Back to the Future You’d think, in an age of online everything, that it would be easier, not harder, to do due diligence on new home builders. Especially small home builders, who may only build a handful of homes a year (vs. national giants like D.R. Horton and Pulte). Unh-unh. As recently as five years...Read More
Ground-scraping interest rates turn savers into speculators and quarantined millennials into day traders. They facilitate overborrowing, suppress market signals, misdirect investment dollars, and promote the dubious business of turning well-financed public companies into heavily indebted private ones.” –James Grant, “Powell Has Become the Fed’s Dr. Feelgood”; The Wall Street Journal 6/28/2020. Except for Jim Grant’s...Read More
Interior Decorating Tip #34 If you want to give a Living Room or Family Room a luxurious feel, you could pop for an Oriental rug costing $2,000, $5,000 ” or more. Or . . . you could spend $100 or so to get an especially thick carpet pad to put under a more modest rug...Read More
Homing Instinct Sellers frown on Buyers moving in before closing, for about 27 (valid) reasons. But, the Momma raccoon that set up housekeeping in my client’s window well hardly asked anyone’s permission. And since my clients moved out-of-town well before closing, it fell to the Buyer ” and specifically, their pre-closing walk-thru inspection ” to...Read More
“Substantially the Same Condition” & The Golden Rule “I know it when I see it.” —Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, on the legal definition of what constitutes pornography. “Buyer has the right to a walk-through review of the property prior to closing to establish that the property is in substantially the same condition as of the...Read More
Prospective Home Sellers’ Four Big Sins: Music, Mirrors, and Masking Scents & Paint Like Richard Nixon and Watergate, in real estate, too, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” In that vein, here are four things that home Sellers misguidedly do to throw Buyers (and their agents) off the, umm . . . scent. One....Read More
