There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 1 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

I never lose.

It’s no secret that I am a Tom Brady fan. I admire him because of his commitment to excellence and because he competes hard. His off-field conditioning is maniacal but, at 45 years old, he has taught the next generation of NFL greats that self-care is what leads to longevity in the highly physical game of professional football.   Brady prepares the way he does to win, and Brady wins.

As much as Brady wins, like it or not, not winning is a part of competing.  He said as much yesterday, on his podcast:

“It’s interesting because you would think, ‘Oh, well, why is he still playing?’ Because all you want to do is win, and that’s all sports should be about is winning. And I agree it should be about winning, but it’s also, I’m looking at it like, no, what am I learning? What am I learning from putting a similar amount of energy in over the last couple years and not winning? What is that teaching me?” Brady said Monday on his SiriusXM podcast, “Let’s Go!”

This was the money line:

“You know, why should we feel like we’re just entitled to win all the time? We’re not. That’s not what life’s about.”

I know you have heard this Nelson Mandela quote, “I never lose; I either win or learn”.  It may be trite but it’s true.  Don’t use the word “lose”, ever again, when talking about business opportunities.

I have been self-employed or selling on commission since 1992.  I am not kidding when I say that, in the past 30 years, I have never received a biweekly or monthly paycheck.  I have been issued 1099 forms, each January, since 1997.  It hasn’t always been easy but I have paid health insurance, paid car insurance, sent my daughter to private schools from Kindergarten through her senior year in college, and maintained two houses:  one in San Diego and one in my present state of residence, Florida. I am bragging a bit but I am bragging to illustrate this point;

I don’t always win.

In fact, I win less engagements than I don’t win but, whether I win or Read more

Overnight News: Big moment, duh or doofus, you decide: The purpose of the virus is the vaccine.

Ya think it's easy?

“Don’t even try to tell me what doctors won’t do!”

Who doesn’t have questions about this year? Accident of nature or lab accident? Lab accident or bio-warfare? Aimed at Trump? Aimed at all of America? Or: Aimed at all of human fertility?

I’ve feared the last from the first, but that’s the kind of guy I am.

It’s obvious that Ci can’t win. Ideals are transmitted by fathers, and modern Ci, atheistic Ci, technocratic Ci, Marxist and/or libertarian Ci are all underfathered underfathering underfatherers: Hysterically opposed to the only means by which their ideas can survive in an hysterically underfathered culture.

Ci can’t win, but all of humanity can still lose. Many stories of ugly sociopathy linked below, so don’t tell me this is beyond evil’s reach.

CNBC: The CDC banned evictions. Tens of thousands have still occurred.

CNBC: Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told friends and associates he plans to move to Texas. Why not Arizona? We just passed success tax. No successful person will ever move here again.

Human Events: The Plot Against the Small Businesses. How pandemic policy has benefited the corporate elite.

American Association of Physicians and Surgeons: FDA Bureaucrat Brags He Blocked Physician Prescribing of Hydroxychloroquine in Early COVID-19.

David Marcus: Nancy Pelosi Let Millions Suffer To Win An Election.

Rolling Stone: Why Are Fewer Women Than Men Planning to Get a Covid-19 Vaccine?

Andrea Widburg: Democrats’ defense of Georgia election fraud video doesn’t hold water.

American Greatness: The Prima Facie Case for Fraud.

American Thinker: When does a conspiracy theory become a conspiracy?

American Greatness: The Stupid Party Redux.

Overnight News: Q: What are we having for Thanksgiving? A: Redpills. All you can handle.

Ya think it's easy?

“Leftovers? The real Thanksgiving action is dropunders – and that starts today!”

America is in rebellion for Thanksgiving, and that is a wonderful thing to behold. We muck up Thanksgiving with stories about benevolent aboriginals and malevolent proto-Marxists, but the Pilgrims who celebrated our first Thanksgiving were religious rebels – and by their uninterrupted actions they founded a nation of rebels-of-conscience. Tomorrow we celebrate their independence – and ours – from all compulsory creeds.

CNBC: Home prices see biggest spike in 6 years in September, according to S&P Case Shiller. Guess who leads the parade? I have a seller delaying by a month, and that month may pay him $10,000.

Housing Wire: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac conforming loan limits increase for 2021.

CNBC: Another record low mortgage rate just caused demand to jump for both refinances and home purchases.

Tyler O’Neil: EXPLOSIVE Study: Media Suppression of 8 Key Stories ‘Stole This Election’ for Joe Biden.

PJ Media: Over 53 Million Trump Voters Don’t Believe Biden Legitimately Won the Election.

Frontpage Mag: Why Trump Will Win.

Rod Dreher: Jordan Peterson Vs. Crybaby Stalinists.

Issues and Insights: America Is Over. It’s Time To Opt Out.

The Federalist: On Thanksgiving, Democrats Demand The Ultimate Family Separation Policy.

I am the applecart. How do you propose to motivate me?

Here today. Gone tomorrow?

I have a brand new business idea.

At first glance, you might call it lead-gen, except that I hate that kind of wheel-spinning. What nerds call leads, I call inquiries – and the difference between inquiries and crap is that nobody wastes that kind of time on crap.

Instead, as I have discussed, I am interested in in-real-life marketing strategies, this as a way of neutralizing the Realty.bots where they are worst – at Sociability.

So what I have is a way of creating a warm network of around 200 people interested in self-improvement, each deploying their varied talents to engender a self-amplifying mutual-improvement machine. Generates listings for me – from people already sold on me – but it generates opportunities for everyone involved.

Even better, it’s totally replicable: There’s room for a group like this every three miles on every freeway in every city in North America. We spend all our time looking for better people, when, instead, we should be cultivating better people – starting from the inside out. Eminently doable – and there’s work in it for everyone.

There’s a hitch, for now: What I am talking about is inescapably social in a world in quarantine. I had all this worked out when Coronavirus came to call. But this is temporary, and we all know it. When I’m ready to jump, the people I want to meet will be ready to jump, too.

The bigger question would be: Why should I?

I am the applecart. In my head are the means to create jobs in my own business while encouraging the creation of jobs in many other businesses.

Why should I bother?

So you know, for now I am not bothering. We haven’t marketed for new business in ten years, and I am not committing to anything new between now and the election. If Trump wins, I’ve got twenty years of growth to plan for. If Biden wins, my applecart will very quickly come to resemble an armadillo.

Yours, too, I should expect.

Profit is faith and follow-through – not faith in the magical but simply an unwavering belief that the follow-through Read more

Overnight News: Has Joe Biden frolicked things up just in time?

Ya think it's easy?

“What do you know for sure when a rumpled old man says, ‘You don’t deserve to know if I have treats in my pocket!’ And who is going to clean up all this drool?”

Speaking of Joe Biden, Barack Obama said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [frolic] things up.”

Saturday, I said: “I desperately wanted for this election to be about Marxism: ‘You’re what’s for dinner!™’ Biden wanted for this election to be about Trump. Biden won.”

Guess what? Obama was right: Just two short days later, Biden has managed to make the election about radicalism, at a minimum.

We’ll see how that plays out, but, meanwhile, not much else is news:

Zero Hedge: These Are The US Cities Where Workers Make The Most Relative To Their Cost-Of-Living. Fun take, but why assume work-from-homers will remain in American? Why assume they will even be Americans, in due course?

Forbes: Is Florida The Likeliest To Rebound First From COVID? If only Arizona had a governor like DeSantis…

New York Post: ‘Ghost town’: In-person attendance dwindles at NYC schools. Assuming we do not vote to become North Venezuela, a signal unforced error for Marxism will turn out to be letting up on the stranglehold they have on America’s children. Children can’t get Coronavirus, but some of them are learning to read for a change. Readers are rebels. Ask me how I know.

National Review: If Biden were a Republican.

Issues and Insights: Beyond Court Packing: Here’s How Dems Plan To Create A One-Party State.

Salena Zito: No matter who wins, there is no exit from the roller coaster anytime soon.

Joel Kotkin: Will the Cultural Revolution Be Canceled? The challenge to our civilization is real, but most Americans aren’t sympathetic to social radicalism. I believe no one who worked for what he has wants to see it destroyed. But as everyone in real estate can tell you, a backward-looking approach only gets you so far…

This election is not about Trump, Biden, court-packing, nit-picking or any other media-borne nitwittery. It’s about Marxism and its zeal to extinguish human liberty. First we must renounce the Marxists, but then we must also purge them from Read more

Listing Clinic: How I list and sell for top dollar in under seven days-on-market.

There is a better way to list – and I have the stats to prove it.

My listing stats are off-the-scale excellent, stipulating that I’m working for now from a very small sampling. Everybody’s stats are like mine, just now, in this buying frenzy, but my next closing should improve my numbers, anyway: Four days on market, $10,000 over list, all cash.

I happily tell the world what I do – and no one does any of it. Fine with me. I work for my clients, not yours.

Consumers: I work in the West Valley in Metro Phoenix, but if you live somewhere else, find a listing agent with stats like mine.

Howling about the Positive

One of the things that I found most appealing about long form blogging back in the day was the ability to tell full stories, to create complete word pictures, and to convey complete concepts. In a world of sound bites, click bait titles, twitter feeds and short attention span theatre, the idea of writing in paragraphs was (and is) quite appealling. In the 8 years since I have regularly written on the blog, that has not changed.

I still enjoy it immensely.

But other things have changed. While I can (and do) still mix it up with people when needed, I have found that I enjoy now more than ever seeking out examples of the BEST in the real estate industry as opposed to examples of what NOT to do. In short, there is no shortage of the negative; no shortage of opinions and criticism. What there is a shortage of is uplift and positivity. It is a good thing to point out the positive of main street, rather than only focusing on the battles with wall street. So I am going to try to write the positive that is so scarce vs the negative that is so prevalent.

I am going to be posting weekly about people from around the world of real estate. Friends of mine. People who attack the business from all different sorts of angles. These will all be main street types. People who are on the street selling. People who have overcome obstacles. People who serve their clients and differentiate based on value instead of just price. People from whom you can draw some inspiration.

Come back each Saturday morning. (Yes. I am giving you a time so that I force myself to hit the PUBLISH button.) Want a taste of what is to come?

Great. Here goes.

Right about the time that I was leaving California (over 20 years ago now) to move to Indiana another family was immigrating to the United States and specifically to the East Bay. Rama and Sunil have lived the American dream in an amazing way. Rama became a REALTOR and they have built their business Read more

“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: Only three Nobel Peace Prize nominations. Worst. President. Ever.

Ya think it's easy?

“Totally not funny: How do city dogs go for walks on all the broken glass?”

Looking for a very big October Surprise? I’ve got the overs on a denuclearized North Korea.

CNBC: Home prices rose 4.8% in July, according to Case-Shiller index. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found. But: Phoenix up 9.2%!

Forbes: Barclays: The End Of The City Is An Urban Myth. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Housing Wire: New home sales hot but not bubbly. CTRL-F ‘riot’; not found.

Forbes: Mortgage Interest Rates Barely Move Above Lowest Levels On Record.

CNBC: Companies will have to ‘seduce’ staff to go back to the office, real estate CEO says.

Forbes: Is Working For Home Here To Stay?

Joel Kotkin: Americans Won’t Live in the Pod.

American Greatness: The Third Worlding of America.

City Journal: The Substack Superstar System.

Monster Hater Nation: No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work. – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron.

The Federalist: The Left Hates Amy Coney Barrett Because She Disproves All Their Lies About Women.

City Journal: Pouring on the Gasoline.

Sky News: The ‘Trump Doctrine’ earns President third Nobel Peace Prize nomination. What a shame foreign policy won’t be discussed in tonight’s debate.

Husbandry is stewardship first. Are there no more good stewards in America’s economy?

“The simple fact is that you eat better if you work better, even if you are all alone.”

“Under all is the land.”

So says the preamble to the NAR Code of Ethics, and I love those five words of it, at an absolute minimum.

It’s existentially true, obviously. I love the term for real estate in español for that reason – bienes raices, rooted things. So many contract disputes resolved with better word choices!

But the real truth of that observation is economic: Underneath all of the fake wealth of Wall Street securities is the real wealth of real estate.

Silicon Valley billionaires may not own a lot of dirt, but their investors do. Undergirding most mere millionaires, other than their own businesses, is a portfolio of commercial and residential real estate – three or four suburban tract homes, a triple-net drug store or two, strip malls, office parks, apartment communities, skyscrapers. If they don’t own the dirt themselves, their own investors or their REITs do.

The literal foundation all wealth is the land.

Hence: Husbandry of all wealth begins with husbandry of the land we are destined to live on.

This is the idea of stewardship, and it is the essence of the profit-seeking ideal: Better profits come from better stewardship. That much is an economics of isolation: No need for buyers, sellers, trade, currencies or even the idea of profit itself. The simple fact is that you eat better if you work better, even if you are all alone.

So I have some questions for the putative, would-be, wannabe stewards of the American economy. You can pick your own favorite corporate gnomes, but I am specifically highlighting Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Rich Barton of Zillow and Glenn Kelman of Redfin – them because they seem to me to be the worst possible stewards for Seattle, the city they have inflicted themselves on.

So first we note that corporate weenies of every pinstripe have denounced the “systemic racism” committed by everyone around them but themselves.

And we take account that many of them have promised flagrant violations of fair-employment laws to undo all the “systemic racism” Read more

My experiences with actual – not imagined – racism in real estate.

“I’ve had better haircuts, but never cheaper or faster…”

That’s me to the right, a certified selfie with today’s hair and today’s shave. I am my own barber, in the age of the Coronavirus, and I am delighted to say that I’m improving faster than I expected. A year from now I could be as good as awful or even barely-adequate.

But: I have been a Realtor for nearly twenty years, a broker/owner for fifteen. I have sold a few hundred homes and overseen or advised on the sale of hundreds of others. I have met with or spoken to thousands of customers, making hundreds of them my clients or tenants to the rental homes we manage. I am my only agent for now – I sub out anything that does not require a license – but, with my wife Cathleen on board or without her, we have always been scrupulous about fairness – not just fair-housing but fair-dealing as such. I hate predators. I never want to be one.

So what is my experience of actual, specific, objectively-real racism in real estate?

I once had an out-of-town investor in my car who said things I considered red flags, so I drove him back to his hotel. This is the same thing I do with irrationally optimistic investors – except I’ve met dozens of them.

Want more? When I first started, working as an apartment locator, I had a very racist elderly black woman as a client, but I just laughed at the things she said – and in the end she found a new place without me.

I have one more: We used to use a centrally-located Fidelity office for most of our title work. In those days, that was the “Spanish” office, the one where all deals that were to close in Spanish were sent. Over the years, I saw several contracts fall apart on Friday afternoons, with the whole family coming down to sign, only to find out that no one, until then, had told them what their monthly payment would be and how much cash they needed to close. Not 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

How do you beat the Realty.bots? The 3 key weapons of the Guerrilla Bloodhound: Brick and mortar, ink and paper – and flesh and blood.

“I wasn’t always a Realty.bot. I used to drive a driverless-Uber. Hardly ever hit anyone.”

I spent an hour on the phone with Brian Brady yesterday, always a tonic for my spirit. We are both of us guerrillas, both counter-marketers, always looking for ways to use the enemy’s strengths against him.

When we first met, Brian was using the internet to take business away from white shoe lenders and I was using it to scare up clients who wanted to avoid the sleaze of the supermarket-magazine-advertising Realtors.

That is to say, we were using the internet as guerrilla marketers against competitors who were not – or who were not any good at it, anyway.

How now, russet Bloodhounds?

The opposite, yes? Now our most-threatening competition is very adept at marketing by internet.

The Guerrilla Bloodhound’s response: The three ideas in the headline can be subsumed by one idea: In Real Life. And that notion is best understood in longtime BloodhoundBlog contributor Jeff Brown’s formulation: Belly-to-belly.

Be here now? You’ve got it, they don’t. Your best marketing advantage, by now, is that you are not on the internet, that you are present in real life and can address the issues paperwork exists to paper over.

Until they burn up all the excess wealth fools accord them, the Realty.bots will take as much business as they can from Driven and Cautious principals. The former value time over money, while the latter seem to think computers can’t cheat. Those folks may not be completely gone from your life, but they are all of online-shopping’s target market. Your value propositions and their values are a poor match, going forward.

The Incandescents will always be represented. If you’re good at selling luxury, historic, architectural or other jewelry-box homes, your world is secure. Bots can’t do what you do as a real estate analyst, but they can’t even touch what you do as showmanship.

And that leaves the Sociables, who are wise to wonder – continuously! – if they are being taken. They are yours and you are theirs because they do not trust a transaction this huge to what might as well Read more

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: Entropy’s vengeance.

“Nihil nichts, no?”

Chicago Tribune: The alarming downward spiral of downtown Chicago. Is a comeback possible?

Daily Mail: More people are leaving California than ever before, driven out by worsening wildfires, politics and the skyrocketing cost of living.

RedState.com: A Most American City Becoming Increasingly Unlivable.

The Federalist: What Life Is Like In California’s Post-Apocalyptic Landscape.

City Journal: Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society.

Daily Caller: Wildfires Will Become Worse Thanks To Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Says Fire Expert Who Predicted Uptick In Blazes.

Good grief!

Who needs a palate cleanser, some good old fashioned smoke-blowing?

Forbes: 14 Home Upgrades That Will Boost Property Value. Voiceover: “Your mileage may vary.”

What’s the good news, for Monday? Everywhere things aren’t awful, they’re great. Get thee hence and make the most of it!