There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 1 of 30)

Making the case for my manumission – and yours? – from the #NAR.

We all have the right to be free from our pimp in Chicago.

As mentioned, I am striving to extricate myself from the National Association of Realtors.

It’s the speech code that’s put me off the reservation. Until lately the NAR has been a nuisance to me, but now it is an active menace. I would abhor thought police even if they were not targeted at my kind of thinking.

But: Not as easy as I had hoped. I had thought our MLS could dance without its pimp in Chicago, but it cannot, at least for now.

Accordingly, I have asked for ARMLS, the Phoenix Association of Realtors and the Arizona Association of Realtors to create a new product category for me and other agents who understand economics and/or don’t want the NAR threatening their careers.

Here is the bulk of my missive, and feel free to borrow text at will, if you want to make a similar appeal of your own associations:

I will need for ARMLS, the PAR and the AAR to build a parallel product for me. I like ARMLS and the AAR forms library and wish to keep them, but I do not want to pay any of my money or to lend any of my moral support to any political or ideological organization.

This is the logic behind the right-to-work laws, and it seems reasonable to me that you should already have done this. I expect many agents will join me in this product category, once it is available.

You are perfectly free to attend the church of your choice, but there is nothing of justice in forbidding any American his own beliefs and forcing yours upon him.

I’m asking all of you, collectively, to stop doing that.

This is a completely satisfactory solution for me. I want to work with your de facto monopoly businesses, but I don’t wish to be compelled to go to your church.

Can I be free of you amicably?

Thanks for your thoughtful consideration,

Greg Swann
Designated Broker
BloodhoundRealty.com

No rational man believes in luck as a cause, and yet fortune favors the well-prepared mind. Comes today news of the massive Department of Read more

Overnight News: Three ways to be counter-culture in today’s world: 1. Work for a living. 2. Work weekends. 3. Vote like Johnny Rotten.

Ya think it's easy?

“If you’re not committed 24/7, you might as well just take a nap.”

Typical weekend news drought. You’ve got time to read, they’ve got time to vay-cay.

Forbes: Housing Prices Aren’t Coming Down According To Realtor.com. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. The national news is so good, the local news cannot possibly be bad… right…?

Fox News: San Francisco tax revenue plunge points to resident exodus. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. How long will it take for rioter-friendly cities to realize what they have done?

New York Post: Stealing Soho: Luxury retailers terrorized by shoplifting mobs.

Tablet: Left Fascism.

Breitbart: Sex Pistols Front Man Johnny Rotten: ‘Of Course I’m Voting For Trump.’

“Apparently, Opendoor and Zillow and Knock and Flyhomes and Offerpad have been wasting hundreds of millions on all those data scientists and CompSci Ph.D.’s from Stanford.” –Rob Hahn

That sounds right to me. 😉 The waste is not their salaries but the financial havoc they wreak as the very-most-backseat of drivers. That is to say, iBuyers suck at real estate investment, and their hubris prevents any sort of improvement.

“Are YOU notorious? Have you ever BEEN notorious? Well, I have… Not necessarily wise – but compensated.”

Yes, I’m Trump-quoting real-estate consultant The Notorious Rob for fun in the headline, just like the TV “news” does.

But: It turns out Eric Blackwell knows where to poke the Pooh bear’s mincing minions.

My experiences with Rob Hahn have not been pleasant, and this and his other posts are tl;dr, even assuming he knows anything worth reading about, an assumption I do not make.

What’s funny is that Señor Notorious is right here, despite his snark: As soon as the market turns, all of those poindexter models collapse.

And note well: There is ALWAYS something to howl about at BloodhoundBlog.

Overnight News: “Systemic racism” in real estate? Demand specifics.

“My dying wish? Not to be dead. That won’t work, either.”

Is no news good news? It seems there is no real estate news, nor any other kind of news except Supreme Court news.

The Washington Examiner: Racist? Under Trump, black people and Hispanics join suburbs and home ownership up.

National Review: Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.

Townhall: How Woke CEOs Traded Our Future For BLM Approval.

City Journal: Show Us Your Systemic Racism, Princeton.

Those four stories together suggest a strategy: Until this weekend, since George Floyd was canonized, half of all real estate news has consisted of over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats insisting that real estate is systemically racist – both the buying, selling and hypothecation of homes and the management of the brokerages and lenders.

Is that so? Demand specifics.

Demand that they back up their bullshit claims. We know they are lying on the transactions side: The fines are huge but they are almost never collected. Regardless, self-identified violators are required by law to document their violations – if any – to regulators. How many bellowing grand poohbahs have self-reported their purported fair-housing infractions?

If they are not lying about their own personnel management, why haven’t they resigned? If there is “systemic racism” in real estate management, the problem would be “the system” – the very over-paid, over-fragranced corporate fatcats making the specious claims.

Demand specifics – and assume the worst about anyone who will not provide them.

Daily Mail: UK, that is, where they know how to pack up a headline. Trump’s Supreme Court frontrunners: A mother of seven who adopted two children from Haiti and belongs to a Christian sect that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale – and a Cuban American whose father was stopped from becoming a lawyer by Castro.

Breitbart.com: Nolte: Passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Permanently Resets 2020 Election.

Daily Wire: ‘Evil Is Real’: North Carolina Police Officer Pens Heartfelt Resignation Letter To Community Amid ‘Unprecedented’ Exodus From Force.

City Journal: Heiresses on the Barricades.

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.

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.

My 9/11 prayer…

[This is me – Greg – fourteen years ago, when this blog was still a mewling baby. It astounds me to think that the children who were pre-conceptual on 9/11 – aged 0 to 5 – are now the jihadis attempting to destroy Western Civilization from within. We need to do a lot better…]
 

Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex.

I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and Read more

When the punters come out to play, are they tugging a real estate bubble behind them?

Q: Why is it so hard to buy at the top?
A: That’s how you know it’s the top.

Who’s listing actual fee-simple dirt? Could life get any better? Representing hypothetical cubes of air-space amidst spookily-vacant concrete canyons? Not so much.

I just heard that J.P. Morgan is calling its people back to the office, so maybe vertical cities are not dead yet. My bet runs the other way, and, doubling-down, that employers incur liability by requiring attendance in dangerous locales.

Cinemas and shopping malls were dying, anyway. So, too, cities? A way of thinking of this urban exodus is simply as a matter of economic obsolescence: What is generally the oldest and most decrepit segment of the housing stock is being abandoned.

That pushes up prices in the suburbs, don’t it? “Gimme land, lotsa land, under smoggy skies above – and don’t dance so close to me!”

I thought we were pushing the top of this market turn before Coronavirus hit. That foreign import was killing big cities even before the rioters started burning them down. Accordingly, there won’t be a top in Phoenix for a while, where March of 2020 may be the high-water mark for decades for many great American cities.

But the thing about market tops is, they advertise themselves: Rapid price jumps, low inventory, bidding wars, waived contingencies, escalator clauses, solemn pre-dawn ungulate sacrifices, etc.

Again, not there, but very much here – and everywhere suburban parcels abound.

Here’s another characteristic of market tops, one we were all very well paid to overlook in the housing bubble of this century’s toddler years:

The real estate market tops when even the most marginally-prepared borrowers compete for and get mortgages.

What’s a bubble? It’s when the bike messengers and coffee shop waitresses come down to Wall Street with their mattress money. Wait, that’s a dated image. How about this? A bubble is when lifelong renters become very temporary homeowners. No, that was the last time. Try this: A bubble is when forty-year-old adolescents emerge from mom’s basement just long enough to sign socially-distanced closing docs in a title company’s parking lot.

My point would be that, Read more

Unchained Melody: The DISC of “Darling Be Home Soon.”

The original is pure Di, as are the lyrics: Busy musician home briefly imposes ardent deadlines. It’s truly great that way, an abrupt and demanding lust, and the sheer urgency rends fabric. Artie Schroeck did the original arrangements – and he’s there in all the covers.

Joe Cocker takes and remakes the song – just like always – turning it into the Si viscera of wide-open yearning.

Susan Tedeschi delivers the Joe Cocker vocal performance, but it is Derek Trucks who shows us how Cs the love in that lyric can be.

“We are easy prey” – Propositions Three and Seven by Richard Mitchell

Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell

 
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It’s only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called “education.“

Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures, institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival, Read more

Splendor on – and in spite of – Labor Day.

Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence – and violence. Photo by: Karen Horton

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there was years before that. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now – more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own – to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger – over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded Read more

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

Which way, dawgs? There are growth paths from here, but they require effort.

“Got content?”

We added a contributor today, for the first time in what must be a decade. I’ll brag about that more when there is more to brag about, but this much matters: BloodhoundBlog is back.

Sort of. It’s back for me – and I was away for long enough to have managed to miss it. I’m having fun writing a lot, which is what blogging is – writing a lot – and I’m delighting in that playfully-informal blogger’s voice. It’s back for Brian Brady, too, and he can tell you which stars he is shooting for himself. And it’s back for people who have been asking to hear from us for a long time.

We could hear more from the latter folks in the comments. It’s challenging to shop into the echoes of a seemingly empty shopping mall, but there are a bunch of shoppers here – y’all are just too shy.

Here’s where I am: Social Media Marketing and social-media sociability are splitting up. Speaking your mind on social media sites is bad for business and is likely to cost you your marketing investment on that site if you get banned. Meanwhile, being able to speak freely in purely-sociable online settings will become more and more a walled-garden phenomenon. This is already so for the many thousands of folks who socialize with like-minded folks by way of forum software running on hundreds of little web sites.

So I need to get out of Dodge, at a minimum, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are there enough of us to sustain a community? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, there are lots of ways for this place to grow. There are no more real estate weblogs, for one thing – not in our world, defending the grunts on the ground from the parasites who prey on them. Nothing left of real estate bloggers talking to real estate bloggers, but really nothing left of blogging directed at Realtors and lenders that is not itself predatory – monthly subscriptions, sales training, books-’n’-tapes. If I’m wrong about this, I’m very interested in links.

But from our end of Read more

Torn from today’s headlines? Here there be monsters – everywhere! – but why?

“It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy. Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.”

I swear I have sound reasons for talking about Nine Empathies – specifically the idea of an empathy for the transaction, which could not be closer to any closer’s heart. But today I read Chapter 8 – Empathy for the monster – and it whispered to me in ominous tones. I’ve documented the origins of human character, but this as close as I have come to explicating the monstrous malice we are seeing everywhere just now.

tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:

The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.

This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.

Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:

Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is Read more