Apropos of nothing, my favorite money pit is back on the market. For those of you who aren't as fluent in Redfin as myself, here's what you can glean with no skill whatsoever: - Listed in July 2017 for $350k, didn't sell - Price dropped $25k eleven months later, didn't sell - Price dropped $75k four months later with another realtor, didn't sell - Price dropped again with another realtor a year later (think it was $290k), didn't sell - Price dropped again, didn't sell - Turkey finally went for $245k riiiiight before things went hyperbolic with COVID So really, some schmuck (this schmuck) is asking you to pay him $750k for holding this land for eighteen months, which don't get me wrong? Happens. - BUT - The original listing from 2015, when I first started watching it (I mean, waterfront! Next to a park! $350k!), had a legit tree through one room. There was a landslide in the kitchen literally obscuring the dishwasher. Place was red-tagged hard. You can still see some of the horrorshow from the 2017 sequel. Because I watch this stuff, I was rather interested to see the house whose hillside is busily covering this property go in 2018 for about $1.2m. There was evidence that their yard had been growing... erm... smaller... but disclosure about the fact that nature was in the process of transferring topography from one parcel to another was absent from the notes. And really - there's probably $4m worth of retaining wall that needs to be built there. And it's not on the property in question, but uphill from it. If you were to find yourself a semi-talented realtor they might inform you of some of this shit. But there are more realtors than listings right now so your odds of hitting a talented one are slim. Despite that, though, this property tax suck (which is delinquent, by the way - Vlad hain't been paying on his dream house) is being listed "for sale by owner" because either (1) the ethical abyss that is the realtor's code actually has a bottom or (2) Vlad is too cheap to pay a realtor ten percent of whatever price they think you might actually get for this perpetual negative amortization scheme. The best part is simply googling the address will give you some background. The Lords’ former house was built in 1990, permits show. The construction met building codes of the day. Only later that decade did the county adopt its first rules for building near so-called critical areas, including places with high landslide risks. A previous owner applied for permits to rebuild the house after slide damage in 1998, county records show. He also obtained approval to build a large retaining wall engineered to shield the house. Convincing county planners that it’s safe to rebuild again could be tough. “If there is a fix, somebody’s going to have to be able to prove it to us,” county permitting manager Tom Rowe said. “And that’s not going to be easy to do. Bottom line.” and still, they persistedCounty planners have documented slides on the property going back two decades. They classify it as a landslide hazard area. Digital images reveal evidence of historic slides as well.
This house looks like its basement has a second secret basement with dirt floors and missing children. This house looks like the original owner's mutant son, Cyrus, has been living here eating rats to survive for 25 years after murdering his family. This house looks like where the girl from the grudge spent her semester abroad. This house looks like it gained sentience after the groundskeeper had his still-beating heart interred into the foundation during a satanic ritual. This house looks like a careful scientific analysis would reveal the drywall to be made of powdered human bones and the popcorn ceilings made of mysteriously preserved ground meat of dubious origins. If someone gave me an unlimited budget and six months, I still don't think I could make a house look this murdery.
I'm kind of just like...inflation...is this inflation? Have we QE'd our way into inflation and are we beginning a spiral into 5%-7%+ increase in...everything...let alone on top of the craziness that's been housing for years now.
If I were in charge of this mess? I'd inflate the shit out of everything. It makes foreign goods more expensive, thus bringing American jobs back. It rewards savers because all of a sudden interest rates make you money. It likely pushes healthcare past the breaking point, so you basically push your pandemic medicaid plans forward and open it up to anyone. Wage pressures give you all the cover you could want to raise minimum wage and you can tie childcare, healthcare and other living incentives to inflation, which makes them centralized, which robs Republican governors of their power. And I'd do all this because I know that the Democratic house races aren't really going to have to deal with inflation because they're not seen as having any power, and the four year runway I'm looking at means by the time I face any referendum on it, housing prices have been controlled by interest rates and wages are gonna be up. Housing is deeply artificial at the moment. I think it's gonna crash like a ton of bricks, based simply on the fundamentals that are currently awash in PUA money. But we'll see.
I actually agree with you I’d probably do the same thing. Inflation cleans up balance sheets and It’s the only way to get effective out from this crazy debt load. As a Democrat you want inflation it’s good for labor, and it gets you out of pension pit that you can’t pay. 5% is probably not quite enough you probably need 7% and interest rates to match. The current dislocation is terrible though the longer it lasts the more rich folks get assets at 1% that will inflate up at 7% making Crazy profit.
If by "wages" you mean "buying power" then yeah - it's a real problem. But there are a couple chunks on the soccer ball below that Canadians have a different relationship with: "Healthcare, personal insurance and pensions" are 20%. The Biden administration is already front-loading childcare tax credits into payments. That costs them nothing, but makes it look like the government is giving them money. They decide to do the same with insurance (which will raise inflation more) and suddenly yeah, prices are going up but the democrats are giving them money.* "Money" or "Covid." Which do you choose? There will definitely be outliers but the Dems have a rhetorical advantage here.