One year ago today: June 30, 2014, on small houses, like mine.
Five years ago today: June 30, 2010, I still have that chair.
Six years ago today: June 30, 2009, 63 lousy dollars.
MORNING
What is happening out there? Dozens of new real estate listing with search criteria that was turning up zilch for me until last week. My suspicions are that the banks are either flushing their surplus REOs or ramping up foreclosures to comply with some obscure ruling. I am right now looking at a place listed for $25,000. Nobody go nuts, I’m only looking because it is the cheapest (lowest priced) listing. But it is hard to believe.
Here’s the picture. No, there is nothing wrong with it except nobody can keep up with the mortgage. I don’t need a mortgage. I have not seen it, but somebody thought it was worth $104,000 in March of this year. That’s what,100 days ago? And before that in 2009, it sold for $132,000. If this continues, you can expect real estate to dominate this blog for a while. Maybe I’ll take two.
That’s just being silly, I would never borrow money. I know the area (Thornbriar Estates) and there are no slummy houses anywhere in that entire city. The ad says it is sitting on 1.23 acres and “no neighboring homes can be seen”. The county tax assessment says $94,000, so the annual taxes would be $1,700. If I didn’t pay them (first time buyers in Florida cannot be evicted) I’d only have to live there 14 years to get it for free. Would I do that? Don’t tempt me, I’ve put up with nothing but bullshit from the system for my entire life.
Now, for anyone who doesn’t have money, the down payment is $5,000 and the monthlies are $122, including taxes and insurance. It’s a three bed two bath, so highly rentable and sharable. That’s not the garage on the left, that’s the indoor recreation room with a swimming pool. You can see the two-car driveway behind the oak tree.
True, the place is dropping in price since 2005 when it sold for $175,000 but I prefer not to consider that. I’d rather laugh at how some people signed their lives away for it and wound up with nothing. Under the circumstances, I don’t care what the other houses cost. It can’t really drop much further in price, it is, after all, nearly 2,000 square feet.
For the record, I have no intention of buying a high maintenance property like this one. I actually want to live in a jungle surrounded by trees and natural vegetation. There must be something wrong with that house, or the neighborhood, or the subdivision, or the city, it is here only as an example of a spectacular price drop. I understand the market is being driven by speculators, not first time buyers.
NOON
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” ~Ayn Rand
I was hard pressed to find something as top-story today that could match the situation over in Greece. Then I found it. The contents of my refrigerator. Now see here, laddies, this is what a well-stocked non-GMO supply looks like. Everything organic and/or home-made. No saturated fats of any stripe, no corn products, no sugar, no salt, most of what you see is organic. No red meat, no dairy products except imported yogurt. It has been over a year now that GMOs have been banned from my premises. That’s correct, they are not even allowed in the door.
But what about Greece? I done told you long ago, Germany is not going to put up with much nonsense from irresponsible southern Europeans. It is ridiculous to expect any good performance from countries who have never had sensible money policies in modern history.
On top of that, I find the reported sustained growth figures from Germany itself to be a little fishy. They are owned by the same banking system that owns the USA, you know, the gang that got the rest of the world to beat up Germany for them back in the 40s.
The thing is, if Greece goes and Puerto Rico is also teetering on the edge, the collapse will not be confined to those locations any more. Debt was the first globalized business and disaster is imminent. You can’t get something for nothing except crazy ideas about economics. And there is no doubt the Greeks have been talking through their hats since VE day.
It is with these things in mind that I strive to understand what is going with the housing market. I see no direct connection except the stock market plunge when Greece threatened to disconnect the ATMs this morning. The Miami Herald and others trumpet the recovery, but there is not one of us who does not know somebody who has been out of work for years. One guy at the morning coffeeshop tells us he has sent out 172 resumes in the past year.
I can’t think of anyone who has any real confidence in the money system or who trusts politicians to do right. (But they certainly expect politicians to favor their personal causes.) Uncertainty is a universal constant these days. I’m continuing my research, but I’m not an expert. Or as I like to put it, nobody came along and took me by the hand and showed me the path to success. Ho, ho, not by any stretch of the imagination did that ever happen.
Therefore, if you take the things my competition got free at birth, like money and opportunity, it follows that my angle on matters like housing can and ought to be entirely self-centered and selfish. My participation in such “society” is to pay my share but not one penny more. I’m still mulling over the [current housing] situation.
AFTERNOON
Okay, I’m driving out to look at these properties in Arcadia, Ft. Myers, and possibly Tampa. The answer to the housing surge is, “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue”. The causes are so intertwined I could not find any pattern. My conclusion is that if a property I can afford outright drops into my lap, I may buy it simply to insulate myself from future rents which are certain to soar.
What would I buy? Well, that’s a huge judgment call because I’m not fussy where. I want two bedrooms and two baths for the elementary reasoning that I have a room to rent out when I am away. This is still Florida and nothing attracts underprivileged descendants of the persecuted faster than unguarded property.
To put numbers to it, if I can find something for less than ten grand in a nice area out in the countryside, I may just scoop it up to easy my mind. The market bottomed in 2012, but I had no money. In 2013, I had to begin accumulating. In 2014, I had a down payment but no keepers. Now 2015 and I’m quite aware if I lived in such a place for two years, I essentially own it free because of the rent I’d otherwise be paying here.
As for the reasons prices have slumped, I dunno. Slump is a relative term, since further checking shows the lower prices are typical of other properties in the same vicinity. I know overall home ownership is declining, but that’s long-term. For example, Millennials renting because of student loan repayments and banks now demanding 25% up front. I just don’t want to be caught like a Canadian where the rent takes such a chunk out one’s monthly pay that there is no hope of ever saving enough to save up a down payment. Believe it or not, that is how millions of people live up there. They don’t know any better.
In a related comment, I see that middle class is now defined as individual income between $45,000 and $75,000. That sucks because that was not even very much money back in my day. No wonder the majority of workers are living from crisis to crisis—but they will continue to elect the wrong type of people and support the wrong type of policies.
There are fundamental differences in how I view a house. It is not a store of value, or something to flip, but a place to live. Yep, that’s a pretty amazing perspective these day. The slump could be the backlash of all the little head games the government and banks have been playing with house prices since 2012. Hence, I’m tending toward sitting this out unless the deal of the century comes knocking. Yeah, the deal of the Century 21.
EVENING
No return calls from any of my low-ball offers. That’s fine. I’ve talked to my negotiator and decided that her and I must attend one or more of these house auctions. I’ve never been, although I’ve been to many auctions in my time. I surmised that those houses which can be given a five-gallon overhaul and flipped will be in highest demand.
Still, it amazes me to see neighborhoods with foreclosures right next to places trying to sell for $300,000. That’s what made me finally consider the auction. I’m house-hunting, not shopping for a mortgage. Help foreclosure? Sure, buddy, I’ll help you move out. It’s you and the bank shafted each other, not me.
For most people, the cash requirement is a real disincentive, hey, that’s why they call it cash. That, plus rumors that there are other hidden costs. Like, what exactly is a “buyer’s premium”. Screw you, that’s what I say it is. I mean, who even cooks up these terms? Remember, I am the guy who started the investigation into excessive “closing costs” in Florida back in 2003. They wanted $7,000 above the price of a $64,000 house and the deal fell through over it—I refused to pay it. You want “closing costs”, you pay for them. Not me.
I don’t recall if I recorded this incident here, but I did somewhere. The real estate company tried to slough me off, saying that part of the cost was for things like determining a watercourse. My retort to that was that if there had been a watercourse on the property 1,000 years ago, I was okay with assuming it was still there. Property does not have to be re-surveyed every damn time it is sold. But I made a few complaints—very detailed complaints and a year later was rewarded to hear about investigations into the practice.
Yep, that was me.
ADDENDUM
Ha, I reconfirmed something I suspected since the first time I encountered C programming. I initially saw the code in 1984 and did not like it. I’d studied computer science at the university, but found it was bland compared to actual programming, so back to college. As for C, it was evident to me it had been developed in a laboratory by eggheads. I had difficulty with the contrived terms but I wrote this off as due to my pre-existing familiarity with the correct computer designations.
Over the years, I’ve made several attempts to learn C, but always wind up saying to hell with it after learning just enough to complete whatever I’m working on. The hardest part about learning C was that the so-called teachers who claimed to know the language kept talking in circles. And I’m the type that will stop the class and demand they quit it, I’m not shelling out good tuition money to listen to nincompoops.
So last evening, I thought by now somebody has a handle on this C language. Why not bring up a tutorial and see if they can finally explain it so I understand. Ha, what was I thinking? I chose the opensource group (no link) because normally they get a handle on this stuff. Nope. So I was right, even C people don’t have much of a clue what they are talking about.
In this particular video, the narrator teacher was going to describe what a constructor was in an instance of a class. He started off okay, but kept talking himself into corners. Then repeated failing to save face by saying idiotic things like, “you’ll just have to imagine with me that this thing is that”. Every time he tried to define something, he could not do it without talking in circles. I busted a gut laughing—this is exactly what I saw all those years ago. Those people have no shame.
And further, there is nothing that the C language can do that could not be accomplished developing better regular computer language commands. It is not a class, it is a type of subroutine variant. A typical C definition goes like, “Classes have functions that can be applied to instances of the class.”
See what I mean by circles? It means nothing more than call the subroutine and pass it the required parameters. See, even to non-programmers, it makes more sense when I say it. My challenge remains that the C language is crap until somebody can explain it to me so I understand. Don’t read me wrong, I totally follow what they are saying and it does not make sense. That’s why I don’t get it. I have no trouble following real computer talk.
Last Laugh
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