And again on overpricing

180 Round Hill Road, a 1900 house on 1 acre in the R-2 zone, was brought on the market in 2005 by our queen of overpricing at $5.250 million. It failed to sell —duh, and it steadily dropped in price as it aged on the market and acquired that dreaded patina of old listings: “if no one else wants this, why should I?”.

I haven’t checked the court record, but it appears that the owner finally surrendered it to his lender, who put it back on the market two days ago for $1.750 million. I didn’t see it yesterday, but Gideon reports that it was the buzz of the realtor circle, the price-to-value ratio sufficient to cause brokers to call their clients and tell them, “you cannot wait til the weekend, you have to come see this now”. Gid estimates it will go for $500,000 over ask, Jonathan Wilcox thinks $300,000. Either way, it’ll be gone in 60 seconds.

The frustrating thing about wildly overpriced homes, for agents, is that we often have clients looking for exactly that home and location, but not at that price; I certainly wasn’t the only one who had $3-$3.5 buyers back then who wouldn’t approach this house when it was $5.2 (nor would I let them). It’s a really nice home, and could have commanded a good price, but instead, the owner got nothing.

Sad.

Over and under pricing

Right after brother Gideon opined on the subject on his WGCH radio show this morning (10-11 on Wednesdays, co-host Jonathan Wilcox, available via Alexa), comes news that 556 Riversville Road, listed at $3.295 million, sold in 12 days for $3.705. You can’t underprice a house, but you can certainly overprice it, and get slammed. Back in 2008 this house was grossly overpriced at $5.295 and eventually sold for $3.2.

Don’t do that.

We can't say they didn't warn us

Just pretend I was never here

Slo Joe joins VP in referring to the upcoming “Harris-Biden administration”.

According to numerous polls no one, Democrat, Republican or Independent expects Joe to serve out his term. And now it turns out that Joe don’t either,

Cat Rock contract

2 Holly Way, $2.249 million, is under contract. A sort of preposterous explosion of a 1960s home, these owners paid $3.399 for it in 2007 after it had been marked down from $4.5, which is why one should never look to an original price to calculate value.

That said, if the final sales price comes in under $2, probably not bad.

I'm so old, I remember when Columbia University students questioned authority

(My favorite quote from a 1968 Columbia “revolutionary”, given to the NYT: “You don’t know what Hell is until you’ve been raised in Scarsdale”.

Columbia University band “enthusiastically” dissolves after realizing that it is racist and misogonist, bleats a groveling farewell.

The band has been a ragtag collection of juvenile delinquents and the worst sort of boorish fraternity types, but the “musicians” were equal opportunity offenders, and were one of the last vestiges of college-aged children still resisting their overseers. They defied many, many attempts to shut them down, even as recently as 2014, but six years ago was an entirely different generation than the milquetoasts we have now.

A Senator of the United States

His Twitter page is full of interesting posts, like this one:

Markey, who defeated the latest Kennedy spawn up in Massachusettes thanks in part to the support of OAC, Pelosi, and the rest of the mob, is considered a mainstream Democrat. Couple his insistence on disarming of the police and hysterical conspiracy theories with Schumer’s vow to end the Senate filibuster and bring on the Democrat’s full agenda in a flood of legislation come January, and whoo boy.

Have I mentioned that they intend to disarm the citizenry at the same time they abolish the police? Talk about hysterical conspiracy theories; who will then control the country?

Not that a graduate student of English ever produced anything of value, but still ....

Faster, please

University of Chicago English Department announces that graduate applicants will be accepted only for work “in and with black studies”.

“For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black studies,” the statement said. “We understand Black studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages and time periods.”

The department said English has a “long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness.” 

“In light of this historical reality, we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere,” the statement said.

Next up, Law? History? Physics? The rush towards irrelevancy accelerates.

But this time will be different

PJ Media takes a skeptical view of “experts” cheering for Biden’s trillions of dollars of new spending and taxes:

An unrepentant old-school liberal, Joe Biden would crush the economy with three trillion dollars worth of new taxes and five trillion dollars in new spending.

A new study released on Monday by the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) argues that this is a good thing.

According to The Hill:

“At the end of the day, they actually decrease debt because they do have significant revenue raisers,” Richard Prisinzano, director of policy analysis for PWBM, said in an interview with The Hill. “And the economy is more productive. As we put in things like education and infrastructure, workers become more productive, and that gives a boost to the economy.”

The chart illustration says all that needs to be said about increased spending on education making workers more productive except perhaps, this: the real effect of the past four decades of public education has been to produce a huge body pf non-productive citizens who hate their country and expect others to provide them with a (comfortable) living. Too late to ask for our money back, I suppose.

UPDATE on that last point: Modern education in West Palm Beach:

First time as tragedy, second time as farce?

Travel around Greenwich and you can trace successive waves of building over the decades, thrown up by contractors as they sought cheaper land for their projects. Some of these expanded areas flourished, some did not, as the market retreated from the frontiers in times of weaker demand. There’s now a lot of activity in those “failed” areas, and it’s far beyond my abilities to say whether these new buyers represent a permanent revival or merely another wave of suckers, but the houses are selling.

Case in point, 27 Cobb Island, a gut-renovated project under the noise shadow of I-95, priced at $4.795 million and now under contract. Houses here did well when they were new in the 80s, then rapidly declined in value; 27 itself was bought out of foreclosure by its current owner, and others have fared about as well.

So will it have held its value ten years from now? Check back then.

Circa 2019

Rich white ladies protest presence of grocery stores in "food desert"

The Oh-So-Righteous do their thing

Seattle gentrifiers invade Trader Joe’s, claiming that blacks are denied access.

Since Trader Joe’s welcomes all customers regardless of race, I’m a bit baffled by this, but the whole virtue-signaling phenomenon has never made sense, so why should this latest mutation? The last time I checked, which was admittedly a while ago, the “food desert” theory was that grocery stores avoided low-income neighborhoods, thus denying residents access to fresh, healthy foods and forcing them to rely on a diet of pork rinds and orange soda. Do these chai-sippers want to restrict their less fortunate neighbors’ access to produce and inexpensive food? Or do they insist that only soup kitchens be permitted to operate in certain areas of town?

Government Cheese: we’ll make them all beggars ‘cause they’re easy to please.