thehousingbubble@gmail.com
Blog

When You Go Up, Up, Up, There’s Nowhere To Go But Down

A report from the Asheville Citizen Times in North Carolina. “It was the epitome of a hot market: Local buyers so anxious to snap up a house, they wouldn’t even bother to haggle with the seller. In fact, they would offer more than the asking price. Now, that Asheville area trend appears to be cooling slightly. According to recently released home sale data for a 13-county Western North Carolina region, sellers in June got on average 97.7% of the list price. That’s down from 100.4% in June 2022, numbers from Canopy MLS released July 28 said. Asheville real estate agent Dave Noyes attributed the slowdown to rising mortgage rates. ‘It took 25-30% of the buyers out of the market,’ said Noyes. Other average sales prices drops: Henderson County at -1.5% to $500,994, Madison County at -5.8% to $463,247, Transylvania County at -5.9% to $572,698, Jackson County at -35.3% to $351,681, McDowell County at -9.6% to $329,101, Burke County at -0.2% to $294,693, Swain County at -9.8% to $340,817, Rutherford County at -10.4% to $338,485.”

The American Statesman in Texas. “In June, home sales in the Austin region decreased 8.5% from the prior June, and the $483,000 median sold price was down 9.6% from June 2022, the Austin Board of Realtors said in its latest report. The board’s housing economist, Clare Losey said it’s important to remember that home prices ‘are still very much elevated’ relative to pre-pandemic levels. In June, the median sales price in the Austin region ($483,000) surpassed that of June 2019 by 50%. That means ‘affordability constraints on home prices are still very much at play,’ she said. And coupled with higher interest rates, ‘that’s what has been driving that moderation in sales activity and prices themselves.'”

The Miami Herald in Florida. “Despite the wave of outsiders who relocated to Florida during the pandemic, Miami-Dade County actually saw a net decrease in population from 2020 to 2022, according to newly released U.S. Census Bureau figures. The newcomers were outnumbered by those departing by a margin not seen since the throes of the Great Recession that began in late 2007. Miriam Merino’s life might cause anyone to think she enjoyed the best of Miami-Dade County. In recent years, her quality of life declined. The city’s allure had faded. ‘Traffic became impossible. People that came in were disrespectful. The developers get whatever they want,’ Merino said. ‘It became a pirate town. Whoever has more money, wins.'”

KTVU in California. “A new study suggested that the Bay Area’s housing market was seeing one of the nation’s largest cooldowns, as 13 local cities were among a list of the top 18 U.S. spots, where home prices were falling. At the top of the list was the East Bay city of Dublin, where home values plunged more than 15.37%, according to the study. Prices for the typical home in Dublin averaged $1,264,563 in May, a drop of $230,000 from the previous year. San Francisco ranked second, dropping 13.3%, or $195,275, to bring the average home value of a typical home to $1,273,464. Palo Alto saw the third-largest percentage drop falling 12.82%, or $464,868, though the average home value there was the highest on the list. Fremont took the fourth slot with a drop of 12.77% or $202,814 to average $1,384,781.”

“Kirkland, Washington broke up the Bay Area streak, coming in fifth. But Oakland followed, and it was the only city in the top 10 with a home value under $1 million, according to the analysis. Pleasanton and San Mateo took the sixth and seventh rankings respectively. Other Bay Area cities identified among the top to see the biggest percentage drops included Alameda, Mountain View, Berkeley, Livermore, Union City, and San Ramon.”

Money Wise on California. “America’s most-robbed Walgreens was the victim of at least three thefts within 30 minutes in July, according to CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah — one of the latest examples of brazen crime at the location. The thefts were witnessed during the filming of a televised report at the Walgreens in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. According to Lah, Walgreens has identified this location as having the ‘highest theft rate’ — hit more than a dozen times a day — of the pharmacy chain’s nearly 9,000 U.S. stores. San Francisco resident Richie Greenberg, who toured the Richmond Walgreens with Lah, described what he felt after previously seeing the chained-up items. ‘This was bizarre, something I’d never seen before,’ he said. ‘This is just more icing on the cake. Telling us that rampant crime has become a regular part of life.'”

“Real estate investing expert Patrick Carroll said the commercial real estate market is tumbling toward a crash that could be as devastating as the 2008 crisis. ‘The party’s over, unfortunately,’ he said. ‘The office market’s going to be destroyed, hotels are going to be destroyed — it’s going to be ugly.'”

The Real Deal. “Last summer, well before multifamily syndicator Tides Equities would show its troubled hand to investors, economists warned that the Federal Reserve’s rapid rate hikes could trigger a wave of defaults. Meanwhile, MF1 Capital, one of Tides’ favored lenders, was doling out loans like it was 2021. The debt fund, led by Scott Waynebern, originated at least $7.4 billion in debt between 2020 and 2021, giving high-leverage loans to multifamily syndicators looking to act on aggressive fix-and-flip plans.”

“Though the loans were floating-rate, they were short-term, the benchmark federal funds rate was near zero, and most real estate players did not expect inflation, then dubbed transitory, to set off the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes. But industry observers say that by 2022, with the fight against inflation in the spotlight, a downturn was apparent to anyone willing to notice it. ‘You could make an argument the writing was on the wall by the end of 2021, and especially the first quarter of 2022,’ one Sun Belt-focused investor said.”

“Bankruptcy is another path for syndicators in a cash crunch, industry insiders say. But most of the bridge loans coming due carry a so-called ‘bad boy’ guarantee — a declaration that the borrower won’t commit a nefarious act, like filing for bankruptcy or scoring subordinate debt on a property without a lender’s consent. If any do file for bankruptcy, it would break the guarantee and lenders could go after more than just the property. A person familiar with multifamily syndicators put it thus: ‘It’s [like] when you mortgage all your properties in Monopoly — you’re done.'”

Bisnow Philadelphia. “Without the backing of billion-dollar funds, developing student housing is like threading a needle right now — and developers are running out of needles. The flood of institutional capital into the sector has flowed primarily toward universities in Power 5 athletic conferences, and longtime student housing developers like The Michaels Organization and Campus Apartments have been priced out, executives from both companies said. ‘At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, there’s 3,500 beds coming,’ said Campus Apartments Executive Vice President Miles Orth said. ‘Florida State [University], [The University of] Florida — all the markets you’d expect. We’re a little worried about the overbuilding happening in those markets.'”

The Beacon Herald in Canada. “Permits for construction projects in Brant County dropped sharply in the first half of the year in comparison to 2022 but there are signs business is picking up. ‘We’ve been hitting records year after year and it can’t keep happening forever,’ said county chief building inspector Richard Weidhaas. ‘When you go up, up, up, there’s nowhere to go but down eventually.'”

Metro in the UK. “Rishi Sunak has appeared on LBC Radio this morning to take calls from concerned listeners asking how he can help them amid the cost of living crisis. One caller explained that he is a married father-of-four in his early 30s with a family to support and has ‘been encouraged to invest in bricks and mortar and become homeowners’. Jack, from Guildford, asked: ‘But when my current two-year fixed rate expires at the end of this year, my new fixed rate will go up from £1,500 a month to £2,800 a month.’ While admitting he was ‘incredibly sympathetic’ about Jack’s situation, which is being ‘faced by many across the country’, Mr Sunak effectively told him to ask the bank to deal with it. ‘So you can talk to your bank and you can do a couple of things with them. You could extend the term of your mortgage by say five to 10 years – or you could switch to an interest only mortgage.'”

“When presenter Nick Ferrari asked what he made of the PM’s advice, Jack replied: ‘I’m already on a 35-year term and that £2,800 was extending that term to 37 years. Now bearing in mind I am in my early 30s, I don’t really want to be paying it off until I’m in the grave.’”

The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. “A home hunting couple with no children could spend $1,038,000 at auction while the cash rate is 4.1 per cent, modelling from comparison platform Canstar shows. That assumes they have saved a 20 per cent deposit, slash their living expenses to a frugal level to maximise their borrowing power, and each earn an average income of $94,000 a year based on ABS figures. But in April last year, that couple could have spent $1,422,000 if they had the deposit ready. Their budget since dropped $384,000 as the Reserve Bank raised interest rates at the fastest pace in a generation.”

“An average couple could no longer borrow enough to purchase a median priced house in Sydney, which cost about $1,334,000 in July on CoreLogic figures. That’s a drop of only $109,000 since April last year, a far more modest change compared to the cut to their spending power. The average couple could afford the median house in Melbourne, valued at about $924,000, and down only $86,000 since April. Brisbane’s median house value of about $820,000 is down just over $71,000 in the same time period.”

Frontier Myanmar. “With rows of smart houses with large yards and reliable electricity, on winding lanes secluded from Yangon’s main thoroughfares, Golden Valley has long been one of Yangon’s most desirable neighbourhoods. A luxury housing bubble helped to enrich members of the military and their associates in the decade of reforms that preceded the 2021 coup, but a subsequent exodus of foreign professionals has tanked the rental market – possibly beyond repair.”

“At its peak, homes in Golden Valley were being rented for as much as US$10,000 a month and sale prices for certain tower blocks became even more expensive than New York City. Rents eased gradually from 2016, but the military coup in February 2021 caused demand to collapse. Expat-heavy areas like Golden Valley emptied out, leaving once highly desired homes vacant and pushing prices down by more than 50 percent, according to two real estate agents who spoke to Frontier.”

“Daw Htet*, a doctor and Golden Valley resident who spoke to Frontier through an intermediary for safety reasons, said she had to slash the rental cost of one of her two properties by two thirds to entice a tenant. ‘In the last couple of years, it has been harder to find a tenant because most of the expats have left the country. In 2015, I rented my house for $3,000 per month, but now I only rent it for less than $1,000,’ she said. ‘For the market to recover – I don’t think it ever can. It was a fluke that so many people came in when they did at a time [when] the housing market was at a place where there was very limited supply in relation to the rapid high demand,’ said Mr David Ney, who worked as a real estate agent in Yangon from 2009 to 2015. ‘Now there is more stock than ever before and more to come online when paused developments eventually get finished.'”

Related Posts
This Post Has 98 Comments

    1. Election night Tuesday, at about midnight on the East Coast, Trump led in all the battleground states by decent margins. The betting odds were more than 75% for Trump to win. Then, for some unexplainable reason, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada all seemingly stopped counting votes simultaneously, in unison. They took a “pause” at around 1 a.m. None of those states reported any additional votes for the next three hours. So, what did they do for those three hours?

  2. The Real Deal, Bisnow, Miami Herald and Myanmar articles are worth reading in full. These apartment syndicators are totally fooked and so is everyone else nvolved.

  3. ‘Other average sales prices drops: Henderson County at -1.5% to $500,994, Madison County at -5.8% to $463,247, Transylvania County at -5.9% to $572,698, Jackson County at -35.3% to $351,681, McDowell County at -9.6% to $329,101, Burke County at -0.2% to $294,693, Swain County at -9.8% to $340,817, Rutherford County at -10.4% to $338,485’

    Not one or two sh$tholes, entire counties are sinking like a turd in a well.

      1. Mo’ CR8R

        “Prices for the typical home in Dublin averaged $1,264,563 in May, a drop of $230,000 from the previous year. San Francisco ranked second, dropping 13.3%, or $195,275, to bring the average home value of a typical home to $1,273,464. Palo Alto saw the third-largest percentage drop falling 12.82%, or $464,868, though the average home value there was the highest on the list. Fremont took the fourth slot with a drop of 12.77% or $202,814 to average $1,384,781.”

        1. How can anyone afford to buy a home in the Bay Area, with values dropping at an annual rate exceeding $100,000?

          Try not to catch yourself a falling knife.

        2. This is so like 2007. It won’t be full capitulation until 2025 to 2028. I’m not sure when the new bottom will form.

          1. It will bottom 1-2 years after Congress starts paying people to buy houses again with the tax credits

          2. Last go round, The Forehead was hired to bail-out the Wall street banking system. Who will they trot out next?

    2. Other average sales prices drops
      There is very little well paid work in those areas. Nice places in the summer to get out of the heat but that has to be second home and/or speculator money that drove the prices.

    3. Those counties are all Appalachia. Great culture, but economically it is and has always been a sh$thole. I’m not even sure if they frack that far south.

  4. ‘When presenter Nick Ferrari asked what he made of the PM’s advice, Jack replied: ‘I’m already on a 35-year term and that £2,800 was extending that term to 37 years. Now bearing in mind I am in my early 30s, I don’t really want to be paying it off until I’m in the grave’

    I’d bet 5 pesos with a queen on it that Jack is still eating, probably every day.

  6. Is it safe to assume that interest rates will start dropping any day now, providing relief to the fraught housing market?

    1. Financial Times
      US economy
      Fitch strips US of triple A rating after borrowing stand-off
      Agency cites ‘erosion of governance’ as it downgrades debt of world’s largest economy
      American flags at the Washington Monument near the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US
      The Fitch downgrade comes two months after debt ceiling brinkmanship brought the US to the edge of default
      Kate Duguid and Harriet Clarfelt in New York yesterday

      Fitch Ratings has cut the US debt rating from triple A to double A plus, citing worsening fiscal conditions and governance, two months after political brinkmanship brought the world’s largest economy to the edge of a sovereign default.

      The rating agency on Tuesday said its downgrade reflected “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years” and “a high and growing general government debt burden”. Fitch also noted an “erosion of governance” over the past two decades “that has manifested in repeated debt limit stand-offs and last-minute resolutions”.

      Washington narrowly avoided a default projected for June after legislators and the White House reached a deal to raise the federal borrowing limit at the eleventh hour. Fitch in late May had warned of a possible downgrade, pointing to “increased political partisanship that is hindering reaching a resolution”.
      …

    2. U.S. Stock Market Rally Threatened by Rising Treasury Yields
      Michael Kramer | Jul 31, 2023 03:43AM ET

      This week will feature a ton of economic data that will likely reveal that the job market remains strong and the economy remains robust. Initial jobless claims have consistently decreased in the past few weeks, and the Indeed job openings have increased in July.

      Additionally, the 2Q GDP came in stronger than expected. This all points to an economy that remains robust and an environment likely to see rates push higher from here.
      …
      https://m.investing.com/analysis/us-stock-market-rally-threatened-by-rising-treasury-yields-200640493

    3. Yahoo
      Reuters
      TREASURIES-US long bond yields rise to year-high ahead of Treasury refunding
      Davide Barbuscia
      Tue, August 1, 2023 at 12:17 PM PDT·4 min read

      NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury yields rose on Tuesday with 30-year paper touching a new year-high as investors expected an increase in government debt issuance and anticipated more signs of economic resilience,…

      https://finance.yahoo.com/news/treasuries-us-long-bond-yields-191725151.html

    4. Business
      Today’s mortgage rates for August 2, 2023
      Published: Aug. 02, 2023, 8:50 a.m.
      By Katherine Rodriguez | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

      Looking for the most up-to-date mortgage rates to empower your purchasing or refinancing decisions? We’ve got you covered.

      Here, you can view today’s mortgage interest rates, updated daily according to data from Bankrate, so you can have the most current data when purchasing or refinancing your home.

      30-year fixed rate mortgages

      The average mortgage interest rate for a standard 30-year fixed mortgage is 7.31%, an increase of 0.03 percentage points from last week’s 7.28%.
      …
      https://www.nj.com/business/2023/08/todays-mortgage-rates-for-august-2-2023.html

    5. Financial Times
      2 hours ago 05:51
      Treasury boosts issuance of new long-term US government debt
      Kate Duguid in New York

      The US will boost its issuance of new long-term debt this quarter, in order to make up the growing gap between tax revenue and government spending.

      The Treasury department announced on Wednesday that it plans to issue $103bn in its quarterly refunding next week, an increase of $7bn from the prior quarter. That will include offerings of $42bn in three-year notes, $38bn in 10-year notes, and $23bn in 30-year bonds.

      In addition to the refunding, the Treasury said it will also increase the size of its two- and five-year auctions by $3bn each month over the coming three months.

      The Treasury’s new borrowing plans mean a flood of longer-dated debt is heading towards the government bond market, which could drive yields higher and create some problems as the market attempts to digest the bigger auction sizes.

  7. Asheville ,NC is is a beansprout eating , bike trail enclave full of transplanted liberal Yanks, with an awful traffic mess.,on the Interstate….Even the Florida transplants, that can’t stand the tropic heat they encountered when they moved there ,can’t afford it now…Whatever happens to the overpriced real Estate in Asheville, they deserve it all,maybe it will send them back “Up there”….

    1. It’s the same all over the state of nc. I hope we get financially Slaughtered!!!!!! I’m sick of these F###$ moving here like it’s the last place on earth.

      1. You can’t swing a dead cat in Texas without hitting a West Coast, Yankee, or Chicago transplant.

  8. ‘Traffic became impossible. People that came in were disrespectful. The developers get whatever they want,’ Merino said. ‘It became a pirate town. Whoever has more money, wins’

    This was all kicked off by a WSJ article saying population was down in Miami. But that’s old news. Bisnow reported they were down 40,000 people around a year and a half ago. She’s right though. Some of the nicest people I’ve ever met were in Miami when I was there in 2018. But after a few minutes of chit chat, they would start talking about the drug money, never lived in condos, hushed conversations about ‘powerful developers’ etc.

    2. “The underlying animosity in town had gotten pretty rough,” says Ryan, who left Truckee in June 2022. “You’d accidentally brush someone on the sidewalk and they’d say, ‘Go back to the bay, as*hole.’

        1. Libtards fleeing the commie dystopias they created should be branded on the forehead with a hammer & sickle, then sent back to whatever blue state hellhole they tried to escape. They made their bed, let them lie in it.

  9. ‘said it’s important to remember that home prices ‘are still very much elevated’ relative to pre-pandemic levels. In June, the median sales price in the Austin region ($483,000) surpassed that of June 2019 by 50%. That means ‘affordability constraints on home prices are still very much at play,’ she said. And coupled with higher interest rates, ‘that’s what has been driving that moderation in sales activity and prices themselves’

    And you still had over a year of minor respiratory illness to come Clare. BTW, they have a photo: she’s a BIG girl! I bet she could dunk a basketball in junior high.

  10. ‘described what he felt after previously seeing the chained-up items. ‘This was bizarre, something I’d never seen before,’ he said. ‘This is just more icing on the cake. Telling us that rampant crime has become a regular part of life’

    They’re even locking up ketchup and mustard. I’m not kidding!

    I posted a puddle watching link the other day that said, the guberment can’t control bums, but they can change the Earths temperature with a tax.

    1. “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” — Edmund Burke

    2. Dumb people who couldn’t hack it in private industry usually find jobs in .gov. I have no idea why people think the government can solve anything besides creating new ways to extort middle class tax payers.

  11. RE: When You Go Up, Up, Up, There’s Nowhere To Go But Down

    It is interesting that nobody uttered such pious words when the Fed was goosing the buyers with its insanely low interest rate policy (a/k/a idiocy) calling it “Economic Recovery (a/k/a Reflation)” and now it is all its victims’ fault.

    RE: has ‘been encouraged to invest in bricks and mortar and become homeowners’

    And now the successor of Gordon Brown (a/k/a Golden Brown) who had dumped Bank of England’ gold at $250/oz is advising them on how to keep kicking the can down the street – forever . . .

  12. A reader sent these in:

    Got insider scoop on a small homebuilder in Naples going bankrupt – approx ~150 homes/yr volume

    https://twitter.com/MacroEdgeRes/status/1686545507110305794

    Nothing says Wall Street is just going to buy all the real estate quite like *checks notes* mass investor exodus and Wall Street being forced to liquidate real estate.

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686463142363385856

    The low in 2012 had housing affordability in the high-normal range. We never even returned to post-war mean. Fed purchasing MBS prevented a proper correction from happening. Needed to be 80-90% drop in real terms, because that’s how all major bubbles resolve.

    https://twitter.com/BTC_i_Hodl/status/1686554268340232192

    “It’s a good time for you to get in, not me” LOL

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686550402437914624

    Realtors went from ‘best time to buy is yesterday or today’ to blaming Trudeau 4 everything. 😂 Where was this energy on the 🏡 price run up? These ‘influencers’ are compromised. Y’all had no issues collecting CEBA from Trudeau in 2020.

    https://twitter.com/ManyBeenRinsed/status/1686524625277091840

    There are no good solutions for housing bulls now.
    1. Prices were toast over 3%
    2. The only reason rates will fall back to 3% is a depression.
    3. There was never a housing shortage, it was just a speculative mania (rocketing rental vacancies)
    4. The only reason rates got to 3% at all was because the Fed was buying MBS which they view as a mistake.
    5. Net working age demographics pulled us out of a tailspin in 2011. That tailwind is gone. My question isn’t does it fall, my question is how does it ever recover? The only path for the bulls is REAL wages increasing 40% over the next 2-3 years. Good luck!

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686516654401077250

    it never gets old

    https://twitter.com/scottrayUT/status/1686509765005099011

    Throw in the damn towel lady! It’s over!

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686504946366128128

    My face when she says she’s got an $875/mo car loan, 30 YR mortgage made on a 3% DP, $57,000 in student loans, $26,000 in credit card debt, and says the Fed will never allow another recession to happen.

    https://twitter.com/DonMiami3/status/1686496422814793728

    Reminder, there is more student loan debt than all auto loans combined. And student loan payments begin again in October

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686490156491247616

    US Bonds are down 13% over the last 3 years, their worst 3-year return in history.

    https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1686419294224109578

    The average price of a used Tesla is now over $25k lower than its peak price from last July. That’s a 37% decline to $42,785, a new all-time low.

    https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1686366117613142017

    Is earnings dropping 95% bad?

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1686444380549423104

    The average American credit card balance is at a record $7,300. Meanwhile, the median household has just $5,300 in savings. Delinquency rates are up 6 straight quarters, on track for the longest streak since 2008. We are “fighting” inflation with credit cards. (a thread)

    https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1686435580249329668

    “77% of respondents plan to increase exposure to tech stocks or keep it steady over the next six months. Less than 10% see a bubble bursting. That has pushed the Nasdaq 100 to its best first half in history”

    https://twitter.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1686049073600643077

    The pandemic bubble was dumb, but this AI bubble is even dumber.

    https://twitter.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1685664022673174529

    NYC IS BACK!

    https://twitter.com/EnronChairman/status/1686562817061654528

    The Treasury’s new guidance today is that they want borrow ::checks notes:: $1.85 trillion during the second half of this year.

    https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1686113133868285953

    If 2023 Yellen would only listen to 2010 Yellen. Everything she bemoaned & warned about for years she is now executing as Treasury Secretary to ever more extreme degrees.

    https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1686433308308099073

    Campaign finance charges on Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX have been dropped. This is unusual. He gave millions to politicians. And there wasn’t a list of who which politicians and groups he gave money to. Until now.

    https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1685636611156103168

    1. “mass investor exodus and Wall Street being forced to liquidate real estate”

      Too bad, so sad to watch this movie again.

    2. “The low in 2012 had housing affordability in the high-normal range. We never even returned to post-war mean. Fed purchasing MBS prevented a proper correction from happening. Needed to be 80-90% drop in real terms, because that’s how all major bubbles resolve.”

      I’ve been harping on that for years. We never had a full correction. Eventually, as Mises said, the choice will be between a full correction or currency collapse, and the correction will be the worse the longer it’s been put off.

    3. The average price of a used Tesla is now over $25k lower than its peak price from last July. That’s a 37% decline to $42,785, a new all-time low.

      Prices always drop on things I don’t want or need.

      1. Plus $42K for a used car that might ignite doesn’t sound like a deal to me. Plus the stupid things are chock full of pricey, custom electronic components that will cost a king’s ransom to repair, even more so than 2023 ICE cars (which are also bad)

      2. Prices always drop on things I don’t want or need.

        The thing is, is that nobody really wanted a used Tesla. Just like nobody really wants a house that is priced three times more than its true value. But this is what every bubble in history looks like–prices have nothing to do with demand or reality.

        1. I remember the FUH2 site where people posted pictures of themselves flipping off Hummers & their drivers.

          1. The $150,000 high top Mercedes Sprinter vans with the $15k mountain bikes on back are the latest F U recipients. These people are annoying a f.

          2. I remember the FUH2 site where people posted pictures of themselves flipping off Hummers & their drivers.

            The anti-Hummer crowd were just social climbers and virtue signalers. It was the cool thing to do and was a demonstration of one’s independent thinking–just like getting tattoos shows everyone how different and “independent” you are. Only rebels get tattoos, right?

            This is just like the current fad of people magically turning into gays and non-binary beings. As if sexual reproduction is just a “social construct”. You know, like all of the advance forms of life a billion of years ago didn’t know that they were actually gay.

  13. Investors are making the same mistake they made during the dot-com and housing bubbles, analyst says
    Theron Mohamed Aug 2, 2023, 5:06 AM ET
    Three men in suits looking up with computer screens and large windows behind them.
    Traders at the New York Stock Exchange.
    TIMOTHY A. CLARY / Getty

    Investors are so excited about stocks that they’re missing the bigger, grimmer economic picture.
    Danielle DiMartino Booth said the complacency reminded her of the dot-com and housing bubbles.
    She pointed to a surge in bankruptcies and mounting pressures in the bank and real estate sectors.
    …
    https://www.businessinsider.com/economy-recession-outlook-danielle-dimartino-booth-stocks-dotcom-housing-crashes-2023-8?amp=

    1. As a spoiled Californian the only nice neighborhoods I’ve seen in Florida were gated or security booth developments. It felt like rich and poor with a considerable jump between them, lots of morbid obesity and children everywhere.

    2. The rest of the neighborhood doesn’t look much better. If the neighborhood were safe (probably not), it might be worth paying $12K for the land with the public electricity and sewer. Tear it all out, put up a pre-fab for $100K, and you have a nice little homestead.

      1. “The rest of the neighborhood doesn’t look much better.”

        A “city limits” neighborhood has curbs, storm drainage and sanitary sewers. These are shacks on undeveloped land.

  15. NBC NEWS says that HEART ATTACKS up 30% in people due to COVID??!!

    According to a “study” heart attack deaths up nearly 30% in people ages 25 to 44. The clowns from the ‘Today’ show USA are still saying it’s from the convid boogieman not the quaxination.

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/6GxcIEFqhA14/

    6:31.

    1. The clowns from the ‘Today’ show USA are still saying it’s from the convid boogieman not the quaxination.

      They will NEVER admit that it’s the jab.

      1. They

        They are morally bankrupt, and complicit in mass genocide. Doctors, nurses, newscasters, politicians, crony corporatists and everybody else working in conjunction to hide the truth deserve to die like the people they murdered.

        1. The thought of them dancing in videos while their patients died because they refused to give them effective treatments makes my blood boil.

          1. I don’t think the floor nurses decided on treatment protocols. They were bored because admissions were low.

    2. Time for another re-post of this survey.

      Gallup — American Public Opinion and Vaccination Requirements (9/3/2021):

      “Americans’ political identity is strongly related to their opinions about vaccine requirements, echoing similar partisan differences on such issues as vaccination hesitancy, mask requirements and the importance of COVID-19 as the nation’s top problem. Very large majorities of Democrats are in favor of each of the five vaccination requirements tested …

      The variation across these party/vaccination status groups is extreme. For example, 96% of vaccinated Democrats favor the requirement for proof of vaccination before flying on an airplane, compared with 12% of unvaccinated Republicans. Ninety-four percent of vaccinated Democrats favor the requirement for attendance at events, compared with 9% of unvaccinated Republicans.”

      https://news.gallup.com/poll/354506/update-american-public-opinion-vaccination-requirements.aspx

      These people elected the politicians who enacted a “vaccine” mandate that threatened to get you FIRED FROM YOUR JOB for not getting injected with experimental mRNA poison.

      They voted to poison you, and they voted for you to be excluded from participating in society and to starve.

      They voted to enact a medical genocide.

      1. Vaccinated Democrats demand that everybody be vaccinated to prevent people from spreading Covid. This in spite of the fact that the vaccines have never demonstrated that they prevent infected people from being infectious–i.e., able to spread Covid to others and the environment.

        This is exactly like the behavior exhibited in the Salem Witch Trials.

  16. London Ontario Real Estate Update July 2023 – Prices Fall Fast in July: Correction Starting?
    Mark Mitchell – Mortgage Broker London Ontario
    Aug 2, 2023

    London’s real estate market showed major price drops in July, with the Benchmark, Average and Median prices showing their first significant drops in 2023. While some are coining this a summer slowdown, historical data shows that this slowdown may be much more significant than previous summers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIkjG5GfvE8

    7 minutes.

  17. – Full article post. You may reduce or reference…

    https://www.newsweek.com/americans-should-not-have-rent-american-dream-opinion-1816686

    Americans Should Not Have to Rent the American Dream | Opinion

    CAROL ROTH , FORMER INVESTMENT BANKER, ENTREPRENEUR, AND AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK “YOU WILL OWN NOTHING”

    ON 8/1/23 AT 11:21 AM EDT

    The following is adapted from the author’s New York Times bestselling book, You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back.

    For decades, people around the world have come to America to embrace freedoms, including property rights. The American Dream is often illustrated by owning a very specific piece of property—a home. That’s not a coincidence; the home is the largest asset on U.S. household balance sheets in terms of dollar value.

    But in recent years, the balance sheets of young and old alike have been wrecked by inflation, debt and college loans. Home prices have also been driven up by undersupply, government regulation, and even corporate competition.

    With that, more Americans are finding their dream isn’t attainable—it is only for rent.

    Corporations have been given a huge advantage through government and central bank policy. With this unlevel playing field, these institutional investors drove up the prices in traditional asset classes. When they couldn’t find enough of a return on their investment from the usual sources, Wall Street-backed corporate investors decided to come into the single-family home market.

    The New York Times Magazine reported that “from 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure, and a million more to short sale. Private-equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes.”

    It was an epic transfer of wealth.

    Moreover, it consolidated power with big institutions and has impaired the ability of many Americans to gain wealth via home ownership.

    While there was no meaningful institutional corporate investment in the housing market prior to 2010, at the end of 2022, more than one in every five homes was purchased from a corporate investor, according to CoreLogic.

    Imagine for a moment an America without broad individual home ownership.
    That America would be one with further exacerbated non-merit-based inequality. We know the rich and well-connected will continue to own housing assets and collect the wealth driven by both the rents and the price appreciation of those houses.

    Owning a home leads to more family wealth, directly and indirectly. Those who have more money can afford a house and eventually other investments, but those who face increasing rents are often priced out of investing, creating a cycle of non-ownership and lack of participation in wealth creation.

    NGOs like the World Economic Forum—which famously predicted in a 2021 video “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”—and publicly traded corporations buying up tens of thousands of single-family homes to rent back to the middle class pretend that moving away from ownership is for your convenience and happiness. But the “care-free life” of not having the ability to generate legacy wealth hasn’t worked out too well for people throughout history. Those without ownership have typically been unfree and unhappy—thus the old Hebrew Proverb: “He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land.”

    In consolidating ownership within the hands of the wealthy and well-connected and taking the American Dream away from the middle class, central planners are choosing the haves and have nots—a divide that’s been accelerating over the past decade and a half with more and more wealth being transferred from Main Street to Wall Street, by policy and by design.

    Non-ownership of single-family homes also has material and concerning implications for freedom. Non-ownership means that more of Americans lives are dictated by the cooperation and coercion of corporate and government forces. A corporation may not let you have a firearm in your home to defend yourself. If you say something they don’t like on social media, they may kick you out of your living space. Your rights hang in the balance.

    And as we’ve seen at length with the Twitter Filers, the government can get the corporations to do their dirty work with a wink and a nudge. If the government wants to rid your life of gas stoves, water heaters, ceiling fans, ice cube makers, or whatever their pet-project du jour is, it’s much easier for them to do that at scale via their corporate cronies, who don’t have to live with the conditions they are enforcing.

    Meanwhile, the wealthiest are buying up more hard assets. One of today’s most famous purveyors of socialism, Bernie Sanders, has three homes. Homes and Gardens Magazine did a November 2022 piece on the several homes owned by the Bidens. Other wealthy individuals and even university endowments are buying up productive land and water rights.

    That’s why the prediction is “you’ll own nothing”—not “we’ll own nothing.”

    The middle and working class deserve to participate in the American Dream. Barriers to owning housing need to be removed.

    People need to get involved at the local level to make building easier and more abundant. Individuals should consider whether or not they want to sell their house to a corporation, which will take it out of family ownership for the long-run.

    And, for goodness sake, ignore what the elite are saying and do what they are doing. They will keep owning houses; you deserve that opportunity, too.

    Carol Roth is a former investment banker, entrepreneur and author of the new book “You Will Own Nothing” from Broadside Books. Her previous books are “The War on Small Business” and the New York Times bestseller “The Entrepreneur Equation.”

    The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

    1. “NGOs like the World Economic Forum—which famously predicted in a 2021 video “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”

      These people need to die. All of them.

      1. Only when we see an angry mob playing soccer with Klaus Schwab’s head will we know we’re finally rid of these filth.

  19. From the Colorado Sun:

    Deaths of people who are homeless in Denver surge 50% since last year

    Coroner blames “tightening grip of fentanyl” for the rising deaths, hitting 166 people so far this year, compared with 108 last year

    This is not an accident. And it’s going to get worse, a lot worse.

  20. “developing student housing is like threading a needle right now — and developers are running out of needles. ”

    Who writes this tripe? In order for the metaphor to work, the needle opening should be narrowing, or the thread thickening. Not “running out of needles.” Maybe just stick with bullet points?

    1. I’m trying to imagine what city they are talking about. Certainly SF, Seattle, Portland, Philly, etc are not running out of needles. Maybe the developers need a free needle program too. Needles for all!

      1. Why is anyone developing student housing when student enrollments are going down and private colleges are closing left and right?

  24. The newcomers were outnumbered by those departing by a margin not seen since the throes of the Great Recession that began in late 2007.

    It’s just a gully.

  26. One caller explained that he is a married father-of-four in his early 30s with a family to support and has ‘been encouraged to invest in bricks and mortar and become homeowners’.

    “Been encouraged”? Are you not capable of doing your own due diligence? Are you a man or a sheep?

    1. It is amazing how it never crossed these people’s minds that interest rates at some point, sooner rather than later, would go up.

  27. ‘So you can talk to your bank and you can do a couple of things with them. You could extend the term of your mortgage by say five to 10 years – or you could switch to an interest only mortgage.’”

    You’re well & truly buggered, Jack.

  28. “Daw Htet*, a doctor and Golden Valley resident who spoke to Frontier through an intermediary for safety reasons, said she had to slash the rental cost of one of her two properties by two thirds to entice a tenant.

    The crows seemed to be calling her name, thought Daw.

Comments are closed.