A report from the Palm Beach Daily News in Florida. "Real estate agents and brokers…
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From the first 6 minute video:
Denver Real Estate Market Update September 2022 – Is A Buyer’s Market Coming Soon?
Jill Upleger
Oct 15, 2022 The market has continues to slow! Are we heading toward a buyer’s market?
The second 11:19 video:
Higher interest rates will KILL buy-to-let property market
Charles Kelly Money Tips Podcast
Oct 16, 2022
Example of buying a £500,000 property with a £20,000 a year rent or 4% yield. That’s all very well but if you are then borrowing money on say an 80% mortgage, in the past your mortgage payments based on a 2% interest rate would be £8000 a year leaving you a gross profit before cost of £12,000 per annum.
Then interest rates went up to 4% meaning that your mortgage payments rose to £16,000 per annum.
At 5% your mortgage payments will be £20,000, in which case you would not even break even after paying costs such as insurance and letting agency fees.
At 6% per annum your mortgage payments would be £24,000 a year leaving you with a loss of £4000 per annum before costs.
However, that’s not the whole story. Rates are expected to go higher and have already breached 6% for the residential market based on five-year fixed rates.
At 8% the interest only mortgage on a £400,000 loan Will be £32,000 a year.
Even if you only borrowed £300,000, the mortgage payment will be £24,000 a year not only leaving you a loss but an obtainable from the lender which would want a buffer zone in case of rental void.
The higher the interest rate the less you can borrow.
It’s unlikely that the lender would give you more than £200,000 based on an 8% interest rate, which would mean that you would need £300,000 as a deposit.
In short, higher interest rates will wipe out any hope of a monthly residual yield or profit for buy to let buyers using islands value by to let mortgages.
Bearing in mind that the high growth model for most investors is based on using maximum leverage and borrowing against their properties, higher interest rates will wipe out a large percentage of the potential buyers as the deals no longer stack up.
Learn how to invest and build wealth.
The Bank of England were forced to bail out the pensions industry after it nearly collapsed and brought down the financial industry with it.
Whatever you do, don’t do ANYTHING unless you are financially educated.
Question: What can you do to change the economy, market or government policy?
Answer: Nothing!
Question: What can you do to change YOUR economy (Uconomy), your policy, your financial and money management and your earnings?
Answer: EVERYTHING!
The last 15 minute video:
Charlotte NC Real Estate Market – October 2022 – Charlotte NC Housing Market
Sasa M Living in Charlotte NC
Premiered Oct 13, 2022
Redfin’s Glenn Kelman on real estate’s ‘massive reckoning’
The Business Journals|5 hours ago
Despite the steep slowdown in home sales, the bottom of the market isn’t going to fall out, the Redfin CEO said, because many buyers are keeping their old places to rent out.
What an absolute disaster the city of Los Angeles is
Sal Rodriguez, The Orange County Register – Yesterday 4:42 PM
Over the past week three sitting council members — Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León, Nury Martinez — found themselves embroiled in a scandal that quickly went nationwide for spouting racist nonsense in a meeting with a union boss as they schemed how to bend the city’s redistricting process in their favor.
It’s both totally disgusting — but also not really that surprising. Los Angeles City Hall has been a cesspool for years and the current scandal is just the latest to bubble up from the otherwise insular world of City Hall insiders.
In 2020, Mitchell Englander, whose only real distinction was being the sole Republican on the council, was charged “with obstructing a federal investigation into cash, lavish meals, escort services and other gifts that officials say he accepted from a businessman,” as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
Joining him on what was described as a “debauched” trip to Las Vegas was his aide and now Councilman John Lee (who, for the record, insists he did nothing illegal and was never charged). Englander reported to prison last year and was later sent to a halfway house.
Meanwhile, former Los Angeles Councilman Jose Huizar is currently on trial on federal corruption charges. One of the great details of his case was the reportedly $130,000 or so in cash he had stashed away in his closet at home when the cops searched it.
On Wednesday, Huizar’s brother “admitted in a plea agreement filed today in United States District Court that he took cash from José Huizar on numerous occasions and immediately wrote checks back to him or arranged to pay his expenses, and then lied about his actions to federal investigators,” according to the Department of Justice.
This particular scandal also brought down former Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan. He is also awaiting trial.
Good stuff.
Then there’s Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was elected to the council in 2020 after a long stint on the county Board of Supervisors.
In October 2021, Ridley-Thomas, along with the former dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California, were indicted for a “bribery scheme in which [Ridley-Thomas’ son] received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,” as the DOJ explained at the time. The former dean has already admitted her role in the scheme.
And this is just the stuff we know about.
In the midst of all of this, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti went off the rails years ago. From backtracking on major campaign promises to delusionally exploring the possibility of a 2020 presidential campaign, Garcetti’s ambassadorship to India has been on ice for over a year because most senators are smart enough to see there’s only risk to a vote for Garcetti. This is especially so after his right-hand man, Rick Jacobs, was beset with misconduct allegations.
With these being the sort of people in charge, is it any wonder the city of Los Angeles is so dysfunctional and can’t get any problems solved?
Is it any wonder that tens of thousands of people have been living on the streets for decades?
Is it any wonder that the city blew a $1.2 billion homeless housing bond on developments that cost over $700,000 per unit to build?
Is it any wonder that only narrow special interests, from select developers to big unions, seem to benefit most from whatever it is the city does?
Is it any wonder that the city has long maintained an alarmingly high rate of poverty?
Is it any wonder that the city has continued its economic trajectory of wide inequality?
Is it any wonder that the city has wasted vast proportions of its budget on government pensions rather than city services?
No one should be surprised. City Hall has been a clown show.
It’s been that way for a long time; we’re just seeing the long-term consequences of fundamental problems.
It has been nine years since the Los Angeles 2020 Commission warned that “Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward. We risk falling behind in adapting to the realities of the 21st century and becoming a city in decline,”
They noted the lack of public engagement with and transparency out of City Hall, of the problems of bloated bureaucracies, City Hall insiders and special interest influence.
Those are all the same problems that plague the city of Los Angeles today.
Of course, there’s only so much any commission or report can do. And so here we are — if council members aren’t heading to court or the exits under a dark cloud, many of the rest are so far to the left that people should just start taking and placing bets on how long it will be before Los Angeles completely implodes.
I say all of this, yes, as a cynic, but also someone who has lived in the city of Los Angeles most of my life.
A place with all of the potential Los Angeles has shouldn’t have the absolute trash heap of a government that it has had for years. But it does.
Most, if not all, of the aforementioned political creatures are products of dysfunctional political machines, who then have their own little fiefdoms once elected. That’s what Cedillo, de León and Martinez were so intent on protecting. They used the cover of “Latinos” and the Latino community, but they’re in it for themselves at the end of the day.
Most Los Angeles residents couldn’t name their council member and even fewer could say what exactly any of them have done on any matter of significance. That will need to change if Los Angeles is going to course-correct. City leaders need to be held accountable for what they actually do and which special interests they meet with and answer to.
We may be headed toward a buyers market as inventory increases and prices begin to decline. We advise sellers to be strategic and well-informed when pricing their home.
Catching up to rapid price decreases and utilizing recent comparables will allow buyers who have been shut out of the purchasing process for the past 18 months to potentially put an offer down.
To identify the sweet spot in the pricing of a home, it is important to articulate a figure that is reflective of a home’s fair market value based on floor plan, size, and condition.
1 in 4 public housing units sit vacant during D.C. affordability crisis
The apartment is a time capsule. In the fridge, still plugged in and running, sits a mostly empty package of Oscar Mayer deli meat dated May 2019. The freezer holds a 16-pound turkey — best if used by June 29, 2019.
As hundreds leave, dozens trickle in
Crystal Ballard lives in a third-floor two-bedroom in Hopkins Apartments, a 158-unit DCHA complex in Southeast Washington. Trash in the vacant unit next door, which neighborhood youths have used as a hangout, has fed mice and roach infestations. Several years ago, she says, DCHA fixed up the unit.
“But they didn’t move anybody in,” Ballard said. “It was a smack in the face.”
The real world, however, isn’t showing quite the same enthusiasm as Zuckerberg for his new vision.
In the past 14 months, Meta — which used to be called Facebook — has seen its share price fall nearly 60 per cent, wiping a staggering $600 billion off its market value. True, the company is still worth nearly $400 billion, but the collapse means Zuckerberg’s personal fortune has shrunk by more than $76 billion since January and he’s no longer among the richest 20 people on the planet.
This monumental slump reflects in part a general malaise in the technology industry, caused by declining advertising revenue and increased competition. The social media sites Facebook and Instagram — both part of Meta — are being pressed hard, for instance, by outfits such as China’s phenomenally successful TikTok.
But increasingly, it appears that Zuckerberg’s obsession with his virtual reality kingdom of the Metaverse is playing a large part in the company’s difficulties.
The omens were not auspicious when the avatar that engineers produced of Zuckerberg drew widespread ridicule.
It made him look like a baby, or perhaps a porcelain doll — with a fixed smile and wide green but lifeless eyes set in an unlined face.
Social media exploded in mockery, prompting Zuckerberg — already a Silicon Valley hate figure as he sinks tens of billions of dollars into the Metaverse in a make-or-break bet on the internet’s future — to rush to get it redone. A company insider claimed they created 40 versions of Zuckerberg’s face before a final replacement was chosen.
But questions about data- harvesting are not the only criticism levelled at Zuckerberg’s dreamscape. Others include complaints that its graphics are still as primitive as the ones in video games from the 1990s and there’s so little to do in the Metaverse that there seems not much point venturing there in the first place.
Despite paying $400 (£358) for the most basic headset, visitors generally don’t return to the site — a rambling collection of virtual worlds such as Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party and Murder Village — after the first month. Common complaints are that the technology’s endlessly glitchy and there’s not enough to do. ‘An empty world is a sad world,’ commented an internal document.
Last month, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta’s Metaverse division, spotted how few of the company’s staff were actually on it and said managers will start checking up on them. ‘Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time?’ he wrote pleadingly on an internal Meta message board.
‘The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?’
It also emerged that some Meta staff mockingly refer to any work that’s done on Metaverse as ‘MMH’ or ‘Make Mark Happy’ projects. It’s hardly a ringing vote of confidence from the people supposedly building this brave new world. Zuckerberg has made clear that those who don’t share his vision will be shown the door.
As Meta’s 83,000 staff strive to make the boss happy and keep their jobs, critics of the Metaverse dearly hope that this is one digital experiment that does indeed bite the dust before it becomes an even more toxic environment in the hunt for more users.
While the company claims it wants ‘almost Disney levels of safety’ for users, visitors report that it’s a scary place with very little moderation.
A popular YouTube broadcaster named Ethan Klein streamed a session on the Metaverse last month, in which he tried to be as sexually explicit as possible while surrounded by children in the Plaza, its central meeting place. He was thrown off and barred from returning as punishment — but only for two hours.
A BBC researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl said she was able to easily access a digital strip club on the Metaverse, where a man told her that avatars can ‘get naked and do unspeakable things’, while others talked about ‘erotic role play’.
An NSPCC spokesman described some parts of the Metaverse as ‘dangerous by design’.
Already condemned around the world for what a senior whistleblower called products that ‘harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more’, Meta’s rapacious chief executive has the nerve to think he can now convince people to spend even more time in its sinister and exploitative company.
His peculiar arrogance may this time have proved to be his undoing.
he’s no longer among the richest 20 people on the planet.
Good so maybe he won’t feel compelled to spend $419MM to buy an election next time.
I have never used facebook.
“Good so maybe he won’t feel compelled to spend $419MM to buy an election next time.”
Indeed. Good call.
$419MM
His tithing.
The Real Estate Quarterly: Storage Surge – Subleasing Space Soars
Los Angeles Business Journal|1 hour ago
Subleasing hit an all-time high in the greater Los Angeles office market’s third quarter, with companies like Netflix Inc. in Burbank giving back large amounts of space. The streaming giant is listing more than 66,
Column: In that racist leaked recording, Los Angeles sees its true reflection — and it’s ugly
I wasn’t expecting to hear a reference to my favorite childhood movie as I listened to the surreptitiously recorded conversation among Latino officials that has shaken Los Angeles to its core.
But there it was, sandwiched between then-City Council President Nury Martinez’s cruel and racist comments about Oaxacans (they’re so ugly), a Black child (he’s like a monkey), a gay colleague (“a little bitch”).
City Councilman Kevin de Léon spoke of what he called the “Wizard of Oz” effect. Black Angelenos, he implied, are overrepresented in the city’s corridors of power, because they make so much noise.
“When you’re at the side of the curtain, it’s like this big voice, it sounds big,” De León tells his colleagues. “It sounds like there’s thousands. And then, when you actually pull the curtain, is that you see the little Wizard of Oz. You know what? It’s the same thing.”
Labor leader Ron Herrera, who has since resigned, agrees that Latinos have more voting power than Black Angelenos: “It’s real simple,” he says. “You have 100 people, 52 of them are Mexicanos.… I feel pretty good about my chances of beating your ass.”
City Councilmember Gil Cedillo then pipes up. “Twenty-five or so are Black, and the 25 Blacks are shouting.”
“But,” says De Léon, “they shout like they are 250, when there’s 100 of us.”
This is some shockingly crude arithmetic. It is indisputable that Latinos in Los Angeles have faced substantial racism. Indeed, anti-Latino discrimination in Los Angeles is the stuff of legend — Zoot Suit riots, Chavez Ravine, the Chicano Moratorium. Which is why it’s doubly upsetting when Latinos who have made it to the top rung of power would kick the ladder out from other people of color.
The real Wizard of Oz effect in Los Angeles is the lie we have told ourselves over and over that we elect leaders who embrace progressive values, especially anti-racism. We like to believe that we live in a tolerant place where differences are celebrated and all are welcome.
And yet, every few decades, the curtain is pulled back and Angelenos are violently reminded that, far from the racially harmonious paradise we’d like to believe we have, our city suffers from the same racial hatred that has afflicted this country since the very beginning.
No matter how far we’ve come, the stench of racism lingers. Too often, it expresses itself in the way our communities are developed and policed, and the way our schools are run.
It was in Los Angeles that real estate professionals popularized the concept of the restrictive racial covenant when the city’s population was exploding in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, about 95% of the city’s housing stock was off limits to people of color.
For years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1948, covenants were still boilerplate in Los Angeles real estate deeds. In fact, the 1960 deed to my parents’ first house, in Northridge, forbade them from selling to anyone who wasn’t white.
Knuckle dragging racist sheet wearing Californians. What a bunch of red necks.
They still have a long way to go to catch up to Jack Abramoff’s corruption as a lobbyist for his “troglodyte” benefactors, the Native American tribes who were seeking to develop casino gambling on their reservations.
Column: In that racist leaked recording, Los Angeles sees its true reflection — and it’s ugly
Newsflash! Contrary to leftist beliefs, Mexicans are tribal and don’t like blacks or gays. And they don’t like other Hispanics: Central Americans hate Mexicans. Mexicans don’t like Cubans or Puerto Ricans (they mock their accents). And South Americans, who are the latest arrivals, are distrusted by all. Mexicans especially dislike Argentinians. Oh, and whiter Mexicans, like Ms. Martinez, don’t like brown “indios”.
It will be interesting to see how the Dems will deal with this. If they try to replace the Mexicans with blacks on city council, there could be a revolt that could put GOP candidates in office.
Mexicans don’t like Cubans or Puerto Ricans
I am from Chicago and I can affirm, at least back in the day, Mexicans did NOT like Puerto Ricans. Life may have changed in 40 years but some how I doubt it.
“The macro environment continues to deteriorate. We think many ad-driven companies will miss their fourth-quarter earnings,” Needham Senior Analyst Laura Martin told Yahoo Finance “And in Meta’s case, not only is just the macro environment deteriorating, but they’re losing a lot of user time to TikTok. And that continues to happen.”
According to research conducted by Piper Sandler, TikTok is the favorite social media app among teens and the margin has only widened for the Bytedance-owned company when compared to Facebook and Instagram.
“I think Mark Zuckerberg is telling us he doesn’t think he has a core business,” Martin said. “He is moving to Reels because it competes with TikTok. He is moving to the metaverse, and he’s changed the name of this company, which tells me he doesn’t think his core business that he built 15 years ago is actually a business anymore.”
Wired (2/4/2004): Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project
The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence. Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, […]
Facebook “launched” 2/4/2004. By end of the year, angel investor Peter Thiel invested $500K.
It’s a big club that you’re not in and that many people are stupid enough to volunteer the desired information.
Miromar Lakes, FL Housing Prices Crater 10% YOY As Mounting Mortgage Defaults And Personal Bankruptcy Filings Soar Across Florida
From the first 6 minute video:
Denver Real Estate Market Update September 2022 – Is A Buyer’s Market Coming Soon?
Jill Upleger
Oct 15, 2022 The market has continues to slow! Are we heading toward a buyer’s market?
The second 11:19 video:
Higher interest rates will KILL buy-to-let property market
Charles Kelly Money Tips Podcast
Oct 16, 2022
Example of buying a £500,000 property with a £20,000 a year rent or 4% yield. That’s all very well but if you are then borrowing money on say an 80% mortgage, in the past your mortgage payments based on a 2% interest rate would be £8000 a year leaving you a gross profit before cost of £12,000 per annum.
Then interest rates went up to 4% meaning that your mortgage payments rose to £16,000 per annum.
At 5% your mortgage payments will be £20,000, in which case you would not even break even after paying costs such as insurance and letting agency fees.
At 6% per annum your mortgage payments would be £24,000 a year leaving you with a loss of £4000 per annum before costs.
However, that’s not the whole story. Rates are expected to go higher and have already breached 6% for the residential market based on five-year fixed rates.
At 8% the interest only mortgage on a £400,000 loan Will be £32,000 a year.
Even if you only borrowed £300,000, the mortgage payment will be £24,000 a year not only leaving you a loss but an obtainable from the lender which would want a buffer zone in case of rental void.
The higher the interest rate the less you can borrow.
It’s unlikely that the lender would give you more than £200,000 based on an 8% interest rate, which would mean that you would need £300,000 as a deposit.
In short, higher interest rates will wipe out any hope of a monthly residual yield or profit for buy to let buyers using islands value by to let mortgages.
Bearing in mind that the high growth model for most investors is based on using maximum leverage and borrowing against their properties, higher interest rates will wipe out a large percentage of the potential buyers as the deals no longer stack up.
Learn how to invest and build wealth.
The Bank of England were forced to bail out the pensions industry after it nearly collapsed and brought down the financial industry with it.
Whatever you do, don’t do ANYTHING unless you are financially educated.
Question: What can you do to change the economy, market or government policy?
Answer: Nothing!
Question: What can you do to change YOUR economy (Uconomy), your policy, your financial and money management and your earnings?
Answer: EVERYTHING!
The last 15 minute video:
Charlotte NC Real Estate Market – October 2022 – Charlotte NC Housing Market
Sasa M Living in Charlotte NC
Premiered Oct 13, 2022
Redfin’s Glenn Kelman on real estate’s ‘massive reckoning’
The Business Journals|5 hours ago
Despite the steep slowdown in home sales, the bottom of the market isn’t going to fall out, the Redfin CEO said, because many buyers are keeping their old places to rent out.
What an absolute disaster the city of Los Angeles is
Sal Rodriguez, The Orange County Register – Yesterday 4:42 PM
Over the past week three sitting council members — Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León, Nury Martinez — found themselves embroiled in a scandal that quickly went nationwide for spouting racist nonsense in a meeting with a union boss as they schemed how to bend the city’s redistricting process in their favor.
It’s both totally disgusting — but also not really that surprising. Los Angeles City Hall has been a cesspool for years and the current scandal is just the latest to bubble up from the otherwise insular world of City Hall insiders.
In 2020, Mitchell Englander, whose only real distinction was being the sole Republican on the council, was charged “with obstructing a federal investigation into cash, lavish meals, escort services and other gifts that officials say he accepted from a businessman,” as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
Joining him on what was described as a “debauched” trip to Las Vegas was his aide and now Councilman John Lee (who, for the record, insists he did nothing illegal and was never charged). Englander reported to prison last year and was later sent to a halfway house.
Meanwhile, former Los Angeles Councilman Jose Huizar is currently on trial on federal corruption charges. One of the great details of his case was the reportedly $130,000 or so in cash he had stashed away in his closet at home when the cops searched it.
On Wednesday, Huizar’s brother “admitted in a plea agreement filed today in United States District Court that he took cash from José Huizar on numerous occasions and immediately wrote checks back to him or arranged to pay his expenses, and then lied about his actions to federal investigators,” according to the Department of Justice.
This particular scandal also brought down former Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan. He is also awaiting trial.
Good stuff.
Then there’s Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was elected to the council in 2020 after a long stint on the county Board of Supervisors.
In October 2021, Ridley-Thomas, along with the former dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California, were indicted for a “bribery scheme in which [Ridley-Thomas’ son] received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,” as the DOJ explained at the time. The former dean has already admitted her role in the scheme.
And this is just the stuff we know about.
In the midst of all of this, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti went off the rails years ago. From backtracking on major campaign promises to delusionally exploring the possibility of a 2020 presidential campaign, Garcetti’s ambassadorship to India has been on ice for over a year because most senators are smart enough to see there’s only risk to a vote for Garcetti. This is especially so after his right-hand man, Rick Jacobs, was beset with misconduct allegations.
With these being the sort of people in charge, is it any wonder the city of Los Angeles is so dysfunctional and can’t get any problems solved?
Is it any wonder that tens of thousands of people have been living on the streets for decades?
Is it any wonder that the city blew a $1.2 billion homeless housing bond on developments that cost over $700,000 per unit to build?
Is it any wonder that only narrow special interests, from select developers to big unions, seem to benefit most from whatever it is the city does?
Is it any wonder that the city has long maintained an alarmingly high rate of poverty?
Is it any wonder that the city has continued its economic trajectory of wide inequality?
Is it any wonder that the city has wasted vast proportions of its budget on government pensions rather than city services?
No one should be surprised. City Hall has been a clown show.
It’s been that way for a long time; we’re just seeing the long-term consequences of fundamental problems.
It has been nine years since the Los Angeles 2020 Commission warned that “Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward. We risk falling behind in adapting to the realities of the 21st century and becoming a city in decline,”
They noted the lack of public engagement with and transparency out of City Hall, of the problems of bloated bureaucracies, City Hall insiders and special interest influence.
Those are all the same problems that plague the city of Los Angeles today.
Of course, there’s only so much any commission or report can do. And so here we are — if council members aren’t heading to court or the exits under a dark cloud, many of the rest are so far to the left that people should just start taking and placing bets on how long it will be before Los Angeles completely implodes.
I say all of this, yes, as a cynic, but also someone who has lived in the city of Los Angeles most of my life.
A place with all of the potential Los Angeles has shouldn’t have the absolute trash heap of a government that it has had for years. But it does.
Most, if not all, of the aforementioned political creatures are products of dysfunctional political machines, who then have their own little fiefdoms once elected. That’s what Cedillo, de León and Martinez were so intent on protecting. They used the cover of “Latinos” and the Latino community, but they’re in it for themselves at the end of the day.
Most Los Angeles residents couldn’t name their council member and even fewer could say what exactly any of them have done on any matter of significance. That will need to change if Los Angeles is going to course-correct. City leaders need to be held accountable for what they actually do and which special interests they meet with and answer to.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/what-an-absolute-disaster-the-city-of-los-angeles-is/ar-AA131Kbr
Arizona:
We may be headed toward a buyers market as inventory increases and prices begin to decline. We advise sellers to be strategic and well-informed when pricing their home.
Catching up to rapid price decreases and utilizing recent comparables will allow buyers who have been shut out of the purchasing process for the past 18 months to potentially put an offer down.
To identify the sweet spot in the pricing of a home, it is important to articulate a figure that is reflective of a home’s fair market value based on floor plan, size, and condition.
https://www.gilbertsunnews.com/special_issues/navigating-a-volatile-time-for-mortgage-rates/article_009fcdf2-4c0f-11ed-aec8-6344349a8f08.html
1 in 4 public housing units sit vacant during D.C. affordability crisis
The apartment is a time capsule. In the fridge, still plugged in and running, sits a mostly empty package of Oscar Mayer deli meat dated May 2019. The freezer holds a 16-pound turkey — best if used by June 29, 2019.
As hundreds leave, dozens trickle in
Crystal Ballard lives in a third-floor two-bedroom in Hopkins Apartments, a 158-unit DCHA complex in Southeast Washington. Trash in the vacant unit next door, which neighborhood youths have used as a hangout, has fed mice and roach infestations. Several years ago, she says, DCHA fixed up the unit.
“But they didn’t move anybody in,” Ballard said. “It was a smack in the face.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1-in-4-public-housing-units-sit-vacant-during-dc-affordability-crisis/ar-AA131zXp
The real world, however, isn’t showing quite the same enthusiasm as Zuckerberg for his new vision.
In the past 14 months, Meta — which used to be called Facebook — has seen its share price fall nearly 60 per cent, wiping a staggering $600 billion off its market value. True, the company is still worth nearly $400 billion, but the collapse means Zuckerberg’s personal fortune has shrunk by more than $76 billion since January and he’s no longer among the richest 20 people on the planet.
This monumental slump reflects in part a general malaise in the technology industry, caused by declining advertising revenue and increased competition. The social media sites Facebook and Instagram — both part of Meta — are being pressed hard, for instance, by outfits such as China’s phenomenally successful TikTok.
But increasingly, it appears that Zuckerberg’s obsession with his virtual reality kingdom of the Metaverse is playing a large part in the company’s difficulties.
The omens were not auspicious when the avatar that engineers produced of Zuckerberg drew widespread ridicule.
It made him look like a baby, or perhaps a porcelain doll — with a fixed smile and wide green but lifeless eyes set in an unlined face.
Social media exploded in mockery, prompting Zuckerberg — already a Silicon Valley hate figure as he sinks tens of billions of dollars into the Metaverse in a make-or-break bet on the internet’s future — to rush to get it redone. A company insider claimed they created 40 versions of Zuckerberg’s face before a final replacement was chosen.
But questions about data- harvesting are not the only criticism levelled at Zuckerberg’s dreamscape. Others include complaints that its graphics are still as primitive as the ones in video games from the 1990s and there’s so little to do in the Metaverse that there seems not much point venturing there in the first place.
Despite paying $400 (£358) for the most basic headset, visitors generally don’t return to the site — a rambling collection of virtual worlds such as Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party and Murder Village — after the first month. Common complaints are that the technology’s endlessly glitchy and there’s not enough to do. ‘An empty world is a sad world,’ commented an internal document.
Last month, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta’s Metaverse division, spotted how few of the company’s staff were actually on it and said managers will start checking up on them. ‘Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time?’ he wrote pleadingly on an internal Meta message board.
‘The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?’
It also emerged that some Meta staff mockingly refer to any work that’s done on Metaverse as ‘MMH’ or ‘Make Mark Happy’ projects. It’s hardly a ringing vote of confidence from the people supposedly building this brave new world. Zuckerberg has made clear that those who don’t share his vision will be shown the door.
As Meta’s 83,000 staff strive to make the boss happy and keep their jobs, critics of the Metaverse dearly hope that this is one digital experiment that does indeed bite the dust before it becomes an even more toxic environment in the hunt for more users.
While the company claims it wants ‘almost Disney levels of safety’ for users, visitors report that it’s a scary place with very little moderation.
A popular YouTube broadcaster named Ethan Klein streamed a session on the Metaverse last month, in which he tried to be as sexually explicit as possible while surrounded by children in the Plaza, its central meeting place. He was thrown off and barred from returning as punishment — but only for two hours.
A BBC researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl said she was able to easily access a digital strip club on the Metaverse, where a man told her that avatars can ‘get naked and do unspeakable things’, while others talked about ‘erotic role play’.
An NSPCC spokesman described some parts of the Metaverse as ‘dangerous by design’.
Already condemned around the world for what a senior whistleblower called products that ‘harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more’, Meta’s rapacious chief executive has the nerve to think he can now convince people to spend even more time in its sinister and exploitative company.
His peculiar arrogance may this time have proved to be his undoing.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11321765/Will-Facebook-founder-Mark-Zuckerbergs-blind-faith-metaverse-dream-ruin-400bn-empire.html
he’s no longer among the richest 20 people on the planet.
Good so maybe he won’t feel compelled to spend $419MM to buy an election next time.
I have never used facebook.
“Good so maybe he won’t feel compelled to spend $419MM to buy an election next time.”
Indeed. Good call.
$419MM
His tithing.
The Real Estate Quarterly: Storage Surge – Subleasing Space Soars
Los Angeles Business Journal|1 hour ago
Subleasing hit an all-time high in the greater Los Angeles office market’s third quarter, with companies like Netflix Inc. in Burbank giving back large amounts of space. The streaming giant is listing more than 66,
Column: In that racist leaked recording, Los Angeles sees its true reflection — and it’s ugly
I wasn’t expecting to hear a reference to my favorite childhood movie as I listened to the surreptitiously recorded conversation among Latino officials that has shaken Los Angeles to its core.
But there it was, sandwiched between then-City Council President Nury Martinez’s cruel and racist comments about Oaxacans (they’re so ugly), a Black child (he’s like a monkey), a gay colleague (“a little bitch”).
City Councilman Kevin de Léon spoke of what he called the “Wizard of Oz” effect. Black Angelenos, he implied, are overrepresented in the city’s corridors of power, because they make so much noise.
“When you’re at the side of the curtain, it’s like this big voice, it sounds big,” De León tells his colleagues. “It sounds like there’s thousands. And then, when you actually pull the curtain, is that you see the little Wizard of Oz. You know what? It’s the same thing.”
Labor leader Ron Herrera, who has since resigned, agrees that Latinos have more voting power than Black Angelenos: “It’s real simple,” he says. “You have 100 people, 52 of them are Mexicanos.… I feel pretty good about my chances of beating your ass.”
City Councilmember Gil Cedillo then pipes up. “Twenty-five or so are Black, and the 25 Blacks are shouting.”
“But,” says De Léon, “they shout like they are 250, when there’s 100 of us.”
This is some shockingly crude arithmetic. It is indisputable that Latinos in Los Angeles have faced substantial racism. Indeed, anti-Latino discrimination in Los Angeles is the stuff of legend — Zoot Suit riots, Chavez Ravine, the Chicano Moratorium. Which is why it’s doubly upsetting when Latinos who have made it to the top rung of power would kick the ladder out from other people of color.
The real Wizard of Oz effect in Los Angeles is the lie we have told ourselves over and over that we elect leaders who embrace progressive values, especially anti-racism. We like to believe that we live in a tolerant place where differences are celebrated and all are welcome.
And yet, every few decades, the curtain is pulled back and Angelenos are violently reminded that, far from the racially harmonious paradise we’d like to believe we have, our city suffers from the same racial hatred that has afflicted this country since the very beginning.
No matter how far we’ve come, the stench of racism lingers. Too often, it expresses itself in the way our communities are developed and policed, and the way our schools are run.
It was in Los Angeles that real estate professionals popularized the concept of the restrictive racial covenant when the city’s population was exploding in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, about 95% of the city’s housing stock was off limits to people of color.
For years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1948, covenants were still boilerplate in Los Angeles real estate deeds. In fact, the 1960 deed to my parents’ first house, in Northridge, forbade them from selling to anyone who wasn’t white.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-10-16/city-council-los-angeles-racism-racist
Knuckle dragging racist sheet wearing Californians. What a bunch of red necks.
They still have a long way to go to catch up to Jack Abramoff’s corruption as a lobbyist for his “troglodyte” benefactors, the Native American tribes who were seeking to develop casino gambling on their reservations.
Column: In that racist leaked recording, Los Angeles sees its true reflection — and it’s ugly
Newsflash! Contrary to leftist beliefs, Mexicans are tribal and don’t like blacks or gays. And they don’t like other Hispanics: Central Americans hate Mexicans. Mexicans don’t like Cubans or Puerto Ricans (they mock their accents). And South Americans, who are the latest arrivals, are distrusted by all. Mexicans especially dislike Argentinians. Oh, and whiter Mexicans, like Ms. Martinez, don’t like brown “indios”.
It will be interesting to see how the Dems will deal with this. If they try to replace the Mexicans with blacks on city council, there could be a revolt that could put GOP candidates in office.
Mexicans don’t like Cubans or Puerto Ricans
I am from Chicago and I can affirm, at least back in the day, Mexicans did NOT like Puerto Ricans. Life may have changed in 40 years but some how I doubt it.
“The macro environment continues to deteriorate. We think many ad-driven companies will miss their fourth-quarter earnings,” Needham Senior Analyst Laura Martin told Yahoo Finance “And in Meta’s case, not only is just the macro environment deteriorating, but they’re losing a lot of user time to TikTok. And that continues to happen.”
According to research conducted by Piper Sandler, TikTok is the favorite social media app among teens and the margin has only widened for the Bytedance-owned company when compared to Facebook and Instagram.
“I think Mark Zuckerberg is telling us he doesn’t think he has a core business,” Martin said. “He is moving to Reels because it competes with TikTok. He is moving to the metaverse, and he’s changed the name of this company, which tells me he doesn’t think his core business that he built 15 years ago is actually a business anymore.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-is-telling-us-he-doesnt-think-he-has-a-core-business-meta-analyst-122101655.html
that he built
Wired (2/4/2004): Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project
The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence. Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, […]
Facebook “launched” 2/4/2004. By end of the year, angel investor Peter Thiel invested $500K.
It’s a big club that you’re not in and that many people are stupid enough to volunteer the desired information.
Miromar Lakes, FL Housing Prices Crater 10% YOY As Mounting Mortgage Defaults And Personal Bankruptcy Filings Soar Across Florida
https://www.movoto.com/miromar-lakes-fl/market-trends/
As one noted economist advises, “Mortgage debt is the most toxic and damaging debt of all. Avoid it at all costs.”