From Bloomberg:
Manhattan Home Sales Surge as Cuts Bring Prices to Buyers’ Level
Manhattan homebuyers found deals they couldn’t refuse in the second quarter, driving up sales of previously owned properties by the most in more than two years.
Purchases of resale homes jumped 16 percent from a year earlier to 2,597, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Buyer interest was fueled by average price cuts of 6.1 percent across all property types. The last time the average discount was larger was the third quarter of 2012, when it was 7.2 percent.
Sellers of luxury apartments took the whittling further, cutting prices by an average of 10 percent, the most since the end of 2010 and the second-biggest discounts in more than 16 years of record-keeping.
“The sellers definitely got it,” said Diane Ramirez, chief executive officer of brokerage Halstead Real Estate, which released its own report Thursday saying there was a 28 percent jump in resales in the second quarter. “They said, ‘We’ve got buyers out there who are serious but that are not moving forward, so let’s give them a reason to move forward.’”
Manhattan home shoppers held back last year, uninspired to commit to a purchase when sellers were holding fast to their lofty asking prices, even as inventory climbed. A rising stock market since the U.S. presidential election sparked fresh interest in browsing, and sellers sensed an opportunity to offload apartments that had been lingering.
…
“Our market cannot support aspirational pricing by sellers waiting for that ‘one buyer’ who will overpay for their home,” Warburg’s Peters said in his note. “Buyers are as price-conscious as I have ever seen them.”
Friskies.
Do I have to go buy a Volvo Polestar before they electrify it?
Didn’t pumpkin admit to buying a Chinese Volvo?
Cubans have it right. buy a 60 yr old car and drive it for 20 yrs
Doing what Cubans do with old cars is a crime in the US.
I’m really happy with the volvo purchase so far. See if that continues.
Chi,
Love the transit video. Thank god the Trump election put the whole BLM to sleep. Otherwise, this could have been the next Ferguson.
Grim,
On the CrossTrek…I don’t think they are making them anymore, though the Ridgeline will be my next car. Especially if I move down to Costa Rica. It’s got the MDX engine in a lightweight truck frame. Can fit 4×8’s in the back too. 4WD available too. Second row of seats perfect for the airport pick-ups.
Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Moana, was in Reno/Tahoe last week. Trump is their greatest president since Lincoln. Be wary of perspective.
God Damn the Ridgeline is ugly.
New Chassis for the Crosstrek. Uses the new “global platform”.
http://driving.ca/subaru/xv-crosstrek/reviews/road-test/first-look-2018-subaru-crosstrek
Grab if trump goes than you get pence. So just keep that in mind. Unless your plan is rinse and repeat.
@nytimes
Opinion: “Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?”
Steamturd, Part Time Orientalist and Full Time Mysoginist says:
July 6, 2017 at 8:43 am
was in Reno/Tahoe last week. Trump is their greatest president since Lincoln.
About a year ago, I wrote a story about a family that went to the emergency room, had a Band-Aid put on their 1-year-old daughter’s finger, and then were billed $629 for the encounter. Since then, I’ve gotten countless letters describing other outlandish medical bills. These include:
A $2,237 bill for liquid stitches and a bandage. This emergency room visit lasted from about 11:30 pm until 1 am, so the hospital billed for two days spent there.
A $900 bill for four stitches in the emergency room
A $1,000 bill for a pneumonia vaccination delivered in a health care clinic
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=232206
OP-ED
Back to the Center, Democrats
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/opinion/center-democrats-identity-politics.html
Grab them by the puzzy says:
July 6, 2017 at 9:05 am
@nytimes
Opinion: “Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?”
If all the family wanted and received was a “Band-Aid”, why not just go to CVS, Walmart, etc and buy one? You could get an entire box for about 4.00.
“About a year ago, I wrote a story about a family that went to the emergency room, had a Band-Aid put on their 1-year-old daughter’s finger, and then were billed $629 for the encounter.”
My daughter dislocated her elbow and had to get it put back in. She’s now kind of prone to it, when she is playing or hanging, etc.
The bill was $5000, had to pay full deductible for her, $1,500. Radial head subluxation.
My wife watched a youtube video on how to do it, and has since saved $15,000 by doing it herself.
Check out the photos. Excellent Twitter thread.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nellsco/status/881718964149243904
Regarding conservatives voting “against” their interests below is the link to the article puzzy references.
Can’t believe I’m saying this but it is an insightful op ed from the times.
The “vigorous virtues” argument captures much of the misunderstanding and disdain the coasts have for flyover country. I’ve argued on here before – these people aren’t rubes or hicks. They vote THEIR interests which are THEIR values. And their values are not the coastal values. It’s so simple, and yet the east coast liberal establishment can not grasp the fact that they re worldview is not absolutely certainly exclusively right.
NYTimes: What’s the Matter With Republicans?
What’s the Matter With Republicans? https://nyti.ms/2tH2h9U
Lib, check ground clearance also. Traversing two rivers cuts a good portion off of what is otherwise a 26 mile trip down dirt roads to my favorite place down there :)
Watched a group of German tourists unwittingly purchase a small suv rental when they didn’t make the first flow a couple years back.
Yeah…that’s big issue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-06/it-s-boom-times-for-recruiters-as-u-s-job-market-tightens
“When it comes to killing humans, no other animal comes close to the mosquito.”
Tune in to Discovery at 9 pm to learn about the progress we’re making to stop the world’s deadliest animal: http://b-gat.es/2sKTMLJ
Mosquito control is a huge priority in the Florida keys. We just released gmo mosquito larvae to destroy disease carrying bugs.
Yes, blumpy..market is on fire and not enough workers to go around therefore companies won’t hire as much this year. Same BS in housing about low supply keeping a lid on a hot national market. I know several people in compliance and client onboarding who can’t get a whiff of a job. No recruiter call backs for weeks. I am on LinkedIn with a pristine background with PM duties across change and technology. I also state that I am open to new opportunities in my profile. I get maybe one contact every month or so, usually a weak one. Fluff piece bought by simple minds
Conservatives, market cheer-leaders, free-traders: hustlers who fleeced a gullible middle class. Even Bloomberg gets it now.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/how-middle-class-america-got-fleeced
“And if you’re part of Generation X, you’re probably less wealthy than your parents were at the same age. Meanwhile, all across the U.S., pension funds are underfunded and will almost certainly have to default on some of their obligations to retirees.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class Americans looked forward to a future of wealth and leisure. If you were a small business owner, or an engineer, or a lawyer at a small firm, you might not have expected to be rolling in it, but you probably didn’t think things would go so badly awry.
Who’s responsible? Who took your prosperity? Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro might tell you it was China, while his political aide Steve Bannon might tell you it was immigrants. Free-market think-tank types might tell you it was government regulation, while conservative lawmakers might tell you it was single moms on welfare or lazy people on food stamps. But these answers are mostly or completely wrong.
One partially correct answer is that your prosperity was taken by the very people who promised to ensure and enhance it. The decades from 1980 through 2008 were the age of neoliberalism — the ideology of the free market. Financial deregulation, tax cuts and a lax attitude toward consumer protection and antitrust were supposed to free the entrepreneurial potential of the American middle class. And to some degree it did — those decades saw plenty of wealth creation, and the U.S. economy performed a bit better than most rich nations in Europe and East Asia.
But along with real productivity, the neoliberal age saw plenty of grift and middle-class wealth extraction. In the book, “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception,” Nobel prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller said that all free-market economies are accompanied by some amount of consumer error, simply because sellers are always exploring every possible method of parting people from their money.
Writer Alex Pareene, in a recent article in Fusion, colorfully describes how vendors of all sorts cashed in on enthusiasm for conservative politicians:
[The conservative era] was a fantastic deal for…companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions.
But Pareene’s focus on conservative political appeal is much too narrow. The white middle-class that tended to support leaders like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush, lost huge percentages of their life’s savings because of excessive fees paid to actively managed mutual funds, financial advisers, stockbrokers, pension fund managers and the like. They also paid 6 percent real estate commissions even as people in most countries paid much less. They rejected the Clintons’ health-care plan in 1993, and ended up paying double what people in other countries pay for comparable treatment. They forked over more and more money in college tuition. They paid higher prices to companies that went on to monopolize markets after spending millions convincing the government to allow their megamergers. The spectacular rise of U.S. wealth inequality shows that trillions of dollars in middle-class assets were shifted up the socio-economic ladder into the hands of a relatively small and fantastically rich upper tier.”
One of the best opinion pieces I have read in a long time.
“That’s why there won’t be a quick fix for middle-class boomers and Gen Xers. You can’t get back what you never really had. Although the economy and technology will continue to progress, and the government may manage to give the middle class some relief, for the many who had expected much better, that will seem like a booby prize. The markets seemed to promise the moon, and it turned out to be just a reflection in a pond. It pains me greatly to say it, but some members of the older generation probably will be disappointed for the rest of their lives.
Instead of indulging in fantasies of getting it all back, U.S. leaders should focus on selling a more realistic vision of progress to younger generations. With the right policies, the U.S. government should be able to pull the country out of its sclerosis, curb many of the excesses of the neoliberal age and restore healthy growth in jobs and productivity. That will have to be good enough.”
Might be fav line from the piece.
“Each of these little free-market failures was another slice off of the ham that was the wealth of the American middle class. The people who thought they were going to be the guests of honor at the feast ended up being the main course.”
“The American middle class was played like a deck of cards. So self-righteous in their bubbles of comfort. Masterfully used as a buffer between the owning class and working-class majority. They bought into their perceived “exceptionalism,” funded the supply-side scam with unsustainable consumer credit, shielded the wealthy during the neoliberal disaster, and now are left wondering what happened. The fact that they still point fingers at immigrants, welfare recipients, minimum-wage workers, millennials, etc. shows they haven’t learned a thing. Or are simply too cowardly to point upwards to the real culprits.”
I guess Pumpkin’s load built up down South but he couldn’t hold it in any longer. Messy and disgusting as ever.
Pumps but you still think high priced high taxed north Here real estate makes perfect sense. Like I always say you consistently contradict yourself.