to data from the California Association of Realtors, Freddie Mac and the U.S. Census. Even if that house was sold at the most recent market peak in 2007, the average annual price growth was just 6.61%.

So a dollar used to purchase a median-price, single-family California home in 1980 would have grown to $5.63 in 2007, and to $2.98 in 2010. The same dollar invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Index would have been worth $14.41 in 2007, and $11.49 in 2010.

No need to pass these facts along to the National Association of Realtors. They already know.

June 29, 2011

Lay down with dogs and you wake up with fleas? Worse. If you decide to rape the taxpayers via NAR’s RAPAC scam you get… plague!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Phoenix Realtor Forum, the monthly newsletter of the Phoenix Association of Realtors:

Alas, the plague is a swarm of vampire-like locust Realtors. These are RAPAC’s objectives, according to the article, with interstitial commentary by me in bold text.

  • Mortgage Interest Deduction: NAR opposes any changes that would limit or undermine current law.

    That is, people who don’t buy homes on credit, including people who own their homes outright, people who rent and working poor people living in mom’s basement or in their cars, should subsidize the incomes of very wealthy people. If this doesn’t make you sick, you’re much too sick already.
     

  • Capital Gains Exemption: NAR opposes any changes to the capital gains exemption on the sale of a home.

    How much does the NAR hate real property? Why isn’t its position to eliminate all taxes, or at least all taxes on real estate?
     

  • Depreciation/Tenant Improvements: NAR supports efforts to establish a permanent rule that more accurately reflects the depreciable lives of buildings and to conform amortization periods for tenant improvements more closely to the term of the lease.

    More tax subsidies for the rich, rather than getting rid of taxes altogether.
     

  • Government-Sponsored Enterprises: NAR is recommending that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be converted into government-chartered, non-shareholder owned authorities.

    Because it’s harder to hide the corruption if the SEC is pretending to pay attention to FannieMae and FreddieMac.
     

  • Mortgage Loan Limits: NAR supports making the current higher loan limits and formula permanent.

    Rich people need more subsidies!
     

  • FHA/Federal Housing Administration Programs: NAR is a strong supporter of FHA’s single- and multi-family programs.

    Poor people need subsidies, too!
     

  • NAR Credit Policy: NAR is calling on the credit and lending industries and regulators to reassess the entire mortgage lending policy structure and look for ways to increase the availability of credit.

    Because not enough unqualified buyers were rooked into buying homes they couldn’t pay for the last time we pulled these stunts.
     

  • Short Sales: NAR continues to push the lending industry to expedite short sales.

    Criminal penalties if they don’t? Don’t laugh. Government is nothing but force. If we are doing anything other than negotiating by means of the persuasions of the free market, one party is Read more

May 14, 2011

The bad news? The NAR’s #rppsi scam passed, despite overwhelming opposition. The good news? The NAR is now a labor union, complete with forced political speech. Let the Right-to-Work lawsuits begin!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The National Association of Realtors’ bloodsuckers’ survival initiative (#rppsi) passed this morning, even though only the bloodsucking Babbitts themselves are in favor if it.

Now the NAR will have even more money to “protect homeownership” with bloodsucking legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, the Government Sponsored Entities laws, the first-time home-buyer tax credit, etc.

The NAR plans to “protect homeownership” until every last one of us is living in a cardboard box.

That’s a bad thing — bad for the people who voted for it, since crime is always self-destructive. But bad for us, too, since we now have that much more to apologize for.

Here’s the silver lining: The NAR is now arguably a labor union. Membership is forced for most Realtors to gain access to the MLS. And #rppsi is beyond all doubt forced political speech: You will have no control over the $40 a year that is to be extracted from you. If you don’t despise Barney Franks, there’s something wrong with you, but your money will be going to that petulant thug like it or don’t.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the 22 Right-to-Work states, you may have recourse in the courts. Here are some apposite links from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation:

The NAR has been a vampire latched onto the neck of the American body politic since its founding. It does not exist to “protect homeownership.” Its sole reason for existence is to despoil American consumers to the benefit of real estate brokers: To steal money from the people who earned it, diverting it to a conspiracy of bloodsucking vampires. Today’s vote was the first step in the process of eliminating this pestilence from our lives forever.

May 11, 2011

More thrilling real estate math from the National Association of Realtors: How much did first-time home-buyers benefit from their $8,000 tax-funded subsidy? Can you count to negative $15,000?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You read that right. On average, recipients of the $8,000 federal housing subsidy lost $15,000 on the homes they purchased using the subsidy as their incentive.

From SmartMoney.com:

The government’s recent $8,000 cash incentive for first-time home buyers has proved even more costly for recipients than for taxpayers, according to data released Monday. Typical buyers have lost twice as much to price declines as they received from the program.

The median home value fell to about $170,000 in March from $185,000 a year earlier, according to Zillow.com. That means a buyer who closed on a house just before the tax-credit program expired in April 2010 collected $8,000 but has since lost $15,000 in value. Those who bought earlier in the program have done worse; the median price is down $20,000 from March 2009.

This was all completely foreseeable, of course. The only person, seemingly, who cannot grasp simple economics is Barrack Obama, temporarily president of the United States. But don’t get the idea that Obama is done wrecking the housing market just yet. Even now, his minions are pushing for still more sub-prime mortgages to economically-unqualified home-buyers.

As the great Tom Waits said, “I don’t have a drinking problem — except when I can’t get a drink.” America doesn’t have a housing problem. The problem is that, despite the state’s (mis)education monopoly, there are still too many people who can suss out a hustle, if you give them enough time.

May 11, 2011

What’s the long term investment value of owning your own home? Would you believe… nothing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Business Insider has the goods.

Yes, I know you can tell me stories about killings made. We’ve done it, too. How are your results lately?

Meanwhile, do you want to have a long talk with all those folks who bought their homes believing in the wealth-producing miracle of the mortgage-interest tax deduction?

Does anyone want to chip in for some wood polish for the NAR’s nose?

May 10, 2011

How does the National Association of Realtors love me? They sent me an evaluation so I could count the ways.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I appeared by videoconference at the National Association of Realtors Association Executives convention in March. At the time, I made note of my remarks in a comment to Teri Lussier’s first post on the NAR’s latest anti-consumer money-grab:

I spoke by videoconference to the NAR Association Executives conclave on Monday. I held nothing back, patiently explaining to them that legislation is crime — using force to induce an outcome that would not have occurred without the imposition of force.

I explained that a legislature can do nothing in a free market except harm, and that the American economy is by now essentially a vast mutual-vampirism cult: Each one of is sucking the lifeblood out of his neighbor’s neck, and each one of us is being sucked dry by his next neighbor. Taking a death-grip on the obvious, I patiently explained that this cannot but result in pandemic disaster.

Instead, I said, if the National Association of Realtors were to come to be as zealous about private property rights as the National Rifle Association is about firearms ownership rights, I would be proud to call myself a member.

As you might expect, the reaction was subdued.

Bob Bemis, CEO of ARMLS, intimated to me that there is video of the presentation somewhere, but I have not seen this. But yesterday there came by snail-mail a three-page evaluation of the event.

I think it would be fair to say that I made an impression. I knew going in that I would be telling them exactly what they did not want to hear, so I have to commend the people who made comments for their forbearance of my effrontery.

Here’s my take: What they don’t want to hear is precisely what they need most to hear. It’s not reflected in the evaluation, but a very important idea I took up with them is this one:

What happens if someone comes along and resolves to do real estate brokerage for free?

I’ve pointed out many times that Zillow’s “make me move” feature is brokerage: The introduction of buyer to seller. This is not affected by the real estate regulation machine since the act of Read more

April 16, 2011

When all you have are fangs, everything looks like an artery

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I’m so glad that the NAR leaders took the time to present the Town Hall meeting. It was both informative and educational and I learned quite a bit about the NAR, how they really function as an organization, and what they hope to accomplish with the Realtor Party. Ya know, the NAR leaders who took the time to prepare and present this Town Hall seem like really nice folks who truly believe in what they are saying, and I believe them when they say it really is about survival, but their solutions are based on what they’ve done in the past, and what they’ve done in the past is look at taxpayers, politicians, and members, as dinner.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“It’s the few of us who are pulling everybody else along. A few of us are making and allowing people to stay in business because of our RPAC donations. It’s time that everybody gives… We need to make this fair for everybody and everybody needs to share in what we do at NAR.”

In other words, “we need your blood in order to survive”. Something doesn’t quite follow, though. If I’m forced to join the NAR in order to be a member of the MLS, how am I being unfair to the NAR because I’m not a willing participant in their RPAC political blood-sucking initiatives?

Speaking of those political initiatives…

“(The NAR has) over a million members… about 900,000 of them don’t stand up and charge when we say charge.”

Oh. Well. I do beg your pardon. And yet, even with such a lamentably small number of  foot soldiers willing to do their bidding, (Dear NAR- instead of looking at us as sheeple, perhaps you should consider upping your own UVP) the NAR proudly proclaims all the fine work it did in pushing for the cannibalizing Home Buyer Tax Credit. That was good for the temporary survival of Realtors, not so good for home buyers who may have paid more for their homes than they otherwise would have if the market had been allowed to work itself out and, especially not so good for taxpayers who have just flushed more than half a billion dollars down the commode Read more

April 10, 2011

Do you want to undo the damage the NAR has done to the American economy? If you’re not a criminal — if you’re not a predator — stop lending your moral and financial power to people who are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a fun little exercise for your brain:

Suppose I sneak up behind you, throw a burlap bag over your head, tie you up and then lock you in my basement. Would you regard that as a crime?

I don’t mean just a call-the-cops crime or a phone-your-lawyer crime. I don’t mean simply a violation of some arcane statute law. Even if we were on a desert island, with no written law of any sort, would you still regard my actions as a crime against your person and your liberty?

I know I’m asking you to think for yourself, all by your lonesome, with no hints or signals from the mob and no helpful pre-printed guide to clue you in to the “right” answers. Poor you. So I’ll cut you a break: You can feel free to quit this tiring exercise at the very first instance that you are able to truthfully answer, “No, I would not regard that as a crime.”

So let’s do another one:

Instead of locking you in the basement, let’s say I let you work all day in the sunshine and fresh air, tilling and tending to my fields? You are still my prisoner, but you’re not tied up or locked up. Would you still regard that as a crime?

And, hey, we all know that forcing people to work for free is slavery, so what if I pay you a nice wage for your efforts? You’re still my prisoner, and you still have to do the work I tell you to do, but now you’re being paid handsomely. Would you regard even that little trifle as a crime?

So how about this? Suppose I set you free? Manumission! Just like you pictured it! There’s only one catch. Whenever you buy or sell food, you have to do it through me, like a feudal serf. There are other people who could trade with you, perhaps leaving you with quite a bit more profit than I will, but you are forbidden from doing business with any of those people. You must go through me, paying my price. Would you regard that as a crime?

Clarify Read more

April 6, 2011

The Realtor Party, Part II: The Implied Accusation, and Other (Missed?) Opportunities

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

While Greg Swann takes on the big thinker issues behind the proposed Realtor Party Political Survival Initiative, I’m pondering a more microscopic view- how might this affect the relationship between my clients and me. Maybe not at all. I have no reason to believe that the public will think much about it, at least for a few years, and they may even like it. So what’s the harm?

We know that REALTORs rank along side used car salesmen, lawyers, politicians, and Stuff You Scrap Off Your Shoe when it comes to public opinion polls. As an industry, we are not trusted. At this point in time, our industry is widely considered a necessary evil. Why should that be? We have a Code of Ethics. Doesn’t that make us all, I don’t know, ethical? Our image problem is so pervasive and institutionalized that millions of dollars go toward advertising to get the word out that we are professionals. So how does the Realtor Party solve that? It doesn’t. In fact, it makes things worse. The reason (as in one reason) given for the RPPSI is that as an industry we need to compete with other self-interests. This benefits our image how?

So, I’m thinking… What if? What if we turned away from that? What if we stopped wrestling with pigs and the dirty business of politics? What if instead of more politics, we opened our eyes to the extraordinary opportunity in front of us?

This site is a treasure trove and one of my favorite posts is, The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude… It’s not over dramatizing to say that this post changed the way I communicate with clients. In fact, I’ve printed parts of it to give to my clients, who also love it. In part:

The Implied Accusation is the underground river flowing through every unhappy relationship. To address good and evil, all you have to do is bring things out into the Read more

April 5, 2011

What might have happened if the NAR had not caused this economic downturn? We don’t know. What we know is that the National Association of Realtors was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This post is grown from a comment left by Brian Summerfield, editor of Realtor magazine. Before I begin, I want to commend Brian for daring to show up here to debate this topic. I think he’s wrong, but the man has more guts than the people who pay him.

Now then: I said:

Doesn’t mean that banksters would not have come up with other flavors of larceny.

To which Brian replied:

Greg, you toss this off as an afterthought, but I see it as a key point. You say the sine qua non of the Great Recession was NAR, but it was in fact systemic flaws in the global financial system. Without collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps, there would have been no Great Recession. And NAR had nothing, nothing, to do with the creation of those “innovations” of finance.

As you, the reader, may have noted, there are people writing and commenting here who are more than unusually interested in philosophy — as a map of the universe and as a discipline of the mind. Brian’s argument turns on what normal people call “hypotheticals.” Jim Klein calls them contra-factuals, where I am apt to rave on about subjunctivity. In all three cases, we are talking about the same thing: We are making what we hope are logical claims about imaginary worlds, worlds not in evidence.

The universe outside our minds has an independent and prior existence, and the objects and events that comprise that universe are real and factual existents. When I make a statement about the real world — the universe of real things — my statement is subject to independent verification. The object I claim to see is either present or it is absent. The event I claim is happening is either occurring or it is not. Disputes about statements like these are possible only to the insane or to philosophy professors — but I repeat myself.

So: These things really happened:

1. The National Association of Realtors either wrote or lobbied for a great host of Rotarian Socialist laws devised to churn the residential real estate market for the benefit of real estate brokers Read more

April 1, 2011

What does it mean that the NAR won’t defend itself from the charge that it was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I threw down the gauntlet — and not for the first time:

It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.

The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.

We know they’re spying on us. And we know their PR pimp demonstrated that he got bilked when he paid for his law degree, so poorly does he argue.

So: Why doesn’t the brave National Association of Realtors — the largest, richest, most-powerful Rotarian Socialist corporate-welfare-tit-sucking political pressure group in the land — why won’t it stand up on its hind legs and defend itself?

For a first reason: Because it can’t. Better than any of us, the grand poohbah blood-sucking vampires of the NAR know beyond all room for doubt that it was their legislative initiatives that were the seeds, stems, stalks, branches, trees and forests that caused the housing boom, the housing bust and the Great Recession.

And for a second reason: Because they are actively plotting to do still more, still worse damage to the American economy. They will not stop sucking until they have sucked the body politic dry.

How do we know all of this true? Cum taces, clamas. When you say nothing, you shout.

They don’t defend themselves because they can’t. They know they are criminals. They pray, every sleepless night, that you do not know it.

In fact, the silence of your putative “leaders” does not prove me right. That would require an argument — an argument only I am happy to make. But the fact that the National Association of Realtors does not challenge my arguments is potent evidence that they themselves believe I am correct.

Are you waiting for the NAR to argue that someone else is responsible for the Great Recession — for the ruin of your own finances and for the devastation to be delivered to your children and grandchildren?

Don’t hold your breath. They know they’re at fault. And so do you.

March 29, 2011

Is It Really Just The MLS?

by

Retechulous...

Author website

Greg’s post a few minutes ago lit me up.

I’m pretty sure that just like Greg a majority of NAR members pay their dues each year for just one reason: To get access to the local MLS system.

If this is really true, then forcing changes at NAR or killing the organization altogether is likely as simple as building a really solid National Listing system that both pros and consumers would be comfortable with. Of course, the technology already exists and is out there. Adoption is another story, but nothing a souped up modern marketing plan couldn’t overcome.

But maybe let’s not get ahead of ourselves? First… let’s see for sure whether or not most pros equate NAR dues with little more than MLS access?

If you’re connected with a fair number of current NAR members and you want to help get a sizable sample for this poll, please feel free to tweet this, put it on facebook, or copy the widget to your website.

Thanks!

March 29, 2011

What’s the best thing the National Association of Realtors can do for the American economy? It could drop dead — but it won’t — so here’s how you can kill it, instead.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Hey there, toothy-grinned, glad-handing Realtor: How’s the world treating you?

Business is not so good? Your house is worth less than half of what you paid for it? Your kid has three degrees but can’t get a job?

Are you looking for someone to blame for your troubles?

Guess what? There really is a mastermind of evil in the American economy. A vast parasite, a vampire king, with an insatiable appetite to devour everything that used to be known as “the American way of life.”

Are you being preyed upon by banksters? By Wall Street tycoons? By Chris Dodd and Barney Franks?

Those are the folks we like to blame, when we seek explanations for the Great Recession.

But who is really at fault for your miseries?

The sine qua non cause of this disaster — of the national economic malaise and of your own personal financial situation — is… wait for it…

The National Association of Realtors.

It’s the NAR that obstructs consumers’ access to market alternatives to old-fashioned real estate brokerage.

It’s the NAR that insists on subsidizing homeownership at the expense of other, more-productive uses of capital.

It’s the NAR that manipulates the tax laws to induce thoughtless consumers to overpay for homes they never would have — and never should have — bought in the first place.

It’s the NAR that makes war on the rights of Americans to use and enjoy their real property as they choose.

It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.

The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.

The NAR’s legislative initiatives are uniformly criminal in their objectives. The purpose of all economic legislation is to induce by force an outcome that would not occur in the absence of that force. This is crime, no different from a mugging.

As the author of every state’s real estate licensing laws, the NAR mugs consumers by preventing them from doing business with whom they choose — on the terms Read more

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