Monday, April 16, 2018

Even I think real estate is gasp worthy now.

This week the whole nation freaked out about a burned out house in San Jose selling for 800k. In my head I thought - these people don't even know the half of it. People are telling me that to buy a house these days - you have to waive ~all~ contingencies. Including inspections.

Since I don't like to extrapolate my area to other areas, I like to get lots of data points before freaking out about stuff. But today I talked to my childhood friend who has decided to become an agent in the Seattle market and she said the same thing is happening up there. You even waive title insurance! Everybody says it's been going on for a couple of years.

That right there is a whole nuther level of crazy. I've gutted a house before and even I wouldn't waive inspections or title.

4 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, April 17, 2018 1:55:00 PM

    Miami blows hot and cold, but right now it's mostly luke-warm ...

    The situation with badly maintained, mostly empty condo towers is mostly over -- the big change has been a shift from foreign investment to local investment over the past three years. I knew of several condo towers with failing water and electric services a few years ago, but those situations have changed.

    Because of the mostly empty condo tower problem and other Florida land problems in general, you'd be a fool to buy anything here without multiple inspections and title insurance as well as a full vetting by your attorney for hidden legal problems.

    Florida is a place where national food companies could "sell" little plots of land that people could "buy" by sending in enough box tops to be rewarded with a quitclaim deed for a postage-stamp sized hunk of land. There were over a hundred thousand of these quitclaim deeds issued for just one of these box top land scams.

    I was trying to find information about one of these scams I vaguely remember that involved extremely swampy land in the eastern part of Collier County, but instead I found an article about the planning aftermath decades later of a major real estate scam in Collier County.

    It's a huge aftermath: the area is slightly larger than the city limits of Seattle. This badly planned "community" straddles the section of I-75 (a.k.a. "Alligator Alley") which runs from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa -- look at a map of South Florida and find the hard right turn that I-75 makes to head north toward Tampa, and the area north of that next to that hard right turn is this place.

    Here's the area I was thinking about instead -- it's now called the Picayune Strand State Forest, but look at the grid of dirt roads with nothing on them. The area mentioned in the article is a similarly large expanse north of I-75, on the other side across from this state forest. I think it took an act of the Florida Legislature to clean up the mess of quitclaim deeds in what is now a state forest.

    Swamp land scams in Florida are an actual Glengarry Glen Ross that still continues to this day.

    So there you go: Florida, fighting land scams and mosquitos since 1845. :-)

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  2. It musta helped that all those people moved back to the mainland from Puerto Rico. All those empty plots seem like a great place to put a tiny house village.

    I honestly didn't even think it was possible to buy a house without inspections in California. It's like a law. And the fact that banks are allowing this is confusing.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeThursday, April 19, 2018 11:16:00 AM

    I think you'll enjoy this video ...

    Judge Morty: State of Georgia vs. Rick Allen (sorta NSFW)

    This was an actual case that happened in some redneck county of Georgia where the defendant was clearly not mentally fit for trial, and one of the people involved with the "Rick and Morty" TV show got involved with making sound clips of the court proceedings transcript.

    But there's one phrase from the judge that still makes me laugh ...

    "YOU HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO BE A DUMBASS!"

    Apparently this is also true in the California real estate market. :-)

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  4. LOL. I feel a little profiled. Just because I like Ren and Stimpy. But I just got into Rick and Morty last year. So I haven't seen that one. But that is straight out of a Colin Ferguson trial.

    Skip to around 2 minutes 31.

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