Our reader Another Investor has been supportive of the blog throughout the years. Her comment from the second link above still makes me wonder about the future:
We’ve already seen how the natural real estate cycles have been crushed, and now here we are in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, rampant unemployment, and racial/political unrest AND PRICES STILL KEEP GOING UP. There is nothing natural, normal, or historical about it – we are living in a different world. Today’s real estate market is tailored for the elite, and their insiders.
The days of individual realtors helping families with achieving the American Dream are just about over, and as AI said, ‘the Klinge era of service to clients is coming to an end’. All I can do is to try and help as many people as I can before I get pushed out.
This is one of the better options I’ve seen for touring a home remotely.
The live tour would be similar to showing the home in person because of the open discussion between buyers and agent, and the recording of the event is especially helpful for reviewing later! https://www.homeroverapp.com/
Are we at the point where buyers only tour the homes in person that are the real contenders? Yes!
Watching the nationwide unrest on television last night made me think of the potential of future conflicts. San Diego enjoys a rather mellow population but we undoubtedly have our concerns about any and all oppressed parties in America – but being physically farther away from the action makes it easier to witness, acknowledge, and then get back to our busy lives.
Great leadership might keep our attention on the topic, but we’re still waiting for it to show up.
As a result, revolutions will likely continue until solutions are created. We could all jump in and create non-violent solutions, but without leadership and resolve, the hard choices and tough decisions will be difficult to accomplish.
How does this pertain to housing?
If physical clashes in the street are perceived as effective, we could see other oppressed groups rise up – and well they should, if that is what it takes to get results.
We have witnessed how the real estate is only for the affluent now, and that there isn’t much being done for those of lesser means. We used to only put the homeless/poor people in that category, but now the middle-class and above are finding homeownership to be more unreachable every day.
Either we can create housing solutions in advance, or wait for the oppressed to rise up.
Some of the best ideas I’ve heard regarding the possible solutions for last night’s events include a Community Police-Review Board in every town in America, and independent community groups formed to encourage individual involvement in creating solutions.
Likewise with housing, we need to get more involved as a community. Ideas:
Encourage ADUs as a solution for building lower-cost housing, especially closer to urban hubs.
Press local governments to upzone properties/areas where higher density would be a good fit.
Create communities of tiny houses/manufactured homes and give occupants a stake.
Create places to park/live for those in cars and RVs.
The coronavirus is exposing our weaknesses. Let’s do something good with the opportunity.
I don’t know what else I can do today besides write this message, but I’m looking for more ways to be involved with creating solutions. I’ll post every idea I can find – please send along what you see….and think!
Everything seems like “If” these days, but if we had a market comeback, the dates of a modified and compressed selling season would be fairly predictable, looking at it logically.
The actual results will be a matter of compression and intensity.
If there isn’t much of a market rebound, then we might only have a couple of hot weeks in July, and a lot of standing around, relatively. If things get cooking, then we could have a solid 4-6 weeks before school starts (in red above) when the most sales will be made.
The dates in green is when buyers will be looking hard – and might be when the best deals are made.
Two to four weeks in October will be a lost cause, due to the election. In December, buyers and sellers will both pack it in early for the holidays, and prepare to GET ‘ER DONE IN ’21!
Next year’s selling season is 11-12 months away – we gotta be ok by then, right?
Pretty soon, as the country begins to figure out how we “open back up” and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. It will come in the traditional forms — a billboard here, a hundred commercials there — and in new-media forms: a 2020–2021 generation of memes to remind you that what you want again is normalcy.
In truth, you want the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis.
Wells Fargo is ‘suspending’ their jumbo-loan funding of all correspondents today, and the others (like Chase) are sure to follow. It’s one thing to stop funding loans for mortgage brokers, but to shut down the credit lines to the big players like Loan Depot, Quicken, and Guaranteed Rate is going to effectively end the jumbo-loan market as we know it.
Expect that this will become the industry trend, and blamed on the corona.
But the root cause is the industry contraction that has been going on for a couple of years now as sales decline and there isn’t enough business to go around.
The result?
Wells Fargo will still be funding jumbo loans. You’ll just have to get them directly from Wells Fargo.
You’ll be able to purchase the best homes for sale. You’ll just have to buy them from the listing agent.
The Clear Cooperation Policy is still scheduled to begin on May 1st, and listing agents will either have to input their listings directly onto the MLS within 24 hours of any public advertising, or sell them in-house.
In a desperate, fearful environment, take a guess at which will be the favorite.
We can predict how the real estate market will behave as this country gets a grip on handling the coronavirus (we’re not close yet). During the last crisis, the first buyers to jump in were those who weren’t concerned about timing the market, they just needed a house – and the 2013 market exploded well before the data said it should have.
The first-timers will be fueled with down payments from parents or grandparents, and with very few comps available to the contrary, they will just pay the seller’s price to get ‘er done this summer. It is certain that the corona fright will be the latest reason to hurry up and hunker down in a better home, and if the Fed can goose the MBS market and keep mortgage rates in the mid-3s, the market will come out fast. If rates are in the mid-4s, then it will be a slower ascent.
Broker management will encourage agents to keep those hot new listings in-house. Listing agents will want to be a hero within the office and get acknowledged at the next sales meeting for selling off-market. Office Exclusives will be sold to sellers as a price-discovery device, but when a few agents in the office want to give their waiting buyers an early preview, sellers will oblige. Surprise – we have an offer! The next thing you know we have a deal – and the sellers are grateful that they didn’t have to be bothered with open house or strangers prancing through with little or no notice.
Civility, and fiduciary, in our society was crushed by the quote in the movie Wall Street.
‘Greed is Good’.
Expect it to be on full display once the corona is over. Or sooner:
Two San Diego women have created an app for travelers that’s gaining a sizable following of nomadic young people living out of vans.
Inspired by a social media phenomenon, Breanne Acio, a former San Diego State University lecturer, and public relations worker Jessica Shisler teamed up in 2018 to pave the way for the drifter movement known online as “vanlife.” They created a mobile application, aptly called The Vanlife App, that’s just secured the two women spots in a competitive Techstars accelerator program for promising startups.
The app currently connects longterm travelers with one another while on the road, solving the problem of loneliness that weighs on this group of individuals. The downside of a nomadic lifestyle is that you have no community, Shisler said.
“You’re constantly in places you don’t know and around people you don’t know,” Shisler said. “You’re never a local.”
For those who haven’t heard of it, “vanlife” refers to a recent bohemian trend of people buying cargo vans, old ambulances, school buses and other boxy vehicles, and converting them into livable apartments on wheels (think of it as a do-it-yourself RV). Many vanlifers are also “digital nomads” who work remotely online, such as freelance writers, software developers, or content creators. With no strings tying them to specific cities or towns, they wander from destination to destination for months on end.
This 3,000-square-foot home in Phoenix is made up of stackedshippingcontainers, but you’d never know it once you walked inside. It’s modern, open designed interiors matches the style and spaciousness of any other single-family home today.
Homes constructed ofshippingcontainers are drawing more attention in the building industry. These homes are flood and fire-proof, eco-friendly, energy efficient, and there’s certainly no shortage of them to transform. Worldwide, an estimated 24 million emptyshippingcontainers are retired, just waiting to find a new purpose. Could real estate be it?
Some housing experts predict shipping containers to make up a bigger footprint of homes and buildings in the future. One shipping container can be transformed into a tiny home, several molded together could form a standard-sized single-family home, and hundreds stacked together in a Lego-like way could make for an apartment complex. Shipping containers can also be transformed as add-ons to existing homes, such as a garage.
But can ashippingcontainer be stylish? Shara Terry, a real estate pro with Berkshire Hathway HomeServices Arizona Properties in Phoenix, certainly thinks so. She’s listing a three-bedroom, four-bath single-family, shippingcontainer home for $610,000. The home, which is a hybrid of two stacked containers on its east side and two stacked on its west side, is designed byengineer Jorge Salcedo and Colombian architect Gregorio Baquero.
“A lot of people who’ve visited it have been curious, and they can’t believe it used to be a shipping container once they step inside and they see how open and seamless it is inside,” Terry says. “There really are only two subtle reminders in the interior that show a portion of the red container,” but even those have been blended into the overall decor. The exterior includes some writing on the containers that were preserved for character, including a stamp in Vietnamese showing its former location.
