BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Archives (page 36 of 372)

August 27, 2020

“Price drops are surging” in San Francisco? No, down is not up, it’s just comeuppance.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Going down?”

Is it bad form to make fun of sea-sick writing?

Whatever. Redfin:

A quarter (24.5%) of San Francisco-area home sellers cut their list prices during the four weeks ending Aug. 16, the highest share since at least 2015, when Redfin began recording this data. That’s more than double the rate from a year earlier, marking the largest annual increase in the share of active listings with price drops among the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas.

San Francisco’s price-drop rate has held steady at above 24% in late summer, clocking in at 24.1% during the most recent period in our data—the four weeks ending Aug. 23.

It’s not just San Francisco, it’s every big city Democrats have ruined:

San Francisco was one of just 11 of the top 50 metros that experienced an increase in the share of listings that cut prices, rising to 24.1% from 11.4% a year earlier. Chicago, Philadelphia and New York were among the 10 other places where the rate of price drops rose from the prior year during the four weeks ending Aug. 23.

Will San Francisco recover? Seattle? Portland? Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? Why should they? Grasshoppers need Ants, but Ants don’t need Grasshoppers – and Ants can live anywhere now.

Manhattan is easier to get a grip on, perhaps: What made it Fun City was a secondary consequence of everything that made it Gotham City. No more Gotham, no more Fun.

August 27, 2020

A proud family of Ants bidding farewell to California’s Grasshoppers

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Found on TheDonald.win – unfiltered and unreliable but uncensored.

There are other sites like this, some of them serious to the point of being dour, but crowd-sourced aggregators are the way you have, for now, of making sure you are not being lied to by omission.

Yes, you have to filter for bullshit – but if you aren’t doing that with everything, you just might be a hopeless case.

August 26, 2020

Ask the Broker: Why don’t more poor people own their own homes…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Why isn’t there more opportunity for poor people to own their homes?

If you were to substitute the word “horses” for “homes”, the question would answer itself, wouldn’t it? Poor people rent rather than own because their income is too low, their credit scores are too low, or their debt-to-income ratios are too high. That much is not rocket science, and it would apply to any other expensive financed possession we might name.

People very enamored of coercive charity can imagine circumstances in which financially unqualified people are given homes – or are given heavy subsidies toward buying homes. But this can only happen by taking wealth away from other people – people who have earned that wealth and deserve every penny of it. Poor people might get more home than they have earned, but only because other people are getting less home than they deserve. This kind of redistribution of purported injustice is made possible only by force – and, by my reckoning, that force is the most vicious injustice of all.

But, even so, there are two persistent problems. First, people tend not to respect what they did not have to earn and deserve. This is nicely illustrated by the awful condition of free or subsidized housing all over the world.

Moreover, unless the problem is to repeat itself, the poor recipients of subsidized housing would have to be forbidden from selling it at its true appreciated value – lest it become unobtainable by other poor people in the future.

Many poor people do not buy homes because for whatever reason they don’t develop the attributes of mind, character and behavior that lead to homeownership. And, even if they were to be given free or heavily-subsidized homes, the restrictions that would have to be placed on the sale of those homes would prevent those poor people from profitably developing those same attributes of mind, character and behavior even after they have become homeowners – in name only…

As it happens, we got to see practical examples of these ideas in the housing collapse. We know about CDOs (collateralized debt obligations – big bundles of bad Read more

August 25, 2020

Horror stories wanted: How has real estate’s Vendorslut Mafia preyed upon you?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Results? Any day now, for sure. Meanwhile, this month’s payment is due.” Photo by Ian on Unsplash

I don’t pay for leads. Never have, never will. I pay referral fees to other agents from time to time, this as a matter of expected courtesy, but I don’t collect fees for referrals – not alone to escape the burden of policing them.

Not such big news, regardless: I don’t make a lot of money. We haven’t marketed for new business in ten years, and I make my meager living on repeats and referrals from my existing clients. I’ve never craved money – it shows, I swear – and I am not as much in love with collecting pelts as I once was. When BloodhoundBlog was young, I said we were a boutique brokerage. I am by now my sole licensee, and I think of myself as a lab-rat broker.

I am mainly interested in listing for sale as though I were practicing free-throws on the basketball court. My goal is to perfect my listing praxis and then to hew to it with perfect performance. My numbers bear me out – but I don’t spend much on advertising, either.

My curiosity runs the other way just now: How have you been hurt as an agent or lender by your engagements with the sleazy folks we have always referred to as The Vendorslut Mafia?

Are there no happy stories? Surely there are. Deeper pockets going in may see happier outcomes going forward. But when you’re tap-dancing with your kid’s orthodontist so you can fork over cash you don’t have for “leads” that won’t pan out…

Kinda sucks, don’t it…?

I would love to hear about your experience. Who you paid. How much you paid. How things paid off.

I’m not shaming salesmaniacs, and I know it’s easy to click “Submit” before you know what you’re submitting to. And you can tell yourself that 65% of something is better than 100% of nothing – with luck missing out on the news that you’re paying some gonoph for coming between you and your client – typically with your own listings. Read more

August 25, 2020

Why, for the first time in human history, can the Ants so easily escape the Grasshoppers? That’s easy: The Internet.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The metaphor is not mine. It’s Aesop’s. Uncle Willie borrowed it, just lately. Every true fable has a moral, and here’s the moral to Willie’s story:

“Grasshoppers need Ants, but Ants don’t need Grasshoppers.”

Willie was working from a premise elucidated in today’s New York Post, why taxpayer-hostile big cities will not recover from their recent tantrums:

Why can they go so easily? Because for the first time in history, Internet bandwidth allows all or nearly all white-collar ­employees to work remotely.

Being stuck in or near cities and all their discontents was a link in the golden handcuffs of having a boastworthy corporate job. Now that link is broken, replaced by a link to a Zoom meeting – and there may never again be any reason to fear getting lice in your hair or vomit on your shoes.

Nice going, Grasshoppers. It will take decades and wrecking balls to come back from this…

August 24, 2020

Unchained Melody: The “Layla” guitar solo from a very confident Derek Trucks – age thirteen.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We talk about this at home all the time: Extraordinarily “talented” people will turn out to have been obsessively devoted to practice at age 13. This can be an emotional shielding – if you’re looking for the very most shunned people, look here – but it’s ultimately just a fact of practical ontology.

What’s most fun about this clip? The way thirteen-year-old Derek Trucks takes a sip of his Coke before taking The Allman Brothers Band to school.

August 24, 2020

Bebop and the brain – Thelonious Monk’s career advice to hard-working Realtors and lenders: “We wanted a music that they couldn’t play”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“You’re going to listen to your own music at work, that’s understood. But make your own music at work. And master your craft so well that you can craft a music they can’t play…”

We often listen to Bebop Jazz in the office. If I talk about music, I tend to talk about Rock ’n’ Roll or Country, just because they’re more inclusive. Bebop is demanding music even for Jazz, definitely an acquired taste.

Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.

I would argue that complex compositions – like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz – will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.

Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station on Pandora. Like all streaming-radio stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.

That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline

“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”

is practically a mission statement for hard-working Realtors and lenders.

Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming Read more

August 24, 2020

Eight reasons to own vacation rental properties

by

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

Author website

While we earn most of our money from our mortgage brokerage business, I started helping investors buy real estate some 5 years ago.  Working in San Diego, I have seen just how profitable vacation ownership has been for long-term investors.  If you follow me on any of my social sites, you will see that we just traveled to the Florida Panhandle to look at some of the best areas to own a vacation rental property.   Subsequently, we entered into a strategic partnership with Vacasa, the nation’s largest vacation rental property manager.

Here is an incomplete list of reasons why we think vacation rentals make sense for most investors:

1- Landlords get paid up-front.  When this COVID panic hit, politicians in every level of government instituted eviction stays, denying landlords the right to remove tenants who couldn’t afford the rent.  When you own a vacation rental, the typical stay is 7-30 days and you get paid by the renter before they occupy your property

2- The capitalization rates are better than long-term leases.  Properly managed, vacation rentals produce between 1.6 and 2.1 times the annual income which a long term lease would produce.  A vacation rental requires much more active marketing and management and, for that, vacation rental property managers take a healthy management fee but, after that is accounted for, the net operating income is still better than a long-term tenant.

3- Vacation rental properties are maintained better than those with long-term leases.  This seems counter-intuitive but, because of the active management, the properties are kept cleaner and repairs are addressed immediately.  The housekeeping service is usually passed on to the vacation renter and many of the repairs are covered by that renter if they break it.  Routine maintenance is addressed immediately because the vacation rental needs to be in top-condition to be rented again– tenants don’t “hide” small problems (which can become big problems)

4- Owners can take a vacation in their property.  While using the property can eat into profits, there are seasonal vacancies which can be expected and, if the property is within driving distance, the owner can use the property for leisure Read more

August 22, 2020

Whotube? Two challenges for BloodhoundBlog’s contributors.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This site has 69 contributors, surely a propitious number. We got a lot of new software this week, including shortcodes and the Markdown markup language.

Markdown is an EZ way to get to formatted text, emulating in many ways longstanding Usenet markup conventions. Chances are, if you work in it, you will have to learn nothing of the underlying nuts-and-bolts. The list below was written simply with asterisks, typewriter style:

  • Easy to use.
  • Hard to confuse.
  • Aaron Swartz, the inventor, was hounded to death by the Deep State. His productivity lives on in you.

Shortcodes are easy ways to effect big jobs. Witness Mister Jack White:

 
The code for that was precisely this:

The word ‘youtube’ in brackets with the link to the video. Easy-peasy, and the theme will manage every sort of screen size on its own – desktop, tablet, smartphone.

The link above summarizes all of the available shortcodes, but the docs that matter are here: Extending the Youtube shortcode.

So the first challenge to our contributors is simply to post. Could not be easier to post amazing content.

The second challenge is harder: Forecast the future. Pandemic, protests, politics: What are they doing where you are, and what portents will the future bring? Our contributors are all over the country. There is much they can teach us.

There are two challenges to making a blog work: Content and conversations. The latter are caused by the former.

August 22, 2020

Ask the Broker: Are buyers really willing to overpay in this market?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have Arizona’s Unobtainium: An unpublicized home for sale.

I’m always happy to brag about my listing prowess, and I could not be more delighted to have gotten this question in yesterday’s email. But: Even so: This is how I sell homes faster for more money.

So: A client and I are working out the details for a home that will list on October 8th, and he asked the Ask the Broker question: “Are buyers really willing to overpay in this market?”

In suburban Phoenix? Only the ones who want to buy houses. We’ve been strong since 2014 and before, very strong this year before the pandemic, strong throughout – and all the while we are benefitting hugely from the exodus from other states.

This was my answer to my investor client:

Almost everything I have sold in the past five years has sold with multiple offers, most over list, many for cash. My last listing sold the day before it was to go into the MLS, so that’s not a fair test. My last lease had many applications and the winners paid the full year’s rent in advance.

Things will change in the time we have to wait, but we still should have strong demand. We will have to appraise for financed offers, but if we get lucky, we’ll get cash buyers or waived appraisal contingencies. Not all buyers are equal in their appeal, but the poorly-qualified offers come in high, which is useful for torquing the better-qualified players.

We list on Thursday morning, just after midnight, to capitalize on the search-bot instigated weekend showings. I disclose the state of play on all offers in the private remarks in the listings, so agents always know where they stand. We want the highest/safest/soonest closing, but among highly-comparable well-qualified offers, we want to know who wants it more.

Like this, just explicit, transparent arm-twisting that only the agents can see:

Available, go and show. Priced to market. Priced to move. Seller to review offers Monday night. The state of play on offers will be documented here, as they come in. Don’t dawdle: This home should sell fast. Read more

August 21, 2020

VA Interest Rate Reduction Loans (IRRL) and Forbearances

by

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

Author website

A VA Interest Rate Reduction Loan (IRRL) is a streamlined refinance mortgage which allows veterans to lower their interest rate and payment without an appraisal, income qualification, or assets documentation.  It is a simple process which, over the years, has been subject to lender overlays but still offers veterans a chance to save money on their mortgage.

Basic rules are:

1- the VA loan must be seasoned with a minimum of 6 monthly payments AND  at least 210 days from the first payment date.  This means that, if a veteran closed his/her loan in November 2019, with a first mortgage payment date of January 1, 2020, the veteran wouldn’t be able to close on the VA IRRL until July 29, 2020.  While the June payment would have been the 6th consecutive payment, the 210-day period extends through July 29.

2- When a veteran makes a VA IRRL application (sample), he/she would skip the income, assets, and liabilities section.  While it is not a VA requirement, most lenders want to know that one or both borrowers are employed so we encourage veterans to include their current employment information on the application.

3- the loan processor will ask the veteran and co-borrower to provide a copy of the old note, a copy of identity documents to comply with the USA-PATRIOT Act , a copy of the current mortgage statement

4- right after the application is made, a mortgage loan originator may present 2-3 options for the VA IRRL (sample), showing the inverse relationship between rates and fees.  Quick rules of thumb  for a VA IRRL  are:

  • the rate must drop at least .5%.  If a veteran has a current mortgage rate of 3.25%, the rate offered must be 2.75% or lower
  • closing costs, including the VA funding fee of .5%, must be recovered through the monthly savings within 36 months (disabled veterans are not charged a VA funding fee.  Thus, their savings are greater than veterans who do not have a VA-rated disability)

5- Once the veteran selects the rate and closing costs scheme, the loan terms are locked and loan disclosures are sent (this must happen within 3 Read more

August 21, 2020

What’s your new #iBuyer strategy? Steal this script and run with it.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“iBuying is such a great idea that the iBuyers would rather sell you anything else instead!”

When I built iBuyerSpy.com, I had anticipated writing software that would have generated the main content of the site. This never happened. I ended up blogging there, which I should have done here – an error I am now correcting.

By now, the big-foot iBuyers have switched to upselling traditional listings, just like Redfin – and just like the many Realtors who have teamed up with cash investors to offer their own equity-fleecings – just like the iBuyers.

So here’s my script for dealing with the question, on the phone or in a listing appointment:

“iBuying is by now a loss-leader for online brokers, a bright, shiny bait-‘n’-switch. They will buy your house if you’re willing to abandon much of your equity. Or they will upsell you to a traditional listing – except they are much worse than traditional Realtors at getting homes sold. iBuyers are a lose-lose proposition for sellers. Can we talk about how we will work to get the job done right, instead?”

They’re ordinary real estate gonophs with fancier websites. They suck at selling – you know, the actual job. They’re weak everywhere you’re strong. Sell your strengths.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts