Overnight News: The most important preparation for selling a home? Know what market you’re in.

For my two most-recent listings, the prep work consisted of landscaping – around $300 each. For one, I had planned to have a huge, ugly tree trimmed, but the house sold before the tree surgeon could sharpen his scalpel. For vacant listings, I’m doing landscaping plus deep cleaning, but I’m still coming in under $1,000 a house.

Yesterday I saw an article – I won’t say where – on the importance of staging for the sale of your home.

Yeah… Not so much. Not now. Everything helps, incrementally, I suppose – but anything that delays your entry into this market right now is probably a mistake. If I take possession of a house on Monday, I will have it listed by Friday and sold by Tuesday – or sooner. My staging right now consists of a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Staging, photos, drone shots, virtual tours, floorplans, blah, blah, blah. The purpose of marketing is to move goods that aren’t moving on their own. When houses are selling like hotcakes – and when the breakfast menu could go away at any second – our job is not marketing but salesmanship.

In other news:

CNBC: Creating safe and affordable homes is reaching a crisis point. Ahem. Get the hell out of the way.

Legal Insurrection: Kristi Noem: “COVID didn’t crush the economy. Government crushed the economy.”

City Journal: Covid’s Transportation Tsunami: To allocate new infrastructure spending wisely, legislators need to understand how Americans’ habits have changed.

City Journal: “Money Printer Go Brrr” Can the U.S. borrow endlessly?

American Greatness: A Trojan Horse for Woke Education.