From HousingWire:
How can 2014 home sales outpace 2013?
Existing home sales stalled out at the end of 2013, but Paul Diggle, property economist at Capital Economics, says the decline in existing home sales will prove temporary.
Capital Economics notes the number of existing home sales fell 9.1% between August and November to 4.9 million annualized.
“That meant that, for the first time since mid-2011, existing home sales were running slightly below the level seen a year ago. What’s more, judging by the latest set of pending home sales figures, which tend to lead existing home sales by a month or two, existing home sales may have dropped to 4.8m annualized in December,” Diggle says.
“Given that existing home sales make up more than 90% of all home sales, a key question is whether the current slump will prove temporary or permanent.”
Diggle says the drop in existing home sales was triggered by the rise in mortgage interest rates over the mid-part of last year. Average 30-year mortgage interest rates rose from 3.7% in April to 4.7% in September and they have mostly remained in that territory.
“Alongside the rise in house prices, higher rates have reduced mortgage affordability and taken a toll on consumers’ confidence in the housing recovery,” Diggle says. “The share of respondents to Fannie Mae’s monthly housing survey who think that now is a good time to buy a home dropped from 76% in May to 64% in November, while the NAR’s index of buyer traffic declined from 72 to 53 between April and October.”
“The bottom line is that the improvement in housing market activity during 2014 will be considerably weaker than the improvement during 2013 – even taking account of the soft end to last year. But we do at least expect a further improvement in activity,” Diggle notes.
From the Record:
Proposals for Roche property in Clifton, Nutley could create 18,000 jobs, planner says
The three mixed use redevelopment proposals for the 119-acre Roche campus could create as many as 18,000 jobs and more than $20 million in tax revenue, according to consultants working on the plans.
The three scenarios, which have not been individually outlined, include uses such as a hotel, retail, high-end residential units, senior housing and new office and lab space, the consultants said in a letter dated Jan. 9. Whatever plan is chosen would take an estimated 15 to 25 years to complete, and could create more tax revenue and jobs than when Roche occupied the site, the letter said.
A study found that as many as 13,000 to 18,000 jobs could be created, “which is far more than the peak employment at Roche of 8,500,” according to the letter. “Real estate taxes upon completion of the development would reach over $20 million, depending on the success of the project and the mix of uses allowed.”
Good Morning New Jersey
I used to call Marion Barry a one-man depression for the District. And once he was gone, investment that had shunned DC returned in a big way.
Imagine that on a national level . . .
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101354173
A thought just occurred to me on Andrew Cuomo telling the conservatives there is no place for them in New York.
Rick Scott in Florida should offer and a prisoner exchange: Florida gets all the New York business owners, and New York gets Alan Grayson and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Sounds fair and everyone gets to live where they are welcome.
I will believe there is a housing recovery when I look across from and down from without seeing rows of empty workstations. There are 7-8 computers per row and only one is occupied on average. I have no one in directly in front of me or directly behind me. There are floors without people entirely. This is one of largest British banks.
5 – I remember interviewing for an IT job over at Citi in compliance, probably about 15 years ago at this point.
I loosely say IT, because it was a glorified excel jockey position. They had more than two dozen people analyzing massive data dumps in excel, almost entirely manually (sorry, a macro isn’t automation), then they had managers, directors, quality folks to verify all of it.
I couldn’t believe what I saw, it looked to be the most mind-numbing job in existence. Their justification for the approach was that the team wasn’t able to have direct access into the source systems, nor could it be done with any kind of automated analysis/reporting. In reality, I think they were just trying to protect their own little empire.
I told the team I interviewed with that we could probably automate the entire process, and carve down the two dozen to only 1-2 fte to provide oversight.
I didn’t get the job, but good for me there were plenty of others that value my approach.
(6) That reminds me of an interview I had an Exxon in Florham Park when I was 23 years old. I had a different interviewer for each hour of the day. All day long. Plus ate lunch and went out to dinner with my ‘special attendant’ and his wife. So, here I am at the end of the day, drained, exhausted when I am led to the IT director’s office. He asks me, ‘Son, where do you want to be in 5 years?’ . My mind went blank. Couldn’t answer the question. All I thought about was Ralph Kramden answering ‘Hama hama hama I brive a dus’.
Thinking about it later, I should have answered him by asking this question: ‘Where’s your bosses office?’
Grim,
Absolutely agree but those times are over. System alignment, process consolidation then off-shoring the work. That is what banks are about last 15 years. There are too many MDs whose only job is too shrink costs and headcount. Growth is out of the equation. I sit among tax, payroll, legal, compliance/audit, and accounting. Dead..completely dead. I did have a flurry of calls last week. Reinsurance PM job that paid 90/hr..no thanks and Wipro pressed hard for a client job at UBS. Of course they balked when I has audacity to ask for more than 115k. This area is f-ed
#6…in my previous job selling IT solutions to large healthcare carriers…I was stunned to find that Access was the most common db tool used, seemingly edging out Excel! These companies were caught with shrinking budgets so while they knew it would be far better (compliance, security, long term costs, etc) to switch to an actual software solution that was supported, they couldn’t pull the trigger, even after multiple CMS audits and fines. It is 1987 or 1993 in the healthcare world.
re: Excel and Access.
Yeah well there are apparently a billion MS office users out there. And Microsoft is
still smashing sales records.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/oct13/10-24fy14q1earningspr.aspx
Sorry for rant but another thing I noticed…recruiters are now commonly quoting me hourly rates, not daily. Lets say I tell them I make 800/daily for 10 hr. professional day. They say “oh I can bump that up to 90/hr”. 90*8 is 720/day. How is this better? Not a fool. I know they will micro manage hours and restrict OT.
10 – I also remember, this was back when Excel worksheets had a row limitation of 65,536. So they would then spread transactions out across multiple worksheets, and then subtotal multiple worksheets together. Hours were spent cutting and pasting, and then quality assurance to verify that no errors were made cutting and pasting.
Absolutely absurd.
By the way, back when I interviewed, this was a $100k position, so I really can’t say I’m surprised that you say there are empty cubes today.
In my current position we constantly have to fight Controllers’ love affair with Excel. We have a complex RE fund accounting system which took years of analysis and design, built to their specifications, moving them away from spreadsheets.
Their most fervent desire? “Just give us a way to enter any number we want like we used to be able to”.
dude work in a small pharma company it is like the dark ages sometimes. for christ sakes 16 of my 17 professinal years have been spent using lotus notes and we still use paper systems. don’t even get me started on physician or hospital records when I’m in the field.
As someone who did Access and VBA programming for years, it generally works veyr well. I worked a main closed loan compliance auditing firm back in 2004. We had 100s of consultants at various clients sites on any given day. Whole underwriting software was built on access and distributed to each auditors machine. They could not have internet at sites. It worked beautifully at such little cost. Company management were scum. Controls were weak and they wanted to ovveride “problem” loans to magically comply.
I’ve seen my share of MS office database monstrosities. Usually, they start with an obsolete manager like JJ tinkering after attending a bootcamp session or two. Once they cram it down on their reports build out the disaster, they tend to step away before the collapse.
Then they ask for actual competent help to transition to an enterprise solution. Meanwhile they’ll claim it’s the greatest thing ever, had they actually known WTF they are doing.
15 – Spent many years ferreting out, removing, and replacing rogue vba and access applications built by departmental teams with zero regard for disaster recovery, security, contractual, and regulatory compliance.
Had one situation where a team had a “rock star” developer put together an application that’d become critical. Too bad the (massive) Access DB was stored on a PC that was not part of any kind of backup schedule. One day, hard drive dies. You can not imagine the resultant shit-storm that came out of that situation. Nearly a million dollars in penalties and lost revenue. I imagine they were very proud of their baby the day before this all went down.
We did attempt to send the hard drive to a data recovery firm who charged somewhere near $30,000 to dismantle the drive and recover some data off the platters. We got a handful of files back, none of which we really needed back.
My suggestion for my son would be to become programmer but not a very good. Create an overly complex and confusing table and code structure within important upstream operations process. Ride this out for next 30 years.
re # 12 – Grim “Absolutely absurd.” Sure if you think of it logically, but if you want the customer to get hooked on your product then you need to get the monkey on their back first, the monkey being “speed”.
The Row limits always has been done for speed and still is with the current row limits, also Microsoft is the master at planned software obsolescence. It won’t work in Excel or is too slow, then it time for Access play for licensing now please. Now you need things like commitment control or larger than a 2 GB size database or connecting IIS to the database? Time for SQL Server.
Also current limits.
Excel 2010 can have a maximum of 16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows. Strange numbers?
14 bits = 16 384
20 bits = 1 048 576
It is still done for speed, first to get the accountant hooked on the speed and then get the accountant to approve the PO for the massive implementation of the rest of the Microsoft suite.
#19
Actually the next step in the lock-in is SharePoint. That web enables everything you’ve now taken the excel monstrosities to the next level using “lists.” There will be jobs for the next decade or beyond maintaining those implementations. Demand is high.
http://www.dice.com/job/results/nj?caller=basic&q=sharepoint+developer&x=all&p=s
We’re buying a ton of Lync, Sharepoint, and Exchange licenses. We also started deploying windows phones from Nokia.
Also all of the people who say their ipad is so great where I work…they’re still running a virtual microsoft windows session on it, Lync, and getting all their emails delivered to them from an exchange server on a domain managed by microsoft windows servers.
10.Juiice Box says:
January 22, 2014 at 10:45 am
re: Excel and Access.
Yeah well there are apparently a billion MS office users out there. And Microsoft is
still smashing sales records.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/oct13/10-24fy14q1earningspr.aspx
As a small business solution, few thousand rows of data used for customer entry, order entry, sales tracking and reporting – Access was king. Any regulated FI is out of their mind to be using it. One of craziest things was when auditor finished their loan review, there were 10 compliance mgrs. who could ovveride data. We never captured which went in and manipulated post review. I think it was by design.
re # 20 – I did not include the latest MS stuff, my timeline ends last decade, my first experience with MS Excel was version 2.0 in school and the 3.0 when I went down to Egghead and bought a copy for the small company I was working for one summer at the time. The accountants there were simply amazed at Excel and wanted me to stay on full time to run things. I wanted to get rich or die trying.
Still breathing, but not rich either.
SharePoint: Where documents go to die.
grim could you unmod please? I thought NJ natives would find that interesting.
re # 21- re: “their ipad is so great ” I have this discussion all the time, and when they say that, I usually reply by saying say sure the interface is great but it is not a business device. They usually respond with incredulity.
They do not get it and never will even when I tell them Microsoft has nothing on Apple’s App Store. It’s been a few years now too and they still don’t believe me that MS Office is not coming to the iPad.
Only serious challenge to MS offerings today is Google. I have a feeling the two of them will be the only serious contenders for the the business revenue that Microsoft owns.
Most of my clients have begun to demand box.com and other web-based collaboration tools.
24 is spot on.
I like my iPad.
Use it for business?
Ha Ha Ha.
re Sharepoint – Gartner has already called the death knell for it. It might take a while.
I’m not seeing anything in mod, it might have gotten blown away completely by the blacklist.
#18 you nearly nailed my role to the T! I’ve been at this brokerage for 15 years now (and working from home for most of it) on a table/code structure from a vendor that we use as the main driver for all of this niche of the brokerage’s downstream systems. This is my 2nd job out of programming school (and they paid for the rest of my college degree basically) and the 1st was at the said vendor who created this crazy table/code structure we at the brokerage are stuck with. I am the guru here and I am treated like a rockstar for my abilities and work, even though what I am doing is simple business intelligence stuff and light development (including VBA/Excel/Access as mentioned in today’s thread). It’s perfect and I get to see my kids grow up unlike a lot of other dads
Bystander says:
January 22, 2014 at 11:20 am
My suggestion for my son would be to become programmer but not a very good. Create an overly complex and confusing table and code structure within important upstream operations process. Ride this out for next 30 years.
Recently spoke to a CTO of a very large global firm that was on the precipice of starting a migration off of MS Office to Open Office. Thought that was very interesting. Their major issue with MS wasn’t the cost, it is managing licensing.
Sharepoint as a tool is great. Problem is that central Project Management Office gets their hands in and creates a vast overly complex and redundant folder structure which they practically force at gunpoint on every project great and small. Three months of fighting you to adopt, then they lose track of it then question you again a year after project closes. I really live PMO if you can’t tell.
One of truest sayings from a former IT mgr regarding career in technology:
“If you can’t dazzle them brilliance, baffle them with bullsht”
with brilliance, of course.
Grim – re # 32 – I have been watching Open Office since when Sun bought it back in the 90s. I once asked the developers at a conference when it will contain Macros and the answer was crickets and still is.
It is the cost. Ever single CIO and CTO hates MS licensing. He need to make his bonus by cutting costs and making a big splash.
It is a risky move going Open Office simply because it will cause a revolt amongst their users if you take away their monkey that monkey is still “speed”. MS Office utilizes acceleration in Windows, and blows Open Office out of the water in speed and responsiveness without even comparing features and functions apples to apples.
[34] bystander
That works on juries too!
Assuming opposing counsel is a bit dense.
Conspiracy theory of the day:
With regard to Jersey City’s demand that gun manufacturers bidding on city contracts identify how they handle second amendment issues, I have been hearing of other municipalities doing the same thing. So if many groups of a particular persuasion are doing the same thing at once, there is some coordination or at least some thought toward a common policy objective. And, given some precedents in other industries, I came up with this.
Policy goal is to eventually bifurcate the market into those manufacturers who service government and those who don’t. The questionnaires are merely the first round; the next step is to pressure government contractors to abandon the civilian market if they want your business. Once you bifurcate the market, you can team up with regulators and plaintiffs lawyers to put the civilian market manufacturers out of business without harming the manufacturers that supply government contracts. In fact, by bifiurcating the market and targeting only the civilian manufacturers, you bring the government contractors, that would would ordinarily oppose your efforts, to your side as you will be putting potential competitors out of business.
The proof of this theory will be if bids for government contracts start including language that exclude manufacturers that supply the civilian market.
Now that I think about it, it’s probably not all that conspiratorial. If I search, I will probably find some left wing position paper that advocates pretty much the same thing.
Nom, Is Fulop a MAIG member? What about the other mayors?
NYPD to Add Anti-2A Questionnaire to Firearms Procurement Process?
By Robert Farago on January 20, 2014
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/01/robert-farago/nyc-pd-to-add-anti-2a-questionnaire-to-firearms-procurement-process/
[41] street,
The questionnaires about adhering to a “code of conduct” are not new. There has been opposition to them going back 13 or 14 years that I am aware of. The questionnaires themselves are all little import because the trade association will advise the manufacturers to simply answer them exactly the same way thus rendering the questions useless. Once that becomes apparent, the next step will be more robust, enforceable language in the bids.
But one has to question to what end the policy behind excluding manufacturers that sell to civilian markets? There are plenty of manufacturers that sell into the civilian market that do not bid on government contracts. This does nothing to punish them. So Why create a bifurcated market if it wouldn’t stem gun sales to civilians? It can’t be just about optics.
I’m pretty sure the NYPD is the largest police department in the country….maybe the world. I was reading wikipedia and it looks like NYPD officers currently have a choice of a Glock or a Smith and Wesson firearm. I would be shocked if Glock caved to this nonsense. Also, if I recall, Smith and Wesson experienced a huge backlash when they cooperated with Clinton – era gun control measures. I can’t imagine S&W wants to go through that again….
Glock would have to be careful also, they aren’t the only polymer handgun game in town anymore….there’s plenty of competition these days…
FWIW, and I think it’s my final word on the subject, I do foresee more comprehensive gun control in our future. So I think I will go out and buy that AR after all. If we do get the sort of gun-control I expect, my investments in the AR and in ammo will be exactly that: Investments, and pretty good ones at that.
[43] street,
That’s may all be true, but I also think it’s irrelevant. I can easily see governments agreeing to This sort of condition in order to present a “take it or leave it” position to the manufacturers. Government contracts are very lucrative, and with less competition in the marketplace because you are limiting the pool of manufacturers, the profit margin could actually go up because you can charge more.
The only way this runs into serious resistance is if a manufacturer has both a substantial government contract base and a substantial civilian sales base.
As with any other good intentioned legislation, the net loser is the taxpayer as the remaining contractors can charge more.
The program that blows any other spreadsheet away is Igor Pro. I rarely see anyone use it though.
Smith and Wesson experienced a 40% drop in sales after their agreement with the Clinton administration. It nearly went out of business.
Interestingly, the architect of that agreement between the Clinton administration and S&W was none other than current Governor Andrew Cuomo…
Right over the border many employees are from New Jersey http://www.lohud.com/article/20140121/NEWS02/301210058/Novartis-close-Suffern-plant-hundreds-affected?nclick_check=1
Novartis is 10% of Suffern’s property tax rolls? Ouch.
Question for the group. Live in Manhattan but just bought a beach house in NJ. I don’t have to pay state taxes in both NY and NJ correct? Just the property taxes in NJ? That would be a real kick in the balls given I am already paying Federal, NY state and NY City taxes.
I just heard of this iphone app that I assume anon is using to assemble his talking points. It’s really hilarious to imagine leftist sheep walking around with their eyes glued to their iphones counting on an app to tell them how to shout down the evil “capitalist roaders”.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bubble-busters-the-app/id665985532?mt=8
Just found out the town doesn’t have the ability to pay parking tickets, nor pay for parking permits (and the monthly renewal) online… but at least they pointed out where the night drop is located. What decade is this again?
I think Excel stinks in that during the last 10 years it seems to have gotten worse rather than better. I think they finally did get around to improving memory handling. On the other hand, the proliferation of excel file formats is dumb. Yes I do want to use a macro enabled file, please do not destroy it by throwing it away while saving it, yes when I open it the next day, I do trust this dangerous file I created yesterday, can you stop asking me that?
The reason I still use it is that 3rd party add ins I need are developed for it, so I’m using it more for access to the add-ins than Excel itself.
But when it’s time for hardcore calculating and graphing, I code in R.
Shock the monkey.
ragnar (51)-
I’d like to puncture the soap bubble containing anon’s pellet-sized brain.
Move to jersey. Our mafia style retribution is aimed at liberals.
De Blasio ‘getting back at us’ by not plowing: UES residents
http://nypost.com/2014/01/21/upper-east-side-residents-feel-spurned-after-plow-delay/
It really is a tale of two cities — this time with the tony Upper East Side getting the shaft!
Huge swaths of the city’s wealthiest neighborhood had been not been plowed by early Tuesday evening, leaving 1-percenters out in the cold, according to the city’s own map of snow-plower activity.
“He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” said writer and Life-long Upper East Sider and mom Molly Jong Fast of Mayor de Blasio.
“By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’ But we have everyone in this area on the Upper East Side. We have rich people, middle class people, and housing projects. We have it all.”
There appeared to be no snow plowing between East 59th and 79th Streets and between Second and Fifth Avenues.
Modal Trigger
The plow map as of 2:45 pm.
“I can’t believe de Blasio could do this. He is putting everyone in danger,” said Barbara Tamerin, who was using ski poles to get around 81st Street and Lexington Avenue.
“What is he thinking? We’re supposed to get up to a foot of snow and nobody on the Upper East Side is supposed to blink an eye? I can barely get around and I’m on snow shoes! All of the buses are stuck and can’t go anywhere. He’s crazy. We need Mayor Bloomberg back!”
Martin Cisse, 45, who works at a flower shop near 85th and Lex, said he can’t understand why the city would fail to plow the UES.
“De Blasio is trying to hurt the more wealthy people by ignoring us but there’s no logic to that,” Cisse said.
“There are a lot of blue collar working people out here driving trucks and trying to get around too.”
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, at an evening press briefing, defended the handling of the Upper East Side — claiming that one spreader had a busted GPS and was not reporting progress to the PlowNYC Web site.
“The GPS was not working,” he said. “Also, traffic created a lot of problems for us in that area.”
At the same press conference de Blasio stood by his performance. “All city agencies are acting [like] usual very, very effectively and in a coordinated fashion.”
[47] street,
I agree that presently the economics make it hard, but remember that there is both carrot and stick. One stick, which I did not elaborate on, is how the left will try to put civilian gun mfgrs out of business. There are many ways from mere pinpricks to reviving lawsuits, to enacting new legal recourses for gun victims with the goal of bankrupting mfgrs. Since the limitations imposed by the ex post facto clause make it so that any gun made and sold pre-legislation is grandfathered, the economics suddenly shift and civilian sales are suddenly hazardous. Civilian mfgrs exit the business for gov. contracting or go out of business. Market dries up, my guns suddenly quintuple in price, and the only ones making money are government contractors and mexican cartels.
[56] street
One spreader for an entire section of the city? And since when does a spreader handle large amounts of fluffy snow?
I liked the traffic study story better. Much more plausible.
Depends…..where do you earn your income and can you prove it? Just FYI – the aggregate amount of your taxes is never going to be greater than the highest taxed jurisdiction, so you don’t get double dipped or anything…..as an aside, as a resident of NYC, you are summarily screwed, so I would have a hard time accepting that you will be substantially worse off…..probably more of an administrative hassle if anything….or a matter of a few% (diff between top brackets among the states)
ccb223 says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:24 pm
Question for the group. Live in Manhattan but just bought a beach house in NJ. I don’t have to pay state taxes in both NY and NJ correct? Just the property taxes in NJ? That would be a real kick in the balls given I am already paying Federal, NY state and NY City taxes.
Great name for a movement.
San Francisco League of Pi$$ed-Off Voters
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101354115
I read an article this week that NY and SF are the hardest places to recruit IT talent. There is a shortage of top talent. Wit the likes of Google moving in there is competition with the IBs for the cream (or the Elite).
Interesting article on social inequality, providing a take I hadn’t heard before.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/21/marx_is_back_global_working_class
[60] Fabian
So when is your going away party?
[61] ccb
It is an interesting article but the idea that workers will gain bargaining power as their economic statuses converge isn’t new. Some might argue that it is part of the liberal acceptance of globalization, to raise up the third world to the level of the legacy industrialized world. It is also a function of their improved bargaining power such that coercive legislation really would not be necessary.
However some level of coercion would still be required in the Treaty arena. Here, in order to effectively deal with the asymmetries between nations, you have to blacklist or wall off the actors that aren’t toeing your line. The issue here is that if asymmetries persist, you end up with protectionism.
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