By Mandelman
Okay, look… there’s stupid and then there’s really stupid… and then beyond that I suppose you reach the point of turn-away-out-of-embarrassment-stupid. And that’s what we deteriorated into at the end of last week, when the dependably stupid Diana Olick outdid herself on NBCNews.com, and I’m sure elsewhere as well… but I couldn’t bear to look, or watch.
First of all, Zillow produced a report that proclaimed that four million homes were raised from underwater status in the fourth quarter of 2013, so do I have to say a lot more about that or are we good there? I mean, go look up your home’s value on Zillow any time and tell me how far above reality the price is? I recently saw a house in LA on Zillow at $410,000… sold for $207,000.
How about if we start a contest? I’d love to promote the, “Sell your home at the Zillow price and win your mortgage payments for a year” contest. It’s not like we’d need any money to do it… no one would ever win.
But, let’s forget Zillow’s propensity for quoting prices that could only be designed to help Realtors get overpriced listings. Let’s assume some data actually showed prices on four million homes having risen out of underwater status… oh my God… no, let’s not. That’s just too stupid an idea to entertain.
Zillow’s report says that four million came out of underwater status in 2013, but “9.8 million are still drowning in negative equity.” Wow… we used to have roughly 14 million underwater but in 2013, a year that finished with 60 percent of sales coming from investors flush with private equity cash, we somehow managed to interpret that as having raised the prices of four million homes so much that they’re no longer underwater? Oh yeah? Go f#@k yourself.
How the heck does Zillow or anyone else know what the prices of four million homes are relative to their indebtedness in Q4 of 2013? They don’t and no one else does either. I can’t even find out the amount of my indebtedness from my bank in under a month, and by the time I receive the amount, it’s probably changed already.
But, that’s not even the point here…
Diana and the National Association of Realtors both point out that we have LOW INVENTORY. What that means is that …read more
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