From the Otteau Group:
March MarketNEWS
The number of home sales in New Jersey over the first 2 months of 2018 totaled more than 16,000, setting an all-time record. Still, the 2% year-to-date increase over the same period last year was the smallest recently. This is due largely to misinformation about tax reform, which will actually result in a majority of NJ households paying less in federal income taxes, as lower rates more than offset the reduced mortgage interest deductions (MID) and State and Local Tax (SALT) limits.
While the number of home sales has increased for nearly all price ranges this year, the largest gain has occurred for luxury homes priced over $2.5-Million, rising by 32%. This impressive gain is somewhat misleading, however, given the smaller sample size of sales within this price point. Also noteworthy is that the improvement has been primarily concentrated in towns with direct rail service to Manhattan. Contracts for homes priced under $400,000 remain unchanged due largely to the shortage of supply within this range, while homes within the $400,000-$2.5-Million price ranges have seen modest increases.
Shifting to the supply side of the equation, inventory remains constricted, which is limiting choices for home buyers. The number of homes being offered for sale today in New Jersey has fallen to its lowest point since 2005, having declined by 4,500 (-11%) over the past year. This is also about half the amount of homes (37,000 fewer) on the market compared to the cyclical high in 2011. Today’s unsold inventory equates to 4.1 months of sales (non-seasonally adjusted), which is lower than one year ago, when it was 4.7 months.
Currently, 20 out of New Jersey’s 21 counties (95%) have less than 8.0 months of supply, which is a balance point for home prices. Middlesex County has the strongest market conditions in the state with 2.8 months of supply, followed by Essex, Hudson, Monmouth, Union, Somerset and Morris Counties, which all have 3.5 months of supply or less. The counties with the largest amount of unsold inventory (6 months or greater) are concentrated in the southern portion of the state including Cumberland (6.4), Cape May (6.7), Atlantic (6.8) and Salem (8.0), however, these counties have shown significant improvement and are beginning to exhibit strengthening conditions.
…
Demand for rental apartments remains strong in NJ with statewide occupancy rates being among the highest in the US. The Central NJ region has the lowest vacancy rate in the state at 2.5%, up 10 basis points (bp) from the prior quarter. Vacancy in the Philadelphia/Southern NJ region remained unchanged for the 3rd consecutive quarter, standing at 3.9%. Although vacancy in Northern NJ declined by 20 bp to 4.0%, this region continues to have the highest vacancy rate statewide due to the staggering pace of new construction deliveries in key markets like Hudson County and other towns offering convenient accessibility to Manhattan. Nationally, the average vacancy rate stands at 4.5% for the second consecutive quarter.A driving force for the apartment market sector is that the percentage of New Jersey households with children living at home has steadily declined to 35% today, with continued declines likely in the future.This trend, which is rooted in New Jersey’s economic conditions, is anticipated to drive future housing demand increasingly toward smaller homes including multi-family housing in more urban locations. At the present time, 65% of households within the state have no children under the age of 18 living at home.
Good Morning New Jersey
State budget appreciates this.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/502-million-mega-millions-jackpot-grabs/story?id=54123074
Damm I missed the Mega Millions drawing by 5 numbers!
Some lucky New Jersey resident did win however.
Another N.J. millionaire!!
@tonyschwartz
How is it possible that you can be shot in the back and murdered, and the police officers who shot you get off?
The answer is to be black in America.
@tonyschwartz
Telling two different women you are trying to seduce that they remind you
of your daughter
is perverse and creepy
by any standard.
Moana,
You remind me a lot of a bowel movement.
Any one know good Thai restaurants in Bergen or nearby?
I’m trying to recall if I ever ate Thai before I moved to the Boston area just over 20 years ago. I don’t think I ever ate anything spicy until I was about 27, and that was 10 years before Boston.
When I was about 31 or 32 I saw a guy have drink in a bar. It was a shot called a prairie fire, half Tabasco, half tequila. I was never a fan of either, but something about the combination of the two intrigued me.
I didn’t have the balls to actually try one that night, but I went out and bought two big bottles of both, about the biggest bottle of MacIllhenny’s Tabasco you’ve ever seen and a similarly sized bottle of some Tequila. I went home to the apartment my gf and I had just started sharing and gave it a try, 50/50 mix. Just as I thought, the nastiness kind of cancels out. Maybe a base/acid pH type thing? Anyway, I finished both bottles in a little over a week and never had it again. It was just fine, and kind of a curiosity how the two mixed anc cancelled each other out in harshness. Decades later I’m interested in giving it a another try.
Any one know good Thai restaurants in Bergen or nearby?
Malee Ridgewood.
Back at the end of the nineties I used to end up running into our General Consul all over the world. I would be flown in to get, a project live and start the revenue flowing, or into a client to clean them up so there was nothing they could complain about at re-sign.
I ended up in a lot a restaurants with this guy, both with clients and on our own. Regardless where where, the briefcase would come up and the big bottle of Tabasco would come out. As the lady says “He put that Sh`t on everything”! With the clients it was a great Ice Breaker. Everyone would have a laugh and the night would go well.
At one point, we ended up the two of us, in this one restaurant where the chef came out. He was seriously affronted that he would add Tabasco to his food. The GC , looked the Chef in the eye and said “I apologize if I have offended you, this is not a refection on your food, but on me. I am like a C0ke Add1ct with this stuff and I am at the point I can’t eat Breakfast without it!” The chef though for a moment and just walked away.
It was the 90’s. He turned to me and said “Always understand who you are talking to and what their point of view is!”.
It took me a few years to really work out what he meant.
Google’s AI Has Learned to Become “Highly Aggressive” in Stressful Situations – ScienceAlert
https://apple.news/AKwyyODESN1qZjwG3vrgTOg
Artificial intelligence is scary stuff. Can get out of control real quick.
In February, house prices up 9% in Hudson.
“What kind of a$$hat funds financial aid for illegals while not funding the property tax rebates for the elderly or pensions, it just shows where his priorities are.
Ask the beta males on this blog for an explanation.”
“As the blogs leading beta, Gary, can you explain this for us?”
So Gary, which is true greatness, taking a knee on the anthem or taking a crotch?
https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/roseanne-barr/
On a side note, keep an eye on this.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/980107940454653952
I think this could have been written by a few people in here!
https://medium.com/@johndevore/new-york-doesnt-love-you-ab75335fe268
I agree with the last statement.
https://twitter.com/Deadspin/status/980175772206993409
Pumps – especially scary to you, slogging through life without the real thing. People and machines are your masters. Like I’ve been telling you, just study hard and get that GED and then we can work on the next step.
Love,
Your non-deported Dad surrogate.
Artificial intelligence is scary stuff. Can get out of control real quick.
Chili Pepper and the elite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvUaFp_qMQ
There was an executive VP at my last company who would bring in all kinds of great stuff from his garden at the end of the Summer, and just leave bags of this fresh produce at the coffee stations around the office for people to take home. One of my favorites was some kind of pepper that looked like a completely un-ripe cherry tomato. Not a grape tomato shape, a completely round and green cherry tomato shape.
It was so freaking hot that I had to experiment. Most people don’t know this, but it is not the seeds of a pepper that are hot (though a lot capcaisin does end up in the seeds) but, rather, the whitish pulp that separates the seeds from the “regular” part of the pepper. I carefully cut one of these lime-green orbs from hell open and cut away all of the pulp and seeds. You could eat it like it was a strawberry. I then took a volume equal to less than the tip of a sharpened number 2 pencil and tried it. OMG! So hot, hot, hot!!!
I did the experiment in front of people at lunch at my office and everyone was just amazed at how the fruit/veg had no hotness at all, but just a morsel of the pulp would send people running for milk or something else to cool their palette.
The worst part is when the hotness in your mouth and tongue subsides, giving you a false sense that the danger is over, only to have the capsaicin then spread up through your nose and into your sinuses!
BTW, a couple years after I became a fan of these strange, round, green peppers (for cooking, not eating raw!). The same exec VP continued to bring in produce at the end of the Summer, but the strange peppers were conspicuously absent. I asked him about it and he told me his wife told him, “Why do you continue to plant something nobody in our family, including you, would ever eat?”
You would think it would be easier to find, but my best guess is that it was a Guyanese wiri wiri pepper.
Scoville heat units (SHU): 100,000 to 350,000
Jalapeño reference point: 12 to 140 times hotter
Origin: South America (Guyana)
https://www.pepperscale.com/wiri-wiri-pepper/
I grew Carolina Reapers and Devil’s Tongues last year. These are GMO peppers that produce obsurd amounts of capsaicin. They are pointless from a consumption perspective because they are too hot to eat. I will chop Habanero’s up and put it on my bagel with cream cheese. I love them. I place a tiny piece of the reaper on my tongue and felt this piercing fire. Truly insane.
My friend ate one on a bet and he said the next day, he was on the toilet and was like “this can’t be how I die. Not like this”. haha.
A fun gift for people who like spicy things is the One Chip Challenge. It’s a package that is basically a single dorito dustin with ground Carolina Reapers.
https://www.amazon.com/Paqui-Carolina-Madness-Challenge-Tortilla/dp/B01M748NRN
I did it and it was ridiculously hot. Ran for the milk and it did nothing.
Thanks Grim
.
“I think this could have been written by a few people in here!”
I love NY (pun intended).
The suburbs…pointless.
Inside of 18 months now. Through many of the youngest’s college visits, R/T/S schools coming in focus. College student will enter senior year when the youngest graduates HS next June. Feeling a lot more relieved there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
@davidfrum
Did Trump go to church today?
In the mid 1990’s I bought this long, slim, red pepper at Corrado’s in Clifton/Paterson. Not the old place on Railroad Ave, the supermarket size place on Main Ave. I knew nothing about peppers back then. Anyway, I bought this single pepper thinking, “I like hot peppers on subs, why not just buy my own and give it a whirl?”
So now I’m the proud owner of this single, long, red pepper, no thicker than a pencil and approximately the same length. I made a few sandwiches in the next week, each time cutting off maybe an inch of pepper, slicing it thinly. It was a nothing burger. At the end of the week I’m at home one afternoon making a sandwich and my knife finally makes it’s way up to the seeds and pulp as I’m making another sandwich. I put the remaining pepper slices on my sandwich, and without thinking, just held the stem and bit off the part near the top with all of the seeds and pulp.
OMG!!! I ran to the fridge about 3 seconds later. Nothing there except about 3 ounces of Gatorade. I didn’t want to waste the liquid (this might have been back in the days when Gatorade still came in glass bottles). Instead of swallowing the liquid, I just tipped the bottle and let my tongue bathe in it. About two minutes later is when I first had that sensation of capsaicin running up through your nose, nostrils, and sinuses. I thought my brain was about to become pumpkin brain next!
Not too long after I used to work with a bunch of guys who ordered mail order (remember that quaintness?) from a hot sauce catalog, Mo hotta, mo betta!. The debate of the day, as I remember, was what is hotter, Acid Rain or Dave’s Insanity. I wanted no part of the debate. Several years later some guy at work also had some Scoville Unit weapon that guys were trying their nerve at. Not for me, no thanks.
https://www.mohotta.com/product/Daves-Insanity-Sauce/Hot-Sauce
Why I’m staying in Illinois – Chicago Tribune
https://apple.news/A9aGcSDQYQ5uw3LIxP-l0Ng
My brother’s into the hot pepper craze. I love spice, but not burn your tongue heat. He grows reapers and makes inedible chili. I’m perfectly fine with habaneros and jalapenos. We had a bit of a chili cookoff and he made this crazy blend of hot peppers which gave a lot of layers of heat to the mix, but it was way too hot for everyone. I used cayenne powder and some fresh hatch peppers as well as smoked the ground beef prior to cooking the chili in a pressure cooker. Mine won hands down. BTW, the chipotle Tabasco is pretty amazing.