Tag: realestate

Mansion

Lawyers are upper middle class. But this lawyer grabbed the saddle horn of magnificence and hung on for dear life—until the day in 2004 when he was bucked off. There in the dust he lay, exposed—in the New Orleans Times-Picayune—for defrauding his law partners. His firm defended big companies from class-action suits. To make the kind of money he needed to live in this house, the poor guy had resorted to allegedly cutting secret deals with plaintiffs’ lawyers. He reportedly gave up his law license to avoid being formally charged. The mansion made him do it: That’s what I thought when I heard the story. As sordid as his behavior was, I’m incapable of feeling toward him anything but sympathy. He wanted this mansion, he bought this mansion, and then he discovered that the mansion owned him.

an analysis of the housing fetish, the root of all financial evil

Against HMID

by giving a tax subsidy to housing, it distorts investment decisions toward houses and away from assets like factories and equipment that are more productive at the margin.

It is nothing short of a farce that those chiefly responsible for the mortgage mess, i.e., the deadbeat borrowers themselves, have enjoyed a tax subsidy at the expense of the responsible parties (renters) who did not participate in the housing bubble.

Future Slums

The McMansion will become the new multi-family home for the poor. “What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe. There will probably be 10 people living in 1 house.”

the “suburbs == slums of the future” meme is taking hold. many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s-slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

Maricopa

They were making interest-only payments on a $210k mortgage, essentially just renting from the bank, while a comparable house down the street was on the market for $160k. Around the country people were starting to walk away from houses that were “underwater”, worth less than the mortgage, and he knew that he could easily rent a house 2x the size for 50% of what they were paying. But to him, walking away from a mortgage was unethical. “I owe the bank money. I want to make good.” For now, the couple were planning to sit tight in Maricopa until the market turned, even if it took another 5 years. Someday, they hoped, they would be able to recover what they’d lost.

portrait of a hellhole where the biggest industry is buying and selling homes

Redfin Efficiency

Redfin then refunds 66% (avg $10520) of the buy side fees back to you. Redfin buyers paid 1.015% (avg $5048) below asking price, while brokerage customers paid .087%. Adding those 2 benefits together, a home buyer will save $15568.

the fewer realtors left, the better

Fake Victims

On a personal level this is a tragedy, and there seems little doubt her agent committed fraud, but it is closer to farce. I mean, c’mon: This is someone who couldn’t speak the language, and yet got no advice when making the biggest financial decision of her life. She had to know she was taking immense financial risks (numbers are numbers, whether in Spanish or English), but did nothing to ameliorate her obvious risks, and is now being presented as a victim.

hard to be sympathetic. just like the infatuation with cars, the ‘own your home’ fetish needs to be overcome before real progress can be made.