Tag: realestate

Advice for real estate agents

I had the good fortune to speak to a large gathering of real estate agents last week. Here’s my best advice (everyone knows an agent or 2, so feel free to forward this along). Plan A: You should quit selling real estate. I’m serious. Quit being an agent. Get a job doing something else. Some of you have been waiting to hear that. My pleasure. … Now, if you’re still with me, you’ll be glad to know that the competition for attention just got smaller. The agents who built their business on low interest rates, easy money and speculation (the order takers) have left the building. The ones that are left, that’s you, can consider Plan B: If you’re not going to be able to make a living by taking orders, by selling houses the way everyone else does, by using the never-ending rise in real estate prices to make sales, then what are you going to do? Whining is not an option.

seth is trying too hard for plan b. there is no plan b, this is fundamentally a dumb occupation that needs to die

Neighborhood Boundaries

The Zillow data team has created a database of 7000 neighborhood boundaries in the largest cities in the US And we’d like to share them with you! We’re sharing these neighborhoods under a Creative Commons license to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database.

nice. i wonder how accurate?

Realestate Skills

One problem for out-of-work real estate agents is that their skills may not transfer easily to other careers.

skills? what skills?

NAR Lies

December 4, 2006: Pending Home Sales Tumble
NAR: “It’s important to focus on where the housing market is now – it appears to be stabilizing, and comparisons with an unsustainable boom mask the fact that home sales remain historically high – they’ll stay that way through 2007.”

October 10, 2007: Realtors group lowers sales forecast
NAR: “The speculative excesses have been removed from the market and home sales are returning to fundamentally healthy levels.”

November 15, 2007: Realtors revise home sales forecast lower again
NAR: “It is possible for even higher home sales activity than we’re forecasting if buyers regain their confidence.”

the best outcome of the recession is if these guys go under.

US recession

real estate values have already lost $1T. That could increase 3x over the next few years.

painful lessons are needed to get over the easy credit culture and the home ownership fetish.

Against Realestate bailouts

We, the undersigned economists, write to strongly advise against excessive new regulations or federal interventions as a response to current trends in the housing market. Market corrections have already begun, with financial institutions writing down bad debts and adopting new lending standards to avoid future foreclosures. Legislation to create new underwriting standards will reduce competition and restrict consumer access to credit. Additionally, efforts to bail out or shore up lending institutions create a moral hazard that would slow the adjustments required in the marketplace.

figures. the whole home ownership scam is a moral hazard in the first place. an easy way to cut massive amounts of money from the federal budget. these investments perpetuate detroit-style misinvestments by spreading people out.

The government’s existing real estate programs also create barriers to change in market demand, particularly when it comes to newer mixed-use developments (developers, for instance, seeking an FHA loan for mixed-use properties must limit the share of commercial space to qualify).

Smart Growth America isn’t suggesting that the federal government get out of real estate all together. The criticism isn’t that Uncle Sam intervenes, but that he intervenes ineffectively. “Are we really achieving what we want? And do we even know what we want to achieve?”

Church Recycling

A bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht has won an architectural interiors prize.

good use of all those empty churches. we could use that in nyc where space is tight

2011-09-09: “Clients are turning pulpits into kitchen islands” and “There is an enormous glut of vintage pieces on the market and prices are falling” due to lots of churches closing.

Bank Regulation

In the wake of subprime losses we are hearing claims that the United States should have regulated its banks more. It is worth pointing out that the US has some of the most heavily regulated banks in the world. It is plausible to argue that the United States should have fewer bank regulators (I’ll nominate the Fed for the main role), but that consolidation should be accompanied by greater efficacy of regulation. In the meantime there are too many regulatory authorities, and too many regulations. We have completely blurred lines of accountability, legal, political, economic, and otherwise.

the real problem is a culture that fetishises home ownership.

Travelodge living

For most of us who visit a Travelodge, it is a fleeting pleasure. Park the car, go to bed and get away as early as possible in the morning. But for David and Jean Davidson, it is home. They arrived in 1985, and enjoyed it so much that they never left. Even when the couple crossed the Atlantic for a 3-week holiday in Savannah, Georgia, they booked into a Travelodge.

Energy shaming

The city council of Haringey in the UK hired a spy plane to fly overhead and identify which households are wasting the most energy — to try and shame them into turning their heat down

this is news? they did that in zurich in the early nineties. they need to do this kind of public shaming in the us, where houses are shoddily built and leaking like sieves.