Second Line of Business — Or First? “Star Tribune to Sell Land for Apartment Project.” —Star Tribune (Aug. 28, 2012) What do Twin Cities companies The Star Tribune, Gabberts, and Hoigaards all have in common? Certainly not their primary lines of business: newspaper publishing, furniture, and sports equipment and apparel, respectively. Rather, each company has...Read More
“Is [What?] the Next [What??]” If you found yourself asking the latter of those two questions . . . you’re definitely not the target audience of Web start-up (and high tech rage du jour) “Pinterest.” So, who is? (Pinterest’s target market, that is). As best I can tell, it consists of “under 30-something’s” equipped with the...Read More
Peaks, Troughs, and (September) Stubs Detect any patterns in the chart above? Here’s what I see: –Twin Cities new listings predictably peak each Spring, in late April/early May; –New listings reach their cyclical low each December; –Since the housing market top around 2006, both the new listing peaks and troughs have been successively lower, with one notable...Read More
The Ultimate Reality Test? Reality “And yet, it moves.” –What Galileo Galilei supposedly murmured on his death-bed, after being forced by the Church to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun. What is the ultimate rebuttal to housing bears, who maintain that the housing market isn’t going up, but even if it is,...Read More
That’s the question I fielded the other week from a client on behalf of their friend, who was leaving town imminently, and was (deeply) underwater on their North Minneapolis home. The short answer: ‘no.’ The more detailed answer: “no, for about 18 different reasons,” starting with the fact that what the underwater homeowner is essentially “donating” is a...Read More
Quality > Quantity Exposure, or “Location, Location, Location” After lots of proofs and tweaking, my new bus bench sign is in place at the end of Cedar Lake Road in St. Louis Park (if you can’t read the inscription below my name, it says “5-time Super Real Estate Agent!”). On the assumption that few readers of this...Read More
