There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 2 of 60)

Threaten riot and ruin on Twitter, it’s all good. But do not compliment a black actor.

I waited for weeks to find out Twitter can’t read. Who knew?

Twitter banned me, pending appeal, for praising the actor Forest Whitaker.

I waited from August 4th to September 17th for them to correct this obvious error.

So they didn’t.

I am still banned, pending my next appeal, ideally with someone who can read.

I don’t know if my account will ever be restored, and I don’t know if I will keep it if it is. I abhor the way Twitter does business – and not just with me – so it seems stupid of me to share content with them.

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I am mentioned on Twitter and I am promoted-to by Twitter – this news they deliver by email, a platform they can’t ban… yet – but I cannot read or write on Twitter.

We care a lot.

Overnight News: Mocking Redfin about The Dystemperor’s New Unriots is funny – until you think about what our studied negligence is doing to the black middle class.

“Red Americans got rooked once and completely. Black Americans get rooked with every spin of the ‘economic cycle.’ That’s how you know Black Lives Matter.”

As I noted yesterday, these are not just riots we are seeing across the country, they are carefully-mismanaged riots. Where the police department is allowed to function according to well-understood crowd-control theory, there are no riots. Cf., e.g., Detroit. As with acknowledging the riots themselves, taking note of this deliberate mismanagement is useful: It is the key proxy signal needed to determine any given neighborhood’s RiotScore™.

Redfin: Housing Market White Hot After Labor Day: Home Prices Up 13%, Pending Sales Up 27%. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: MBA: 11 million households fell behind on rent or mortgages in second quarter.

CNBC: Refinancing your mortgage will cost more thanks to an ‘adverse market’ fee.

Forbes: The Paradox Of The U.S. Black Home Ownership Rate.

John Wake is an old friend of mine and of BloodhoundBlog’s. He doesn’t address it here, but a further consequence of the rioting will be a decimation of black homeownership in the riot-wracked cities: The homes that were not destroyed are bleeding equity with every departing U-Haul van. The middle class is how we grow – as traders but also as neighbors. Strangers learn to love each other from trade – that’s how polyglot cities have always worked – but traders cultivate their neighbors by their good example. The social capital this Summer’s riots have destroyed far exceeds the physical damage.

So take just a moment, right here in the middle of the news, to reflect upon the hypocrisy of the so-called “leadership” of the so-called “real estate industry.” Redfin pimps an ugly, racist hiring preference for its Board of Directors and the grand poohbahs of the big brokerages actually promise wholesale violations of fair employment laws – all to make up for the “systemic racism” for which they are the actual and ongoing “system.” And yet, not one of them is standing up to defend the black middle class as it is being exsanguinated right before our eyes. We are “led” by scum – the sleaze Read more

Hey, big-talking big-datafied AI-enhanced machine-learning Realty.bots, give us what we really need: A neighborhood RiotScore.

If it’s not obvious, the big ugly question is my addition.

Redfin is back with new disinformation about the current national state of housing turmoil. It turns out it is not just the pandemic that has incited this frenzied reordering of housing priorities. No. Forest fires are responsible, too.

That is to say: Yet again: CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

I was snarking about yesterday’s disinfo on Facebook, thusly:

If #Redfin were of a mind to do something actually useful, this matters:

Some cities that might be considered riot-prone effected the time-honored policing strategy of taking the hotheads down fast and decisively, snuffing off the conflagration before it could start. Two I can think of are Detroit and Lancaster, PA.

My question: What is the relative difference in the riot-induced exodus in cities like that, compared to the ones which indulged their rioters?

That would be useful information – and a refreshing reconciliation with the truth. Simply classifying cities by their riot-friendliness would be a mitzvah.

And a friend popped off with this:

A riot score next to the walk score?

Bree-izz-illiant! A RiotScore is much more valuable than a WalkScore. If you’re running from trouble, how can you be sure you’re not racing from the frying pan straight into the fire?

Easy to compute. Redfin tried to pretend yesterday that that silly Red/Blue nonsense is meaningful. In fact, Blue cities (cities that are full of very red Marxists, so we lie and call them Blue) are surrounded by Blue suburbs, leading to a Blue-to-Blue exodus that is apparently confusing to people paid to be confused.

What matters more is the factor cited above: How do the local police respond to pre-riot activity? A riot is a critical mass of hotheads that is enflamed by one or more super-hotheads. Pinch off those match-heads right away and there will be no riot. Blue suburbs with reliable cops will have a very hot seller’s market. Those less vigilant will be eclipsed by Redder (less Marxist) exurbs further out.

Another obvious tell: Was the steely-eyed, up-through-the-ranks, by-the-book police chief recently replaced by a newcomer who is (check as many boxes as possible) black, hispanic, Read more

Overnight News: Riots? What riots?

“The hardest thing to know is when, precisely, to pretend not to know…”

You got news? I got news: Present company excepted, the real estate industry seems to be terrified to talk about the riots. You know, the ones roiling the never-more-local real estate markets? Evidence abounds and none dare call it by its right name. The simplest explanation to fit the facts – is the one nobody wants to talk about. Very sad.

Redfin: Hot Housing Market Spans the Political Spectrum, with Prices Up Double Digits in Blue, Red and Swing Counties. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. Red and blue is stupid. Single-family versus multi is better, with average age of the community’s housing stock perhaps being the best tell. Elderly, vertical, mortar or steel: Down. Post-war, horizontal, stick and stucco: Way up. Real estate analysis is easy. Lying about the further consequences of rioting takes work.

Jalopnik: Ahem. Moving Truck Prices In LA And San Francisco Are Skyrocketing Due To Demand.

Housing Wire: First-time homebuyer activity decreased in Q2, but there’s still plenty of buyers out there.

CNBC: Government mortgage bailout numbers improve slowly, but the real test is ahead.

Housing Wire: Builder confidence reaches 35-year high in September.

Joanne Jacobs: Paying for at-home education.

RedState.com: Emails Reveal Nashville City Government Hid COVID-19 Info from Public to Keep City In Lockdown.

City Journal: Problem: Overcrowding.

Watts Up With That?: Irrefutable NASA data: global fires down by 25 percent.

Reason: Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect.”

Overnight News: Redfin: “Why isn’t this historic seller’s market holding back buyers?” CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

“Prices always shoot up for no reason!”

Housing Wire: Fed says expect low rates through 2023. Much better crystal ball than the one we have…

Forbes: Will The Latest Stimulus Proposal Stop A Potential Housing Crisis In 2021?

Redfin: Home Prices Rose 11% in August—Biggest Gain in Over 6 Years.

Housing Wire: More young adults live at home now than during the Great Depression.

Forbes: Topeka, Kansas Is Looking To Lure Remote Workers With A $10,000 Incentive.

Yahoo Finance: Analyst: Neither Trump or Biden care about soaring federal debt, deficit.

City Journal: Apocalyptic rhetoric about climate change is undermining the fight for pragmatic solutions to the West’s fire crisis.

Reason: Homeschooling Hits a Tipping Point.

FEE.org: George Floyd Riots Caused Record-Setting $2 Billion in Damage, New Report Says. Here’s Why the True Cost Is Even Higher.

The Federalist: Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.

City Journal: Against Wokeness: Conservatives must understand the threat posed by critical race theory.

If you’re an ordinary salesmonster and you rook some sucker into a raw deal, you’re just a sleaze. But if you are fiduciary…

Me, this morning, at LinkedIn:

The words that are going to matter, when all this #iBuyer nonsense all blows up, are: “Agency with an interest.”

“Totally not a clown! In fact, someday soon I’ll be the guest of honor at thousands of lawsuits!”

Real estate brokers are fiduciary. They are obliged as agents to put the interests of their clients ahead of all others – including their own.

Translation: They don’t get to gull their clients to their own benefit, the way other marketers can.

iBuyer with an upgrade? iBuyer with an bridge loan? iBuyer with an upsell to a traditional listing instead?

In which of those scenarios is the iBuyer not blatantly self-dealing.

Want an easy test? Quoting me again, on a huge host of real estate agency issues: “If you have a preference, you have a problem.”

There’s the broker’s duty of supervision in there somewhere, too, but that just seems comical.

In due course, the Designated Brokers at the Realty.bots are going to look a lot like cops this Summer: Fallguys for ploddingly predatory poindexters.

None so deserving, fellas. Unlike the billionaires who made you their bitch, you know the law.

Overnight News: “Yo, incipient hermits! Who craves a mile-high skyscraper?”

“Going up?”

Big Think: Is it possible to build a mile-high skyscraper?

Housing Wire: Bought right out of a job? When one OpenDoor closes… Opendoor announces merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. in bid to go public.

Forbes: Opendoor’s Cofounder Talks Covid, Growth, And The Quest For Profits As The Company Goes Public.

Housing Wire: The words that are going to matter, when this nonsense all blows up, are: “Agency with an interest.” EasyKnock launches solution that lets homeowners lease back their home after selling.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment soars to record high, but lumber prices raise a red flag.

Housing Wire: Mortgage lending volume in 2020 likely to break records.

Connect Media: An monument to a dying industry in a dying location? Los Angeles Approves Tribune’s 56-Story DTLA Tower.

Redfin: Coastal Migrants Boost Las Vegas Home Prices, Up 8% in August, Amid High Local Unemployment Rate.

Housing Wire: Virtual notary adoption surges as businesses rush to close transactions remotely.

Forbes: Stripe Is Offering $20,000 Bonus To Employees Who Relocate To Less Expensive Cities, But It Comes With A Pay Reduction.

Housing Wire: Title insurance premiums surging during COVID-19 pandemic.

RedState.com: 5G – and 10G. Symbiotic Wireless and Wired Internet – And Their Government-Free Miracles.

The Daily Signal: Wildfires Will Get Worse Under Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Veteran Forester Says.

AIER: So You Want to Overthrow the State: Ten Questions for Aspiring Revolutionaries.

Entertainment Weekly: South Park tackling COVID-19 with its first hour-long episode. The trailer:

Overnight News: Take that, doubters! All #iBuyers ever needed to succeed was a pandemic, rioting and a buyer feeding-frenzy! Totally sustainable!

“Ya think it’s easy?”

Redfin: Everything about the iBuyers is funny, especially their Special Olympics approach to self-congratulation. Whose listings sell last and worst? But who is delighted to have had a national feeding frenzy to clear their overpriced inventories? iBuyer Activity Ground to a Halt in the Second Quarter, With Market Share Plummeting to 0.1%.

Forbes: Bubbles happen how? Mortgage Interest Rates Reach Another Record Low, Making Buyers Willing To Borrow More.

Redfin: We noted this yesterday: Who can spot the riots in recent closings? Who can anticipate the looming disaster of all the other listings, unreported here, that did not close? Home Prices Up 13%, Biggest Increase Since 2013.

CNBC: Commercial real estate community comes back from Summer vaycay to find its assets incinerated. Real estate CEO: NYC mayor must make streets safer, cleaner so people will want to return.

HousingWire: NAR: 31% of Realtors say they feel unsafe at open houses.

Reason: Who knew? There Is No Defense for Looting.

PJ Media: Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers Suggests the Civil War Has Already Begun.

And because the reincarnation of every sixties wraith is not quite 2020 enough:

BizPacReview: Killer mosquito clouds rise from swamp, descend on Louisiana livestock and drain their blood.

Overnight News: If your houses aren’t evaporating, your taxpayers are.

“What’s new, nu?”

Hoover Institution: California Businesses Leave The State By The Thousands.

Housing Wire: U.S. mortgage rates fall to all-time lows this week.

CNBC: The CDC banned evictions, but some renters are still vulnerable.

Forbes: What It Might Mean If We All Work From Home?

City Journal: What the Trump Eviction Ban Gets Wrong.

City Journal: New York City at the precipice: A Tale of Two Cities, Indeed.

CNBC: Manhattan rental market plunges, leaving 15,000 empty apartments in August.

And for hard-working grunts on the ground who have found a praxis that pays…

UPI: Virginia man buys 20 lottery tickets, wins 20 times.

Are big cities hostile to middle class values? Not to worry! Big Data will make it all worthwhile.

Imagine how cities will change after half their populations have fled.

Forbes today, and I shouldn’t pick on them. Some of their writers are interesting. Not here, though, I’m afraid.

Start wrong, stay wrong: What value has the big city provided, until now:

it has provided urban citizens with access to technology

In fact: Access to cheaper transportation of people, information and goods – most of which is now obviated by the internet – which would be the point demanding consideration.

But not here.

There are still many parts of the developed world where having a video call is difficult and starting an ecommerce business is impossible due to poor internet speeds.

And this has nothing to do with anyone reading Forbes. Got two bars on your phone? You’ve got what it takes to work from home.

Oh, but it’s not old-tech that matters. New-tech will require cities because… Why? The claims are all about economies of scale, but that’s pretty 19th-century thinking. In fact, new technology – like all innovation – goes where the money is. If the full-price early-adopters move to the exurbs, so will the people who hope to sell to them.

Am I wrong?

Take, for instance, self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles require a massive infrastructure of live data feeds from cameras, GPRS, smart devices, infrared, Bluetooth and sensors in order to ensure that a car or drone can operate safely. These data feeds are not going to exist on country lanes and byways in rural areas.

Of course, all of that is daft. You can get four bars or better from any cell carrier, anywhere rich people go. Meanwhile, escaping the glaring, blaring distractions of urbanity is a key benefit of the exodus we are seeing.

What’s the downside to remaining in the big burgs?

Those who do live in cities will see a substantial degradation of their privacy rights as surveillance becomes a way of life.

I’m pretty sure getting mugged by gangs of Grasshoppers is going to turn out to be a bigger deal. Don’t worry, though. Virtual reality will give you something else to think about, as your wounds heal.

Why are people racing Read more

My take on fintech? Who doesn’t love a better pen? But: No rainmakers, no rain.

Click to embiggen.

I got a recruitment pitch from OfferPad the other day: Be an in-house listing agent for our fallback upsell team. This is not an honor, an oddity or an error; I’m in a database, that’s all. And: Fun for me to see, but not a temptation.

They’re fools to make agents 1040 employees, rather than 1099 independent contractors. For a second reason, 1040 employees are going to be the death of all corporate entities. But the first reason is in the headline: No rainmakers, no rain.

You can see they understand this simple fact: The pay plan is commission plus a draw, the scheme all corporate sales teams use to attract and retain dedicated plodders.

But straight commission sales separates closers from losers just like that, with zero management intervention. That’s why real estate brokers like it so much.

And I think that illuminates the folly of taking fintech seriously. Who doesn’t love a better pen – but who believes a better pen will make you a better persuader? Technology solves paperwork problems very well, and I would be more impressed with technology vendors if they put more attention there. (Hint: Title and escrow: Rich, ripe, ready.) Technology addresses people problems poorly – a fact it is perpetually incapable of discovering.

Brian Brady pointed out to me that lenders live on Realtor marketing. That’s not wrong, it’s reasonable. Title, escrow, inspectors, tradesmen and home-warrantors all depend on Realtor referrals, which they can farm out only because they have already surfaced the buyer, seller or investor. You can’t buy your date a cocktail until you have a date.

So it’s the other end of the food chain that concerns me – not fintech but leadgen. Realty.bots whose sole business is to get in front of your client before you can – so they can sell access to you – are not your friends.

For what it’s worth: Of the big-name iBuyers, Zillow’s solution to abandoned shopping carts seems best. Instead of using salaried and lawsuit-curious employees to upsell more lawsuit opportunities, pitch the now-useless “leads” to starving Realtors. For 35%! Who has the Read more

Guerrilla real estate marketing for immediate results: How to be young, hungry – and compensated.

I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.

Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”

I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.

I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.

So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.

I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.

The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!

We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive Read more

The trick to pricing real estate? It ain’t comping houses…

You: “Where should I price this house?” Me: “How much are the buyers willing to pay?” You: “How am I supposed to know about the buyers?” Me: “Precisely!”

For a year-and-a-day, I was an iBuyer pricing algorithm.

When Zillow announced they were going into the cash-incineration iBuying business, I looked for opportunities to find out more. Amazingly, I lucked into a job doing CMAs for Zillow’s pioneer broker on the ground. What’s amazing? Until then, I had never done a CMA in my two-decade career as a Realtor.

I could and can price to the dollar, but I never did anything beyond reading the comps like tea leaves. Zillow was a huge gift to me that way. I got to work with appraisers, and I learned why their comp selections always look so alien to me. I did my best to teach them my way of comping, but I only made a real dent in two of them.

Their tricks were great, and I had fun playing with them. I had never in my life adjusted for anything, for one thing, but I had never ever crossed an arterial street to get a comp before, either: It was – and still is – a great big deal to get me to leave the subject property’s subdivision.

My biggest influence on them was time. Until March of this year, the price trajectory in the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun had been steady as a clock since 2014 or so. They were going back three months for comps, adjusting for time. I rocked them to a year, and I did not hesitate to go back longer than that. Better to have closer comps, adjusted, than a false confidence in more-recent but less-comparable sales.

Zillow was a hoot. The appraisers would do things I think are crazy – like comping one- to two-story homes – but Zillow’s minions would not understand why wildly divergent product lines – Ikea kitchens versus Sub-Zero kitchens, for example – cannot be compared for pricing purposes. If you’re looking for defects in any AVM, it’s there, the inability to reconcile proximate Read more

The money-making secret to real estate? Socialize the risks to the seller. The #iBuyers are just now catching that clue – ineptly, as always.

“Yes, I’m taking a cut on the sale of an asset I didn’t have to buy, first. But you are getting a real estate marketing expert you don’t even have to pay for until I’ve already delivered the goods.”

This has been a slow-rolling epiphany on the part of the iBuyers. I’ve snarked about it here and there, but that’s all, so far. I wrote a ton about iBuying last Summer, but by now it all seems quite a bit less urgent. There are a lot more of them now, for one thing, and they sell like a niche offering – Ug-buys-ugly-houses with swankier web sites. Much worse, dumbasses who already could not evaluate properties are all at sea trying to price into dizzyingly volatile, madly divergent markets. And I thought they were screwed before 2020 came along…

So what’s their solution?

Socialize the risks to the sellers, of course.

After only eight years of pissing away investor funds brokering real estate without a business model, OpenDoor has discovered real estate brokerage: I sell it but you own it, and all I get is a sales commission – and even then only if I get the property sold and the transaction closed. Sucks to be the broker? It can – if the broker sucks. But the upside is that the broker pays only his marketing costs, with the seller bearing all of the ongoing carrying costs.

I sell fast with almost no costs on my end, so this matters less to me that it might to, say, iBuyers, who have demonstrated repeatedly that they can cling to inventory long after buyer feeding frenzies have devoured everything else. Offloading months and months of carrying costs onto the seller might actually point OpenDoor to a path to profitability – someday.

In passing: OfferPad is already cross-selling traditional listings, and, of course, this has been Redfin’s iBuying pitch all along.

And that pitch is what?

“You can either sacrifice your equity for quick cash, or you can risk your time, money and equity on the MLS.”

They won’t say it that way, but that is the actual alternative being Read more

My 7 magic laws of done: How to finish the things you start – quickly, completely and with style.

Genius is fueled by midnight oil – by hours and hours of focused, solitary effort. 
 
Photo by: Raffaele Camardella

There is a book of mine that I am going to bug you to read – Nine empathies. Here’s something funny about that book:

I wrote it on a Saturday, six years ago today.

It’s not very long, only about a 90-minute read, and I only wrote about two-thirds of the revised length of the book on that Saturday. But I wrote the whole book, start to finish, with subsequent revisions all being interstitial – additions between the lines. I wrote a book that I could have shipped on Saturday, and in fact I did ship it to Amazon’s servers on Monday, long before I was all-the-way happy with it. I shipped successive revisions twice a day after that, until I called Thursday morning’s version the golden master. Then I said, “Hey look. I’m done!” – but in my mind I had been done since the day I started.

What is it that I’m telling you?

I don’t work like you. Most of the people who read me are going to be Cs or Ss in the DISC system. I’m much too wordy for my fellow Ds – and I’m only wordy because I see words as a currency, rather than as a distraction. Even so, I would much rather write a book than read one. I tend to work more outrageously even than other Ds, but my style of working is completely alien to Cs.

I wrote in ten hours what a high-C would have agonized over for ten months – or ten years. Worse, I took off with almost no plan – twelve lines of notes – knowing that I was at least two full epiphanies short of a revelation. “Welcome to Seat-Of-Our-Pants Airlines. If we can’t get you there on time – you’ll never live to tell about it.”

To say the truth, my kind of productivity annoys high-Cs, because it shouldn’t be possible to do this much this well this quickly. They are equally alien to me, in that I can’t fathom Read more