Publicly Financed, $1 Billion Buildings . . . in Use 4 Hours a Week, Less Than Half the Year Building football stadiums with public dollars is in fact a mug’s game. With eight regular-season games, pro football rarely if ever pays for itself, no matter how many fictional economic impact reports the league’s captive economists...Read More
Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods I spent four years learning economics at Stanford. I’ve spent (going on) the last forty years unlearning it. It’s not that Stanford failed me. It turns out that the entire field of modern economics was built upon not one but two outmoded ideas, if not conceptual...Read More
“Good,” “Better,” and “Best” One of the key services performed by Realtors for clients is analyzing a home’s fair market value. Buyers’ agents do that analysis — called a CMA, or “Comparative Market Analysis” — to help clients determine how much to offer for a home; listing agents go through the same process to help...Read More
MLS: “Seller Requests Minimum of 24 Hours Notice for All Showings” Aren’t unusual showing instructions a pain? That’s especially the case when a busy prospective Buyer — or two of them, if it’s a couple — and their Realtor are trying to see not just 1 home, but 6-8 in a row, perhaps in different...Read More
Runner-Up Buyers “Once bitten, twice shy” may be true in romance, but it definitely does not apply in residential real estate. At least, that seems to be the case in housing markets with scarce inventory and rising prices — true in many parts of the country now, including the Twin Cities. More Aggressive On the contrary, would-be...Read More
“The Most Important Person in the World” In a world awash with sales “how to” books, sure-fire negotiation techniques, and other misguided blather, it was a tonic to encounter this no b.s., not-so-PC take on the customer – salesperson relationship: “When you’re speaking with a customer, who’s the most important person in the world? “THE...Read More
