(D)arlington, MA

Notwithstanding the caveat that there is ONE MORE DAY left to the quarter, we hazard a trip north from Belmont and take a look at that darling of the Real estate agents, Arlington (get it?...DArlington...ahem...).

Agents bagged pieces of 33 single family payoffs in the first quarter of 2010. This rubs out as a jump over 2009 where 25 homes changed grimy hands, AND an increase over 2008 when 33 singles, shall we say, entered real estate matrimony (get it?...darling, single, matrimony. Hello?!?! I need a laugh here.).

I would not jump to conclusions here about the 8,000 rubdown being given out here. I leave that mental masturbation to the PHD's at Harvard.

Who knows, Arlington seems to be such a sweet little town. Maybe all they need is love.

Ooops...I did it again... (actually they did it)

Can you believe it, "shoppers"? One day left and the first quarter of this new decade is over...

Now, I know there's a bit of time left, but we may well jump the gun and begin to take a look at the slices and dices of how the "recovery" is coming along. Starting with that spendthrift Cambridge wannabe town of Belmont, we see 15 single family deals closed in the quarter...a big jump from the 11 of last year (must be that 8 grand tax gig, eh???). But whoa, what looms on the rear horizon, Kimmosabi? It ain't Uncas or the Last of the Mohicans...it is none other than the first quarter of 2008 -- wherein 29 RE attorney's got paid to write up 29 deeds. Whoa, Silver, we are being told that the LAST 2 years TOGETHER have not gotten up to where they can scratch the butt of 2008. IS that what we are being told??? Yup that is it.

I think this explains the scared stiff smile of the housewife house hucksters -- the ones who do one deal a year. They'll be down to zero at this rate (can you do a half a deal??? why not -- that's a condo, ain't it?).

Keep zooming back, my faithful companions. We will begin our town by town reviews...but WAIT, there's more...

...I will be at the House of Blues, sitting quietly for a change, but a couple of venues have asked me to return to the stand-up mike -- and I shall be doing so shortly. Now ...there's no more (change the channel, please).

Agents are full of S**T Redux, Redux as in again

'nuf said?... read on
By State House News Service
Belmont Citizen-Herald
Posted Mar 25, 2010 @ 01:02 PM
Boston, Mass. — Completed foreclosures in Massachusetts fell 19.6 percent in February, compared to January, but were 10.4 percent higher than in February 2009, according to data released Thursday morning. Also, foreclosure deeds jumped 13.8 percent to 2,058 in the first two months of the year from 1,809 during the same period in 2009, the Warren Group reported. Foreclosures started by lenders in Massachusetts in February were up more than 13 percent over January but down 7.5 percent from a year ago, according to data released Thursday morning. Over the first two months of 2010 foreclosure petitions – the first step in the foreclosure process – are down 6.1 percent from the comparable period in 2009, according to The Warren Group. “In the last six months, an average of about 2,100 foreclosure petitions were filed each month. That’s a pretty high level, but the pace is much lower than it was in the early part of 2008, when lenders were filing an average of about 3,000 petitions to foreclose a month,” Warren Group CEO Timothy M. Warren said in a statement.

Copyright 2010 Belmont Citizen-Herald. Some rights reserved

Liquid Assets in Waltham

Ms. Flanagan, my thoughts are with you today.

For those who do not know Ms. Flanagan, she is the Berkley St homeowner who is, well, not living in her home because the home moved...yes moved...about a foot, so the FOX news folks tell me, OFF its foundation.

Why did it move? Seems, 'though I am no engineer, it "trolleyed" off its cement track because of the recent storms that brought oodles of rain, followed by doodles of more rain a few days later (actually yesterday).

I cannot say how rain can "push a house", but I am reminded of the earthquake term, LIQUIFICATION. This is where the ground, normally harder that a sixty-year-old coot over dosing on Viagra, gets pushed, cajoled and shaken enough so that is gets soft (like the coot after his 2 minutes as Lord Lochinvar, or George Clooney). It may well be akin to when you kick a hard clump of dirt and it breaks up in to a gazillion little pieces. In that state of being, the soil no longer can hold the man-made edifice upon it and things shift, or fall down as the case may be. In Ms. Flanagan's case, water may have softened by the whole thing and, the rest is "moving".

The news reports that the Flanagan home is not in a flood zone (I know the street) and I would agree from my unprofessional view, but I would also conjecture that the forensics of the situation will point to GROUNDWATER issues, and that would not be covered anyway.

At all rates, my heart goes out to them and I wish them well. I would hope there will be no tears shed -- there has been wnought water...

Agents are full of S**T -- Redux

Yesterday (see below) I put out some stats on Orders of Notice in my corner of the world, YTD versus last year for the same period. They painted a grim picture "malgre" the rosy smiles of the "housewife home hucksters" who daily run about hawking homes whilst "habidashing" about the kitchen curtains.

I was asked by many for some support of the numbers as they were from "only a small sample" of towns.

Herewith, I pick Suffolk County -- That is BOSTON, REVERE, CHELSEA, WINTHROP. Here goes...

1/1/10 to 3/18/10 560 Orders of Notice.
1/1/09 to 3/18/09 194 Orders of Notice.

As far as Middlesex South goes...

1/1/10 to 3/18/10 745 Orders of Notice
1/1/09 to 3/18/09 202 Orders of Notice

'nuf said?

Agents are Full of S**T

Here in my corner of the world, the next time your bubbly agent tells you how great things are in the world and how that world will only be greater for you if you buy this home "TODAY!!!!!!", ask that agent of yours about "ORDERS of NOTICE". Now, mind you, they probably do not know what those things are. My advice in that situation is to get another agent, FAST! Just call me, actually.

That is an order of notice over yonder the right there. Not a pretty thing I would hazard (privacy information has been blocked out), AND, it gets uglier as one learns about them.

Herewith is a small primer on what we will now abbreviate as OON:

An OON may be considered an solid indicator of foreclosures coming up. It is a required document filed at the Registry of Deeds that notified folks that their lender is going to foreclose on them. The OON is required because any person in the military can seek relief under the Service members Civil Relief Act (one rightly cannot foreclose on a bloke shooting down some scum bucket who wants to do harm to Americans).

An now, hers are some stats to ponder.

Looking at this year to date (1/1 - 3/18) there have been in "my" areas (Belmont, Arlington, Watertown and Medford) 66 OON's plopped in mailboxes of sinking homeowners; 37 of those are in Medford, by the way.

In the same period last year, there were 14!...Yes only 14 (11 in Medford).

That is a big clunk. When one thinks of all the foreclosures that have been laid to rest, and these numbers coming up that ARE NOT in the stats,...well conjecture is worth a few moments when next we "latte at Starbucks".

What does this mean? Well, we will expand our stat collection and see if the patterns are "All over the board". Then, we will be better able to discern if your happy agent is full of S**T, or completely down and out of the crapper already.

"Ducking" the Weather

There are ducks swimming in my backyard...not in the little pond at the northwest corner, but in the yard where, at about this time every year, I begin the annual toil of planting happy grass and expunging, well, crab grass. Not today.

It appears the water table has risen above the banks of the pond, and the pond has made ownership of a substantial swath of the yard. I noticed a fish in a place that would normally make it a "fish out of water". I had hoped the little adventurer wold submarine itself back to the deeper climes of the pond, but sadly, that did not happen;...an aquatic squirrel tip-toed through the shallows and made a "canape" of the "carp."

Many open houses on this Sunday just gone were "called on account of rain." Brokers, deciding to put valor in the "bottom drawer", felt it best to "close for the day" rather than have to explain to a doubting public that the "wet basement is ONLY during unusual rains" such as these. I kept my open house going: I had not problem facing up to the sceptics about the seepage...no problem because NO ONE came.

The high school is closed today. Flooding. A few other communities are suffering the same fate. Not the flooding but having teenagers with a day off and nothing to do. I suspect the "little darlings" will spend it nursing cheap beer out of paper bags behind the Dunkin Donuts on Trapelo Road, or behind the library if the babbling brook there has not overflowed its banks. The town will fairly glow with beer cans reflecting in headlights by tonight.

I'll be out showing some properties. Let's take advantage of all this. How much off the list price can we get for a sopping basement? Time will tell....

So that's the way things are in my corner of the world in these rain swept times. Time to put on the flippers and check my own basement.

Sellin' the "Crib" for a new career

The caricature to the left is of the Salwens; Mr. and daughter Kevin and Hannah. It appears on page 23 of the March 15, 2010 of the New Yorker. The Salwens for those who have not heard are, now (at least for this week), writers with a successful book, and wanderlusts on a successful book tour bringing in the dough. Their book, The Power of Half details their story and subsequent "journey" spiritual journey, that is (oh brother!), not the book tour pay per speech journery tour that brought them to New York recently from their backwater hovel in Atlanta (actually it was an $800,000 home with an elevator, YES an elevator but why haggle).

Your see, the Selwens have this precocious (some would say obnoxious)daughter (that would be Hannah), now 15 or so, who, in 2006 as the family stopped at a red light, saw two men: a homeless rummy to the left and a rich folkster in a Mercedes to the right. She posited that if the guy to the right in the German car did not have such a good car (read that as not all the money he had), the rummy to the left would be able to have a meal (read that as government hand-out).

Ahhh, says the moron father...yes, but but but, and the kid says NO BUTS WE NEED TO GIVE IT ALL AWAY so that the rummies of the world can get to Burger King STAT! The father should have cut it off right there telling the kid she has no business suggesting the dispersal of HIS hard earned samoleons. Ditto, the father should have cut it off right there by telling the brat that, perhaps, the guy to the left (rummy) should ask the guy to the right for a job, and that what the kid is proposing is communism -- from each accrding to his abilites to each according to his needs. But Karl Marx NEVER did put together a best seller on that score (and it appears the Salwens have; see Barnes and Noble), but that is getting ahead of our opus.

To make that long story short, the Salwens SOLD their home for $800k, elevator and all, and gave half dough away to some seed eaters in Ghana (what ever happened to that Atlanta rummy right around the corner from them?).

And now, they are on the book tour.

We posit a few points here:

At first I was pondering saying what a true moron the guy is, but hey, the guy's got quite a financial head on his shoulders. Wealth is all fluid -- Look at it this way...he sells the ranch for a good a good bowl of rice, puts on the sneakers and runs for the hills. That's one way around the housing crisis.

But even better, he invests HALF of what he sells by dumping it off to some cuckholds out of the country (out of the country because inside the U.S.A. we could actually see how useless it is to give money to porch-sitters). I say "invests", because he writes the book about the experience and now he's rolling in the dough from Amazon, B&N, and all other sorts of cash registers, doing the tours, doing voice books and becoming a celebrity of the benificent type, just like that little girl who wrote a letter to Gorbachev in the 1980's (by the way, that kid died when she was about 13, I believe, in a private plane crash on way to a publicity event).

There is a moral to this story:

There are many folks who've come forward with interesting ways to sell a home and maximize profits in these hard times -- staging, loan take backs, point buy downs, rent-to-owns, who knows?..., but this guy wins the contest.

He sold his house for a best selling book writing career.

Bravo

Wheel Estate Redux

I have been driving a Yaris these days. It appears to be, at this point at least, the only car that has not been recalled by Toyota.

Perhaps my Yaris is truly a super car, but perhaps there are other reasons for no recall and herewith are but a few speculations:

There are but a handful on the road. The numbers sold are counted in tens of thousands, not in millions like the Corolla. Perhaps Toyota forgot to recall them.

I paid a mere 13k for the jalopy. I suppose, if there is something wrong with the chariot, just dump it out on Monday morning with the rest of the recycled cans and plastic (the Yaris, I have been told, is made of aluminum recycled cans).

And, perhaps, anyone riding around in a little car made from Dr. Pepper metal deserves to die, so no bother for a recall.

Yet, as I go off to present a property, I am confident that the brakes will work at 30 MPH and the car (unlike the Prius) will not get stuck at 90 miles per hour (I doubt my Yaris will crank out 60 MPH without the hubcaps falling off).

Now I know what you all are thinking. Does he not look like a fool driving up a sales meeting whilst driving a Tonka Toy?! Where is his sense of status, his sense of lording over the baffled customer; the shock and awe of a BMW?

Ahh, yes, I have addressed that. You see, in this age of less is more, or if not more than just the best we can do, I feel the BMW or any other Luxury car from one of the former AXIS countries bespeaks a pompous and out-of-touch message. Unemployment is rising and this chump is driving up in a Lexus -- a new one??? -- damn I'll be damned if I'll give that parasite a lick of business.

Ahhhhh, but as I drive up in the Yaris, clean and shiny humming of cheap gas consumption, I am ever asked, "What is that little thing?"

A Yaris, I posit. Gets me where I need to go fast, easy, and simple. I can park it in the smallest of wedges. I am in and out. And with my business booming right now, I need to move, and move fast. Now how about this home...let's take a look and see what it does for you, shall we?

Status symbols are everywhere --- just remember symbols say, hard workers DO.