Sunday, March 27, 2022

The housing market is insane

The Vet has started the process of dipping her toes into the home-ownership pool by shopping for a house. My wife and I have been participating in this venture by nodding knowingly and making pleasant sounds when she shows us a new listing that she is interested in. We've also been going with her to open houses.

If you are thinking about buying a house, let me offer you some of my observations:
  1. The words "open house" really mean "Come on over and take a look at this house that has already been sold."

  2. The listing price of "$300,000" really means "Last year, this house sold for $200,000 but this year it will sell for $350,000. Deal with it."

  3. Realtors are now like car dealers: They know they are selling a rare product that you really want. They hold all the cards. That means they can look down their nose at you and snort loudly if you try to bargain with them.

  4. The pictures you see on Zillow.com or Realtor.com have been color-saturated, light-balanced and generally photoshopped to the point where they no longer represent the actual object the camera was pointed at. As a matter of fact, I think some of the pictures we saw online weren't even taken in the actual house being sold.

  5. No one has any idea what the housing market will look like in a year. The house that sold for $350,000 in March of this year might be worth $250,000 in March of 2023. Or it might be worth $450,000. Who knowns. It's all a crap shoot right now.
Take those observations for what they are worth, which is absolutely nothing. I don't charge for my wit and wisdom so it has no value.

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I don't watch basketball because I don't care about basketball. Other than buying the occasional lottery ticket, I don't gamble because I have no luck.

Having said that, I would like to point out that if you had gone to a sports book back on March 1st and bet ten dollars on St Peters, you would have gotten a ticket that said the odds were 10,000 to 1. That means that you could be looking at a $100,000 payoff if St Peters wins it all.

Also, there are some bookies who may very well go bankrupt if St Peters wins.

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I've mentioned the website FiveThirtyEight.com before but I wanted to bring it up again. 538 represents the number of individuals that we elected to represent us in our government. They are the 100 Senators plus the 435 Congressmen plus the 3 non-voting members of Congress from Washington D.C.

I like fivethirtyeight because they aggregate polls in order to eliminate pollster bias. If you don't know about pollster bias, here's a rant I posted two years ago that might enlighten you.

The reason I bring this up is because I wanted to know how Biden compares to Trump so I went to fivethirtyeight and looked for the data acqjuired during Trumps presidency and then for Bidens presidency.

This is what I found:


From what I can tell, Trump was way better at pissing people off because he managed to become very unpopular almost immediately after getting elected. Biden, however, is a slow learner and it took him almost nine months to become very unpopular. Once he figured out how to piss people off, he got good at it and he is now as unpopular as any president has ever been.

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The Red Sox lost to the Twins this afternoon, giving them a 7-4 record. The Maple Leafs lost yesterday so the Bruins maintain second place in the Atlantic division.

Tonights entrèe will be North Atlantic cod with a nice buttered Ritz cracker breading.

Life is good and while I enjoy it, you can enjoy these:

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