I am enduringly annoyed by the iBuyers. You may have noticed.

The most significant factor in Zillow’s ignominious retreat from iBuying is that it was entirely a Dunning-Kruger exercise: Rich Barton and his devoted team of seven-figure eggheads actively and persistently refused to learn anything about real estate brokerage.

All of the iBuyers are lousy at real estate, as I’ve been pointing out for years, and none of them are interested in improving. But Barton’s explicit insistence was that Zillow would do best at real estate by not listening to anyone who has ever sold real estate, not even the Realtor “partners” they used as their hands and feet in their first two years of iBuying.

It’s awful that Rich Barton screwed up so badly – leaving damaged neighborhoods behind him nationwide. But it is much worse that he did it deliberately – by refusing to learn any better – even as his errors racked up by the millions.

If drunk driving is bad, then driving blind-folded is so much worse. Zillow CEO Rich Barton – very proudly! – drove blind-folded into America’s real estate market. He should be held to account for it.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: California Dreamin’.

Andrea Widburg: One fuzzy drone image may send Kyle Rittenhouse to prison.

Andrea Widburg: The DOJ and FBI have combined to destroy Project Veritas.

J.R. Dunn: The Left’s Bungled Revolution.

What hell it would be to have a job right now!

I am lucky that I am able to make my way in the world without having to take shit from morons for money. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for people like me who still have employers.

I was thinking that we’re going to need a website – call it CommieDoxxing.com – to document which employers – and which doctors! – have gone off the rails, like every other Marxist loco motive.

What you need is a plan: If you are ambiguously-employed – if your boss is desperate to destroy the business to get ahead at dinner parties – figure out how to be otherwise-employed, ideally self-employed, ASAP.

There’s all kinds of good advice out there – get fit, pack the larder with protein, grow your own food – but all of it is about being independent. Accordingly: Work to make your future free from self-abnegating idiots who presume to hold your livelihood hostage to their mutiny against reality.

Your bosses are planning to choke on the smoke of their own incineration. Why would you want to get what they deserve?

In other news:

William Jacobson: The media framed Kyle Rittenhouse — and won’t come clean even after the prosecution’s case falls apart.

Seth Barron: What’s Really on Trial in the Rittenhouse Case?

Joanne Jacobs: Grading for equity: What if kids don’t learn?

As previously dreaded, Zillow CEO Rich Barton is electing to leave devastation behind him, as he demonstrates to everyone’s dismay that he is by far the world’s worst real estate “investor.”

“The Incumbent” said everything it takes to get an “investor” ejected from my car – the clueless things people insist on when they have huge dreams and zero experience. The stupidity of the “business plan” was obvious to everyone who has brokered real estate, but it was this – the risk of wrecking the real estate market – that turned me against the iBuying “idea.”

Barton sold his bullshit as a benefit to consumers, of course: That’s how all bullshit gets sold. But his own high regard for his Presbytyrannical apple-polishing is betrayed by his ignominious exit from his “investments.”

Zillow bought thousands of homes from owner-occupants that will now be turned into rental housing – gradually degrading every neighborhood Barton betrayed. They have more than enough money to sell the homes retail, as intended, but they are cutting and running because that’s just what preening sociopaths do.

The Zestimate is the joke that dominates the conversation, but as anything other than a rapid-bankruptcy plan for inept agents, Zillow is a menace.

In other news:

Chronicles: California Exodus.

John Di Leo: Kyle Rittenhouse And The Streets Of Kenosha.

Here’s a true fact about iBuying: The sellers are gonophs. Home-sellers are often gonophs, of course, and, even if not, the information asymmetry runs all their way: Neither your Buyer’s Agent nor your home inspector is likely to identify that semi-annual drainage problem.

But many of the sellers who turn to iBuyers do so because they believe – correctly – that the iBuyers are idiots who will buy any pig in any poke. The seller knows everything he didn’t know about the property when he bought it – the negative externalities that make it sell consistently for 4% less than model-match comps – and he’s betting that the iBuyers will be too dumb and too rushed to see their pricing mistakes.

Gaming “Artificial Intelligence” will be the extreme sport of our young century. Whether or not there are actually any “machine learning” “pricing algorithms” behind the bloviating iBuyers, the sellers are gaming them astutely.

In other news:

Jonathan Tobin: If The GOP Wants To Remain The Party Of Parents, It Must Fight For School Choice.

The Los Angeles Times: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading. Daycare gonna daycare.

One late-Summer Prime Day in 2019, from the depths of Death Valley – cancer brain, chemo brain, insane-in-the-membrane brain – Cathleen bought a Roomba, an “artificially-intelligent” robot vacuum.

She parked it at my desk, saying it was mine to work out. I approached it the same way I do every other project not my own: I neglected it. My wife is not the nagging type, and Death Valley brain pushed her off in other directions, so no rumba for the Roomba.

When we were packing up, I thought, “I should sell this thing” – but we ended up moving it anyway.

And: I have been vacuuming a lot at the new house. Tile floors betray what carpets conceal: Desert air, at least at around shoe level, is full of grit.

And so that Roomba was suddenly much more interesting to me. I don’t mind vacuuming, and I like any job where I can tell the difference when I’m done. But: Scutwork is never first on my list – except my list of jobs to delegate.

Enter Rosie, named after The Jetsons’ housekeeper, who swept away the grit in two short shifts yesterday and is gamely sucking up dust right now. She was duck soup to set up, with a little extra thought devoted to preventing her from becoming beached by her own enthusiasm.

Rosie is hyper-diligent, but she is dumb, dumb, dumb. The “artificial intelligence” is a variation on the drunkard’s walk – that is to say, nothing anyone would even loosely describe as intelligence. If the iRobot people are selling data from this relationship, I cannot imagine what it is. This device – a Roomba 690 – is definitely not mapping the house.

It could be – it must have a Cartesian relationship with its home base – and, accordingly, it could be much more intelligent in its approach to vacuuming. Vide: Map the perimeter, then work that map by segments, lawnmower style. That would make most-efficient use of Rosie’s battery. Or: Keep records of where significant “dirt events” occur and give Read more

What will remain of the iBuyers, once the market turns?

As noted long ago, iBuying as such is a very stupid idea. A flipper came up with it, and it may be that he didn’t really even get the math of flipping, he just started at the perfect time – the bottom of the Big Short real estate bomb; iBuying has lived in no other market than this one, steadily steaming upward for years, now screaming like a tea kettle. In any case, owning a house to fix and flip for resale only makes sense because that’s what you have to do in order to do the rest – where owning non-producing assets (financed!) is always a bad idea. Even then, you have to cheat the original seller – you have to buy even lower the the home’s actual as-is Fair Market Value. You have to control your turnover expenses. And you have to get in and get out fast.

Corporations can’t do anything fast, nor can they control costs. Buying low is only possible where Zestimates don’t grow, so the pure iBuyer business model would seem to have been completely frolicked ab initio – which is of course what I have been saying all along.

iBuyers with a value-add like Curbio or EasyKnock may have a business for a while, and Redfin uses the promise of iBuying to upsell its slow-moving discount listings. Pacaso is an international small-business: A niche offering with any profit potential emerging from its being a time-share: The only winner will be the management company, in the form of recurring fees, and today’s buyers will probably never see a resale return on their “investment.”

That is to say: None of them will matter, going forward. The claims that Zillow has some great data-prescience have always sounded absurd to me: Real estate is a black swan business, and Zillow has seemed to me to be nothing but flat-footed for years now – since Spencer Rascoff did the math on iBuying and went off to find what he hopes is Read more

Every time we move, our network topology gets simpler. By now, we’re wireless for everything except for two network drives hardwired into the cable modem/router.

Those live in the living room, since that’s where the wiring is, in a tiny cabinet of their own. The modem and the drives continuously flash pointlessly, of course, so we’re thinking of festooning their housing with flashing Christmas lights – like a little hi-tech hearth.

What’s radically simpler this time is the power. I have been accumulating all sorts of multi-pronged outlets since before I could drive. I don’t need watts or amps, but I always need more outlets than are available. That need has transmuted over the years, too: On my desk right now there is a power strip charging seven USB devices and three camera batteries. We did everything here with power strips; greater flexibility and better line-protection – I hope.

Perhaps I am too much talking to myself, but I think rethinking is fundamental to the praxis of praxes: If you truly aim to get better at the things you do, you have to admit it when you have been wrong – and then re-do everything you did wrong.

That last bit is the hard part: It’s hard enough getting things almost right. What’s the benefit of undoing everything, then redoing it better?

My answer would be: In order to have done everything better.

I amaze Cathleen whenever there is massive work to be done, because I am unabashedly amazing at daunting tasks. But I astound her most, I think, when I scowl at some huge job I’ve just finished – then proceed to rebuild it all over somewhere else instead.

Everything gets a little better every time you think something all the way through – if you act on your thinking. We are long since done moving in, but I am only just now getting to the place where I’ve stopped rebuilding things.

In other news:

RedState.com: The Read more

So: We are all Colorado cake-bakers now. Who didn’t see this coming?

In other news:

Eugene Volokh: Realtors Group Hearing “Hate Speech” “Ethics Complaint” Against Pastor-Realtor.

Geekwire: Redfin CEO explains how its iBuyer home buying program avoided pitfalls that sunk Zillow Group. Totally not whistling past the graveyard.

I’m playing with some new ideas for 2022. We haven’t done anything to campaign for new business since 2010, but I want to move to the supply side, so I’m sliding in that direction. Just lately, on a training podcast with Brian Brady, I mentioned that the way to get around the Realty.bots is Old School: Direct mail.

Brian and I came together over a shared love for Guerrilla Marketing – not the books, which are excellent, but the underlying strategic praxis: Achieving maximum marketing impact for the minimum spend.

I specifically mentioned the USPS’s Every Door Direct Mail program: Hit every mailbox in a particular carrier route with a mail piece as big as 8-1/2 x 11” for around twenty cents a door. You won’t get the investors – title can get their addresses for you – but you will get every resident.

There is a lot you can do with this: For example, you could leave once side blank and use that to laser print your monthly newsletter to your farm. My pitch is more prosaic: If I list your house, I will manage the rehab to maximum financial benefit. I already do that, of course, but some folks can’t taste the steak until they hear the sizzle.

I can buy the cards I want for around fifteen cents each, and I will do my own copy and design, so my pilot project is to hit around 500 doors a month for twelve months for a total spend of around $2,000. One conversion is worth around $10,000, and two a month is about as hard as I want to work, for now. If it pulls, it can scale until it’s pulling us where we want to go. And if not: Cheap to try something different.

Zillow may have dinosaur-robot egg on its face right now, but it won’t stop coming between you and your clients. To get around the Realty.bots, approach the marketplace in ways they can’t match.

In other news:

Andrea Widburg: The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a master class Read more

On Friday, October 22nd, the day of our actual, physical move, I found out that our net provider had not yet delivered on internet to the new house and that our file server had been shut down because it was attacked from the outside. Then, while I was taking down the network hardware, I managed to scorch the hard disk on my desktop computer.

Ten years ago, I would have been freaked out by that trifecta: No computer, no internet, no internet presence – and no time to fix any of it. What’s changed? Steve Jobs put my business in my shirt pocket. In my everyday world, I use my desktop computer for this – for writing. Everything I do for money I can do from my phone. Vendor contact is all text – only by cell phone. We closed a house in our triply-crippled state.

All is well by now. Brand new SSD hard drive, wicked fast, and every byte of data was recovered from backup. Fiber internet at 500 megs – hello, 500-million channel television. And the file server was held hostage by its host for days just because I couldn’t get to them to demonstrate that a server that is running two weblogs cannot have attacked itself.

Murphy’s Law says whatever can go wrong will. Finagle’s Laws tend to argue that the worst possible thing that could go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time. On the other hand, static charge really does matter, especially in the desert, and people actually do win the lottery.

Meaning what? We had a great move with a three-headed digital Cerberus blocking our exit. I flashed it my phone and it ceased to be a problem. How cool it that?

PS: I am reading that Broker Barton may be dumping his entire inventory of over-priced turkeys to hedge funds – overpaying for owner-occupied homes then turning them into rentals. If this is so, he graduates from moron to menace. Stick to your knitting, please, poindexters. No one needs the world made worse.

In other news:

Robby Soave: Glenn Youngkin Defeated Terry McAuliffe Read more

Well. It turns The Incumbent has a calculator on his phone. Even billionaires can identify a stupid business – eventually.

On July 19th, 2019, I took OpenDoor’s business praxis apart in public, demonstrating all their foolish marketing errors. Hundreds of OpenDoor staffers read that article. I think Eric Wu’s parents read it. Even so, precisely zero people from OpenDoor reached out to me to learn how to do better.

In that same week, I also took OfferPad and Zillow Offers apart, documenting the fundamental real estate errors that make the iBuying idea ridiculous. None of them followed up with me, of course. Who needs free market research – that turns out to be telling the truths you won’t see? I asked Rich Barton on Twitter how he managed to lose $160,000 on a $200,000 house and he blocked me. Nice move, Incumbent.

I haven’t been following Zillow’s flaming Icarus news. Krupke, I’ve got troubles of my own. But I told you the problems they would have in that same week in July of 2019: A retailer without a discount rack must cut the prices for all of the inventory all at once, not just the stuff that isn’t moving. Zillow bought stupidly on its strength, and now it is discounting stupidly – in what is still a killer market for listers – because it cannot hide the fact that it is a crippled lion.

There’s always another Icarus, but there are two easy takeaways for anyone who can latch onto the obvious facts of reality faster than your average billionaire:

1. There is no upside to owning non-producing assets. All the money in real estate brokerage comes from socializing the risk to the seller – being ONLY the agent, not the owner.

2. Big-feet real estate players are inherently catastrophic: Make a mistake in real estate, you lose money. Make enough mistakes, you get a job. But if you make market-wide mistakes, you take the whole market down with you.

Go away, iBuyers, all of you. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t want to know how Read more

Bloodhound Realty is moving its offices – and our residence – today. The COVID and ‘domestic terrorism’ lies both blew up yesterday, so there’s plenty of news out there. Just not here. My apologies.

In other news:

CNBC: Sales of existing homes rose in September, likely due to a brief decline in mortgage rates.

California Globe: Iconic Target Store on Mission St to Close Amid Shoplifting Tidal Wave.

City Journal: In Thrall to D.C.: The pandemic has worsened states’ dependence on federal largesse.

Who didn’t see this coming? Netflix caved.

Since George Floyd got sober, I’ve been predicting the advent of the new power center in all corporations, the Chief Grievances Officer. Yesterday, the CGO became de facto CEO of the biggest money in Hollywood.

I’m thinking “Admiral Rachel” should start primping for “her” closeup…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Fast Sales Increasingly Common This Fall.

City Journal: Transition to Nowhere: California’s switch to a primarily solar and wind-powered grid is a dead end.

The Federalist: Biden Forced Americans Into A Game Of Chicken Over Their Livelihoods, And They’re Not Flinching.

Don Surber: They promised to destroy Big Brother. They became him.

The headline of the day belongs to The Babylon Bee, the most-accurate news source in America: “Arms Race Heats Up: Just As China Reveals Space Nukes, America Responds With Trans Admiral.”

We are led by a pageant of clowns. Who can argue that we don’t deserve exactly what we’re getting?

In other news:

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand drops over 6% after interest rates move even higher.

CNBC: Single-family rents are surging, and investors are flooding the market.

Jordan Davidson: Corporate Media, Democrats Praise Rachel Levine, A Man, For ‘Historic’ Female Admiral Title.

Joy Pullman: Leftist Shadow Governments Control A Lot More Than Our Elections.

Joel Kotkin: Have we reached the high water mark of woke?

Here’s an interesting question: Given that we know that the iBuyers gouge buyer’s agents, could it be that they also gouge all their other vendors?

This could explain why Zillow has discovered that it is unfit for the house-flipping business: It can’t get rehab contractors, and, for bizarre reasons unknown, it (says) it can’t move its deals through title and escrow. Paper-shuffling was to have been propteched by now, likewise online notarization, but it’s not like there is a sudden supply-chain shortage of chatty, chubby folks to close deals.

What’s really Zillow’s problem? Duh. College boys can’t broker real estate from 30,000 feet, but before that there is this: The profitability of real estate brokerage, if any, entails NOT owning the inventory. All iBuyers make stupid marketing mistakes all the time, but their worst mistake – risking their own funds – will bleed them white as the market turns.

Not really a problem for Zillow: They have two reasons for iBuying, to stay in front of consumers – and to stay in front of agents. As long as pie-eyed agents are willing to pay Zillow to sell their own clients back to them, they can continue to soak their toes and call it swimming.

In other news:

CNN Business: Zillow slams the brakes on home buying as it struggles to manage its backlog of inventory.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment bounces back despite ongoing supply chain problems.

City Journal: Some Things Money Can’t Buy: For everything else, there’s deception.

Andrea Widburg: The DOJ has finally disgorged some exculpatory evidence about January 6.

John Stossel: Let Life Resume: “It’s not admitting defeat; it’s admitting reality.”