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Archives (page 61 of 372)

May 4, 2011

MY SENIOR MOMENT

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A couple of weeks ago I joined millions of other Americans in the last minute ritual of rushing to the post office on April 15th and filing… my tax extension.  Brimming with pride over not procrastinating this year, a reward was in order.  Now this is normally the realm of chocolate frozen yogurt, but I wanted something more appropriate, maybe even a little dangerous; so I went down to the local Tea Party Rally.

Though a newbie to the whole “Astroturf” experience, I felt I had some idea what to expect thanks to the fine, unbiased reporting of our main stream media.  I braced myself for loud, selfish people who didn’t give a damn about the less fortunate.  I girded myself for cynical young radicals.  I steeled myself for the subtle racism reportedly running just beneath the surface. In short, I entered the raucous Public Square of the Tea Party by embracing the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.

Ha!  Somebody – I’m not sure if it’s the Boy Scouts or the Fourth Estate – owes me an apology.  I didn’t hear any loud, selfish rhetoric.  In fact, the speeches mainly concerned the social justice of liberty and even saving public employee pensions!  I did not see young radicals (though this was Oceanside, CA so distinguishing between subversive radicals and skateboarders is tricky).  And any “subtle racism” must have been drowned out by Ted Hayes’ standing ovation.

I spent hours looking out over the nearly two thousand people who attended, and it’s what I did see that surprised me: the predominate, if not prototypical, Tea Party activist is a woman in her early fifties who is, or soon will be, a grandmother.

Surprising, right?   I wasn’t prepared either.  (You see why I’m looking for an apology from the main stream media… or is it the Boy Scouts?)  The more I thought about it though, the more sense it made; who else would it be?  The Tea Party, at its heart, stands opposed to the generational transfer of financial devastation.  Now granted, parents are generally more protective of children than anyone else.  But most moms and dads Read more

May 2, 2011

Pieces of April for a morning in May: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I nailed down a house this morning at 6:50 am. It’s a hard dance to get the right house at the right price, but the world of email permits miracles to happen at any hour of the day or night.

We had a totally rockin’ April, more than three times our monthly nut. But the first check in April didn’t hit the bank until the 15th of the month, and, until this morning, we had zero dollars on the board for May. Even so, I told Cathleen that April 15th was our last day of poverty. We’ll see if that’s a prognostication I can defend.

Here’s a goal-getting calendar for May.

This is a simple procedure: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month. It works. So get on it.

April 29, 2011

It’s Time To Think About…Money…Brian Brady’s Money

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

We’re going to take a brief break from the political apocalypse that surrounds us and deal with money.

Your Money.

I’m something of a master at listening on Twitter.  When someone says “After effects”  or “motion graphics” I’m there.  There are a dozen or so other ones that work much better, but you get the picture.  I’m unlikely to share them.

It’s what’s building Simplifilm.com (our work is here, I’ll share some good stuff sometime soon).

I have dozens running on my tweetdeck.  I pitch a few times a day.  It works.

Now, I learned something that Brian Brady better use.

The phrase “New Client,” and “New Buyer,” are tweeted a few hundred times a day.

Over hundred times – 1/3 they are Realtors pandering for Approbation.  “Look at me, I have a client.”  Most of the time, it’s a buyer.  A buyer that needs a mother frolicking mortgage loan.

What if a great lender, googled, called, and then offered the Realtor approval?  What if that lender played dumb and pretended they didn’t see things on Twitter, but had a polished, refined pitch?

Fish in a barrel.  Takes seconds to skim, minutes to sort, and needy people are forever most easily persuaded.

Also: if you have clients- shut up about them.  Marketers brag about new, unsigned clients.  I appreciate them identifying who is in the market for me, saves me the research.  (Be silent, or be better than silence).

April 29, 2011

It’s About Time to Think About… Time

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

It’s time for me to apologize.  Some time back I introduced an idea – a set of ideas really – called the POPs Program, which I always meant to get back to it, but haven’t until today. So, to those of you who faithfully read my articles and were excited to learn more about the POPs Program, I am sorry.  I hope all four of you will forgive me…

In that Introduction, I discussed the autopilot that so often ends up running a great deal of our lives, and how diligent we must be to prevent it.  But it’s not easy, especially if you are a real estate agent!  One of the most common complaints I hear from agents is there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done.  Sound familiar?  Well be careful because that’s the beginning; that’s when we first begin to reach for the autopilot button.  Not on anything important – at least, not yet.  We turn it on to handle little things in our schedule; we allow it to help us move through a very busy week.  But tuning out is a slippery slope and eventually leads to the two great roadblocks of success: Guilt and Fear… and it all starts with Time.

Temporal Awareness is the great gift, and great curse, of sentient beings.  Unlike any other organism on this planet, we are aware of time as a line; we are cognizant of a past and a future.  This no doubt has served us well.  We know how to delay gratification, plan ahead and save.  We are adept at learning from mistakes, recognizing patterns and creating the possibility of a more successful future based on experiences of the past.  BUT (and you just knew there was a big “but” coming), this linear understanding of time is the seed of our undoing as well.

To understand this better, go with me on a quick, imaginary trip to the Serengeti plains of Africa where a tiger is chasing a gazelle… presumably for lunch.  The entire chase lasts less than a minute before both animals are exhausted and, in our happy little trip, the gazelle has escaped.  Do you know what happens next?  Nothing!  The tiger lays down to rest; Read more

April 27, 2011

The Stick, the Carrot, and The Men Behind the Curtain

by

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

Author website

Monday, I talked about how real estate is better described as a store of value rather than an investment, referencing the work Reason’s Anthony Randazzo published.  Randazzo really hit it out of the park because he showed, without a doubt, how the residential real estate bubble started right after 1992.  Look at the second chart (Case-Shiller Real Housing Price Index).  That chart shows the adjusted for inflation index.  It looks like an EKG after a jolt from defibrillator paddles.  Every curious person would want to know what those defibrillator paddles were.:

Only once the so-called 1992 Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) Safety and Soundness Act opened up the floodgates of federal subsidies, later to be caffeinated by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy in the early 2000s, did prices double nationally.

ZAP!!! The 1992 Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) Safety and Soundness Act which turned out to be an oxymoron.

One commenter didn’t buy the results of the EKG and said:

Seems to me that America has had a succession of bubbles, market manipulations and public speculations since the mid 80s. Gold/Silver in the mid 80s, the Saving & Loan scams later, then the tech stock mania, then the real estate bubble and now we’re seeing gold/silver mania again as well as two recent bouts of crude oil speculation.

And these things were caused by activist government planning? No, these things were caused by BIG, BIG money jumping from place to place and “making the market”.

I asked a leading question:

What makes it “jump”?

I should have pointed out that there was a commodities bubble in the late 70s (remember the odd and even days at the pump?) but, let’s add that 70’s commodities bubble, to the many asset bubbles cited by the commenter, and ask “Is that normal?” and, if it isn’t (by the way, it isn’t normal), we must wonder, did anything happen in the 1970’s which would cause money to move quickly in and out of asset classes?  Isn’t there some asset standard to which our dollar could be pegged?

The answer is like a bar of gold, hidden Read more

April 26, 2011

Housing Might Not Be a Good “Investment” But It’s Not a Bad Hedge Against Inflation

by

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

Author website

Debra and I had the good fortune to met Anthony Randazzo at a Reason Foundation dinner last week.  Mr. Randazzo published an article today, about real estate as a “store of value” (which was consistent with what we’ve been talking about here on BloodhoundBlog).

Few people will dispute that more homeowners adds “social value” to communities.  Greg Swann articulated that nicely here:

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we all seem to own our homes only by sufferance, none of us will have anything left to defend.

What Greg was arguing against was an activist government, abusing eminent domain laws.  I was happy to read that locally, the brigands disguised as National City, CA Councilmen were defeated last week but the war in defense of private property rights will be a long campaign.

Mr Randazzo’s article however, demonstrates how that “social value” (op. cit.) can be distorted when the planners keep planning:

When looking at housing this way, the “ownership society” lauded by President Bush in the early 2000s, sounds like a good idea. Especially when considering the social values associated with homeownership, like being a good neighbor and having a stake in nuturing a community. However, while owning a home is rarely a bad thing, it might not be the great investment our Read more

April 23, 2011

Is Brian Brady the Easter Bunny?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

No – he’s better.  Hey, do the Easter Bunny’s eggs tell us what the future has in store?  No, they just keep us busy looking for something that benefits us not at all.  Brian, on the other hand, is not only as sweet as candy, but he actually does give us a glimpse into what’s coming next.  He recently did it again.  This is a clip of Brian on a local television news show about two weeks ago.  Check out what he says around 1:50 into the clip.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say he just warned us that the US ability to borrow money – it’s credit worthiness – is in imminent danger.

And here, two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal reports on S&P’s decision to… downgrade their outlook on US creditworthiness from “Stable” to “Negative”.

If only we could impose on Brian to play a little Santa Claus next.  Maybe we’d all end up with more than an economic lump of coal in our stocking this year…

April 22, 2011

Splendor is where you find it…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A rose is a rose, but the desert has a beauty all it own…

No matter how busy I get, I always want to make time in my life for beauty — wherever I might find it. I spied these lovely cactus flowers in the front lawn of a hugely distressed foreclosed home. Sad stories abound. Bad news is the only news people can be bothered with. But every day is a new beginning, a brand new shot at grace. If you quarry the good within you, then splendor is everywhere you go…

April 19, 2011

Until there is a brokerage counter at Wal-Mart, there is no real estate bubble

by

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

Author website

Ever wonder about the relationship between gold and real estate?

Jim Klein got me to thinking about a “store of wealth”, when I postulated that there is no gold bubble:

I think people can get snookered into thinking it’s a great “investment.” It’s protection, it’s barter; it’s a store of wealth. To me, that’s not what “investment” means, which is usually about income. I believe that in actual inflation periods, gold tends to appreciate on the low side, particularly when compared with many other assets. It does much better /anticipating/ inflation, as now.

I remembered hearing that term before, over on Seeking Alpha:

Gold and Real Estate have historically been the two ways to store real value as they are as real assets as you get. So what happens when the value of one real asset is artificially manipulated? We all know by now what caused the bubble in real estate, but, at the height of the bubble it was unknown to the market that it was a bubble on the verge of bursting

Real estate does have income-producing value though, as Sean Purcell pointed out to us years ago.  Also, the median-priced home is larger today than it was 40 years ago, because of change in retail demand.  Still, for fun, let’s compare the median price of a single-family home, in August, 1971 ($25,300) to the price of a single-family home, in February, 2011 ($202,100), in ounces of gold:

On August 1, 1971, the price of gold was pegged at $35/oz so it would have taken 722 ounces of gold to purchase a median-priced, single-family home.  Two weeks later, The United States terminated its participation in The Bretton Woods Agreement, creating a fiat currency.

At the end of February, 2011, you might have paid $1,400/oz for gold.  You could purchase a median-priced, single family home then for 144 ounces of gold, about one-fifth the cost (in gold), from 1971.

What I’m missing here is the net operating income you would have derived from that single-family home, over the 40-year period.  I’d have to know Read more

April 17, 2011

“When Wal-Mart has a gold coin section in the jewelry department…

by

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

Author website

…then we can start talking about a possible bubble in gold.”–Gary North, on LewRockwell.com

Gold is an investment asset. It therefore will not become popular short of an economic collapse – hyperinflation followed by a depression. The average person owns no gold coins, nor will he anytime soon.

Where would he buy them? How could 100 million households buy a single gold coin per household? This would be impossible. There are only a few small coin stores in any community. They are mostly mom-and-pop outfits. The U.S. Mint could not meet the demand.

When Wal-Mart has a gold coin section in the jewelry department, then we can start talking about a possible bubble in gold. Not until then.

If you’re looking for the best primer for owning gold click the link above and read the whole article.  Of course, if you’re confident that the Fed will find a way to unwind QE II, and that the money center banks are all safe, and that we’re finished with bail outs, and that the Federal budget deficit is under control, you have no need to own gold as an an inflation hedge.  If you think ANY of those shoes could still drop, buy the yellow metal until you see it offered at Sam’s Club.

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