From the APP:
NJ home prices: Here is what roiling stock market has done to spring 2025 home buying
Home buyers continue to descend on the Jersey Shore, shrugging off high mortgage rates, a faltering stock market and economic uncertainty to push median home prices to record heights, according to statistics from the New Jersey Association of Realtors.
The Realtors’ data showed that new listings ticked up in March, but so did prices. The median price of a single-family home sold in Monmouth County was $750,000, up 10.3% from the same month a year ago. The median price in Ocean County was $606,000, up 6.3%, during that time.
“One (buyer) has said they’re going to hold off now and wait and see what happens (with the economy),” said Adrian Jusino, a real estate agent with Exp Realty based in Red Bank. “But everybody else is business as usual, still going out, still looking at houses, still getting leads.”
As the spring buying season gets underway, house hunters in Monmouth and Ocean counties are running into a familiar pattern: They are finding low inventory and high prices, while they await for signs that the housing market is beginning to thaw.
The issue? Many owners who bought or refinanced their homes during the peak of the pandemic, when interest rates were at record lows, are unwilling to move now that mortgage rates are much higher. And economists say it will take time for more homes to come on the market.
“The passage of time should bring about more inventory as life-changing events force some homeowners to give up their locked-in low mortgage rates,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said in an April 23 report. “Aside from inventory growth, lower mortgage rates will be needed to get homeowners to move.”
Booyaa!
Dammit
The median price of a single-family home sold in Monmouth County was $750,000, up 10.3% from the same month a year ago.
Remarkable, but worthy of it’s price point. From beaches to horse farms to antiquities to dining to concerts, what’s missing in this county? I saw Frank Sinatra perform in Monmouth County! Ocean County. has desirable beaches but go inland and it’s scrub pine, blue hair territory.
And this dude Lawrence Yun continues to provide comedy. Rain is wet, donuts are round, someone needs to tell him so he can report it.
Showing up for jury duty today. Hope I get dismissed.
Congressman booed:
We can expect more of this –
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-congress-lawler-trump-dc074f165919c3d5305b3fa0e382c2b0
“The Realtors’ data showed that new listings ticked up in March, but so did prices. The median price of a single-family home sold in Monmouth County was $750,000, up 10.3% from the same month a year ago. The median price in Ocean County was $606,000, up 6.3%, during that time.“
For some reason land in the liberal progressive north east is becoming more expensive, while maga territories like Florida are rapidly losing their value. Yep.
NJ rightwingers will never move to maga states
This is buttoned up nicely. Explain to me the scenario where it’s a treed plot of land in the middle of a few thousand acres? I like the inside a lot and the fact that they cared for this through and through.
https://www.trulia.com/home/4567-state-route-30-middleburgh-ny-12122-32524686?mid=33#lil-mediaTab
Usually it’s because that’s the original land owner’s home, or a closer family member that had carved off a small lot for a home. May have traded hands at one point from the original owner, which is why it wasn’t re-bundled into the larger land sale.
I want to know what the deal is with the partially completed block construction in the basement.
Lyn Alden’s monthly Macro newsletter.
Tariff, trade, US Dollar and capital allocation within the US. Given her engineering / finance background its a bit dry but filled with data and devoid of bad political theatre.
https://www.lynalden.com/may-2025-newsletter/
Thanks, Grim. Plausible explanations. Yeah, can’t figure out the block construction either.
Sorry to the 5m, maybe you should have done HVAC instead…
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/student-loan-collections-restart-for-borrowers-in-default.html
Foundation wall reinforcement and maybe something to do with drainage a large sump pit? There looks to be a sump in the right corner of one picture. That basement looks like it floods allot. Water marks everywhere and dehumidifier up on blocks.
grim says:
May 5, 2025 at 8:03 am
Sorry to the 5m, maybe you should have done HVAC instead…
See lots of hot blondes in this trade….
Don’t worry about that house.
It will be here long after your geezer asses are gone.
In fact, you might have enough land to bury your own azzes on your own property.
If you are tired, just dig a little bit each week. I’m sure you can get to the 6 ft depth within a month. Or hire one of those mexicans before you have them deported.
Nice deck for your funeral as well. Taryl can be your priest.
Couple of kegs and Coffin dance on your JBL party box.
Anybody’s kid on here not going to college?
Lets have a vote.
How many are, how many aren’t.
Just trying to find out which people on here are sending their kids to the Mike Rowe turd school.
Stu’s kid is going to college, as is Fab’s.
Sounding like a true patriot. Or like most Americans.
I mean, why would you want to do your civic duty?
RentL0rd says:
May 5, 2025 at 7:03 am
Showing up for jury duty today. Hope I get dismissed.
Juice,
Hard to tell on possible water issues. The columns are painted but the plates are rusty. Why not paint the plates, too if you’re looking to hide anything?
UPDATED MON, MAY 5 2025
9:13 AM EDT
Dow futures fall 250 points: Live updates
Pia Singh
Hakyung
Phoenix, we are having serious thoughts on possibly getting my son to go that route. The kid is probably going to be top 5 in his HS class and would make a brilliant engineer. From age 5 on, he could fix anything that broke. Once he hit 10 years old, I just started asking him to fix things in the house. His great grandfather was brilliant like that. Just opened up his own vacuum repair store in Trenton in the 50s and made a living off that. In his spare time, he counted cards in AC.
NJ maga kids ain’t going to southern Christian colleges.
They dream of elite liberal progressive universities.
Dark Phoenix says:
May 5, 2025 at 8:26 am
Anybody’s kid on here not going to college?
Lets have a vote.
How many are, how many aren’t.
Just trying to find out which people on here are sending their kids to the Mike Rowe turd school.
Stu’s kid is going to college, as is Fab’s.
Got 1 in college and 1 starting college in 2026.
Nomad,
Thanks for the Lyn Alden share. I wasn’t familiar with her work. Keeping up the tradition of investment newsletter writers skewing libertarian/Austrian-economics.
Do you utilize her asset allocation suggestions?
Problem is, you open your small business. Things are going great. You are making money
But then an orange turd gets voted in, and no one is fixing that vaccuum when the circuit board price goes up 200 percent, or you are a farmer barely making ends meet when your fertillzer doubles and no one in China is buying the crop you planned for last year thanks to an unstable Douche for President.
How do you plan for an unstable douche? It’s like being married. You can’t fix stupid.
I guess you could sell your farm to Oligarch Bill Gates, who plans to control all of the food production in America, one plot at a time.
Slimy fucc.
You need to be able to lift boilers if you are a plumber.
You can do Mike Rowe’s job from a wheelchair.
VSG – back under your rock!
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/sorry-harvard-everyone-wants-to-go-to-college-in-the-south-now-235d7934
VSG – If that rock does not work try this one.
https://www.thefp.com/p/kids-skip-ivy-league-for-southern-schools
Nomad,
Fantastic find from Lyn Alden. It really nails the tariff/manufacturing issue without playing partisan politics.
A couple key points, quite a few I’ve shared here plenty of times over the years.
Gary, Smalls, etc. You really should read this.
1) Our strong military and willingness to help prevent military conquests around the world is what makes the US Dollar, the reserve currency (Trump, wants to play isolationist, and maintain the Dollar as a reserve currency, which works against itself).
2) Due to the Dollar being used as reserve currency, we can run much larger debts to GDP than the rest of the world can.
3) It’s hard to reshore supply chains quickly, especially from China, and so jacking tariffs up very high can hurt us as much as it can hurt them. The US only imports a minority of China’s total exports even including indirects; the the majority of China’s exports go to the rest of the world. Thus while we can harm them via tariffs, it’s pretty hard to cripple them.
4) the execution has been messy (at least so far, from February through April). Tariffs were escalated very quickly to unsustainable levels, which makes it easier for other countries like China to call the bluff. In response, the US made all sorts of exemptions for phonemakers and carmakers and so forth, but that benefits big businesses while leaving many small businesses in trouble. In addition, the very products that the US would need to build up its own manufacturing base are themselves tariffed. It takes many years to build up an industrial base, and many of the needed supplies for that are tariffed and thus more expensive.
5) So, while I do think the structural nature of US trade deficits is becoming a serious problem and needs addressing, I view the current execution approach as raising the risks of a recession and not meaningfully tackling the core issue of the trade deficit itself. We’ll see to what extent the next parts of Miran’s paper are followed, such as a multilateral currency accord or unilateral methods to weaken the dollar. The US does not seem likely to enter that phase with as much negotiating power as Miran hoped.
6) If the dollar is structurally weakened with a currency accord, and then further rebalanced with a more multi-polar global reserve approach, then it would help re-shore manufacturing to some extent, but would also hurt financial asset performance and raise the likelihood of consumer price inflation. Who’s going to vote for a poorly-performing 401(k) and higher consumer prices? Miran acknowledges this and provides mitigating variables, but I think those variables are very likely to be insufficient.
Boilers are pretty light now, small aluminum or SS heat exchangers. Only cast iron boilers still in use are for oil. I mean they make big block cast iron boilers for NG, but why bother.
Electrician is where the money is in the trades.
Daughter is class of ‘26, son ‘27. Just started on college visits. Sticker shock keeps me up at night.
One her best friends is becoming a welder. Smart kid, was in all the most accelerated programs with her since 2nd grade. Goes to VoTech for welding as a Junior. Only girl in her class. She’ll make a fortune. Her father is all mobbed up in the steel trades too, kid is set.
Forbes considers UT Austin to be a new IVY. The top 10% of graduating Texas high schoolers used to automatically be accepted. But the law has been recently changed to top 5 or 6%. Maybe Texas wants the blue states to subsidize the school with out of state tuition.
Forbes new ivies
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/education/university-of-texas/ut-austin-new-ivies-forbes/269-94324c42-4c40-40bd-a78a-819edfe7ad86
Juice,
That Free Press article is exactly right. Gator Jr., looked at the BU’s the UMasses, etc. It was definitely the lack of indoctrination, strong sports teams and freewheeling campus with a true diversity of student types (from partiers to academics) that attracted him.
The Dems certainly swang too far Left. So did the colleges. Fortunately, it appears to be swinging back.
Good share. Much better than condom bombs.
LIb – “we can run much larger debts to GDP than the rest of the world can”
Is that really true? I think not the debt addiction is everywhere.
Perhaps look at the data first before you leap? Canada is not far behind us. Japan is way ahead. France and Spain slightly lower…… Italy and Greece much higher debt to GDP.
Lib BTW when did it really become a problem?
Ben Bernake started QE during the housing crisis… Cash for trash housing bonds and UST.. Then rinse and repeat for Covid etc…The man behind the curtain holds PooF!!! $5 trillion today..
Not to say the private sector isn’t contributing… What was $8 trillion in 2010 has grown to $24 trillion in 2024 of private sector financing… Warren Buffet anyone? $314.1 billion his company holds accounting for 5.1% of the entire U.S. Treasury bill market. Why invest in anything if Uncle Sam is paying a premium?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
HMB,
I had a conversation with my son last night about the schools he considered to be the top public universities. He chose UVA, Illinois, Michigan, UF and UT-Austin.
4th semester of straight A’s completed. Two more and the Summer of 96 and he moves on to his doctorate. It looks like OBM (Organizational Business Management) – or psych for the workplace, is his focus. He can always fallback on Behavioral and work with kids like his brother. Which he is doing to earn spending money for his fourth Summer in a row. He started last Monday.
Juice,
I’m well aware of where we stand on debt. Read the article.
A family member from Bergen County has two of his going to James Madison University. I never heard of any NJ kid ever going there. Their other son went the cop route and now patrols Bergen county picking up perps….no shortage apparently it’s a growing field I am told.
SMU is a holding cell for NE Prep School screw ups
Very Stable Genius says:
May 5, 2025 at 10:11 am
NJ maga kids ain’t going to southern Christian colleges.
They dream of elite liberal progressive universities.
Dark Phoenix says:
May 5, 2025 at 8:26 am
Anybody’s kid on here not going to college?
Lets have a vote.
How many are, how many aren’t.
Just trying to find out which people on here are sending their kids to the Mike Rowe turd school.
Stu’s kid is going to college, as is Fab’s.
Libturd
Those are on my list too. Hoping the high schooler picks UT Austin since we have enough put away for 4 years with zero aid.
Lib – Every time I read anything about dollar hegemony I have to remind folks of the real reason for it. We are willing to pay…. Others are not, buy a Chinese bond yielding 1.6%? A German bond is only 2.79%?
No One,
I don’t use her investment portfolios although I suspect they are good. I enjoy reading her stuff as she is bright and it is a drama free read. In the case of tariffs, the article for me was helpful in order to better understand how the plumbing for the US dollar works.
Lib, the CEO of J&J indicated tax policy would help him reshore manufacturing of their portfolio of Rx and devices they manufacture outside of the US.
Sourcing antibiotics and pain meds from overseas I believe is not good and why manufacturing these items here has not been a priority for multiple administrations is a head scratcher.
Nomad: that portfolio she published (one of many? Used for a specific purpose? Launched in 2025 or has been in place many years?) would have really outperformed for the last 3 months or so, but is the standard old school /value tilt /resources heavy /international heavy /out of the academic textbook that I would have put on in 1997 fresh off my MBA. I full understand it and endorse the underpinnings of the approach.
That said, if in place for the last 15 years (and taking cuts of any 12-36 month rolling period) it would have significantly underperformed.
Not a criticism, merely an observation.
Nomad says:
May 5, 2025 at 12:24 pm
No One,
I don’t use her investment portfolios although I suspect they are good. I enjoy reading her stuff as she is bright and it is a drama free read. In the case of tariffs, the article for me was helpful in order to better understand how the plumbing for the US dollar works.
The chances of getting dismissed as a juror are getting higher.
—
What would the trump admin pay for exhuming your forefathers and sending them to their home country?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/trump-dhs-travel-costs-stipend-immigrants-self-deport.html
Wow;
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/17-Havens-Rd-Wantage-Twp.-NJ-07461/201851222_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare
SMU was one of my kid’s safety schools, and was one of the first to accept her, gave her a modest discount, “scholarship”. It was actually a nice place to visit, there’s a big GWBush museum on the campus, and according to student surveys was probably the most politically balanced university we toured. A nice mid-sized school that has a real campus in a safe location, with sports and school spirit and such. Plus she was accepted to the business school from day one. If you wanted to get hired in the Dallas Ft Worth area in business, it’s probably a decent place to go.
But there are still better undergrad business programs.
One of my four sisters got a full ride for her to obtain her masters in marketing at SMU. She loved the school. Though, some of the students asked to see her horns (not kidding). She was the only Jewish person that she knew was attending at the time.
College rankings JJ style
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/10-colleges-with-the-highest-std-rates-in-america-579700/4
Wow
That’s one hell of a nompound.
So much for transparency. Why did it take a week for the Trump Administration to release the issues with Newark airport ATC?
Biden’s fault for sure.
So basically none of your kids are going the “Mike Rowe” route.
Just what I thought.
Bristol Myers Squibb is making yet more cuts to its Lawrenceville, New Jersey, workforce, this time axing 516 people, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice. The layoffs will come in multiple waves starting May 9 and ending March 27, 2026.
Of course not!
Rightwinger dreams of elitist liberal progressive elite college.
maga dream is Engineering degree. all BS about factories returning
Dark Phoenix says:
May 5, 2025 at 7:27 pm
So basically none of your kids are going the “Mike Rowe” route.
Just what I thought.
Congrats on Elon pulling off a Walt Disney in Texas.
According to the HHS official who was willing to speak on the matter under the condition of anonymity, the pause stemmed from a lover’s spat between researchers at the facility, which resulted in one of the individuals poking holes in the other’s personal protective equipment (PPE). That individual has since been fired, the official indicated.
These are obviously the people we want working with viruses
Clown Portnoy on a crazy rant fires an off duty waitress cause she is at a dance recital and asks to call him back when it was over. When someone’s off work, they’re off work. What about that? Don’t you get you stupid scumbag?
Wrap it up and stop whining. John Wayne I would never cry like this.
Dad in family of 5 reveals price tag for 1 day at Disney World — and haters are shocked: ‘Outrageous’
Anyone headed to El Salvador? Alcatraz? Naah
Credit Suisse Services AG Admits to Conspiring with U.S. Taxpayers to Hide Assets and Income in Offshore Accounts and Admits that Credit Suisse Breached Its Prior Plea Agreement