Two weeks ago, Zillow organized a small event in Washington DC with the title “Getting Our House In Order: Solving the Lingering Issues of the Housing Recession”. The full program was filmed and is available here. If you’re pressed for time, you can get the highlights here. I was on an airplane to California then, … Read more
The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. – Library of Economics & Liberty I’m in St. Paul, MN, where the sun has conspired with the river to create a hundred gorgeous pleasures. Like conversing with new and … Read more
This post, like every post in the month of October, is brought to you by our sponsor, Teardowns.com (and its subsidiary 2Elm), the winner of the Ebay Auction for sponsorship of this blog for October. I’m at the CMLS 2013 meetings, and thought I’d post some further thoughts about a discussion/debate I had on Twitter … Read more
On the newswire this morning was a press release announcing the broadcast of an interview with Senators Bob Cocker (R-Tenn) and Mark Warner (D-Va) conducted by Zillow Chief Economist and all-round trend prognosticator, Dr. Stan Humphries. The senators are co-sponsors of Senate Bill 1217, the Housing Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2013 which seeks … Read more
Sorry to be working on Labor Day… an ironic thing if ever there was one… but a quick promo. This is really intended for those in my audience who are Association leadership or staff. If you were at my AE Institute presentation back in March, you saw some issues I laid out for a “Leaner, … Read more
My last post dealt at some length with Federal policy. But in many of my writings, presentations, and comments, I point out that the folks who are most likely to get all up in your business are municipalities. Case in point: the city of Eastvale, CA, with some 57,000 residents, is contemplating telling real estate … Read more
As I’m sure my industry-savvy readers — that would be you — know by now, President Obama sat down with Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, for a half hour interview in which the President answered questions that Zillow gathered from social media. The video is embedded above. Thing is, if we’re going to understand where … Read more
From Bloomberg comes this story about how Democrats are taking a run at Texas, the home of Rick Perry and Ted Cruz. Personally, since I’m a conservative, I will be doing what I can to make sure that Battleground Texas fails, and fails miserably. But that isn’t the point of this post. The point of … Read more
This is gonna get political, y’all, by necessity. You’ll see. I went over to the REALTOR Magazine website the other day to check out a piece by Lawrence Yun on something or another. Then I started clicking around as I often do, and ran across this piece on the fiscal situation and real estate. Here’s … Read more