Here’s an excerpt from a recent lawsuit for a NYC property that struck me as high art (modified to keep parties private).
…During the same timeframe in which the Sponsor insisted it was unable to restore service to the Condominium, it was somehow possible to locate and rescue 33 trapped miners in a remote region of Chile.
Tags: Contracts
No not the jam band.
One of my sons texted this image to me without an accompanying description – it clearly reflects his potential appraisal skills.
…2 different sized pieces of string cheese still attached by the packaging…demonstrates he has the:
–Curiosity to stop grazing in the refrigerator long enough to take a picture
–Ability to identify significant variances in otherwise generally similar products
–Skill to capture the image clearly so the reader can observer the disparity
–Joy of seeing something trivial and sharing it with others
An appraiser in the making….
Tags: String Cheese Incident
My friend and crazy talented artist Nathan Pyle created a series of rotating gifs that should prove useful to those who just moved to the big city.
For a bunch more, check out Nathan Pyle‘s collection.
Tags: Nathan Pyle, Rotating Gifs
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As the credit world was unraveling around them, email communications between analysts at S&P seems to be pretty damming to their neutrality position. And finally now the lawsuit. There’s a fascinating re-write of the great Talking Heads song “Burning Down The House” by an S&P analyst.
I’ve got the entire Talking Heads catalogue on my iPhone and I’ll bet that David Byrne and the rest of the ‘Heads never imagined their music would used to describe a global credit bubble.
Here is the S&P email with the revised lyrics – as the credit world was imploding…
“With apologies to David Byrne…here’s my version of “Burning Down the House”
“Watch out
Housing market went softer
Cooling down
Strong market is now much weaker
Subprime is boi-ling o-ver
Bringing down the house
Hold tight
CDO biz — has a bother
Hold tight
Leveraged CDOs they were after
Going — all the way down, with
Subprime mortgages
Own it
Hey you need a downgrade now
Free-mont
Huge delinquencies hit it now
Two-thousand-and-six-vintage
Bringing down the house.”
Wow. Their other songs like “Wild Wild Life”, “Road to Nowhere”, and “Psycho Killer” might have also done the trick.
Tags: Talking Heads, S&P, Sub-Prime
With the demolition of the Drake Hotel and the pending construction of Manhattan’s tallest residential condominium 432 Park Avenue, passers by get the opportunity to observe a series of tubes and it’s not the Internet on an adjacent building.
Check out the very cool visual documentation of the 432 Park Avenue development site.
I marvel at old school (modern) engineering when a solution to a problem doesn’t require aesthetics and it’s exposed. Thankfully this masterpiece will be covered as the new 432 Park is constructed.
[click to expand]
Tags: 432 Park Avenue
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[click to read about Daylight Savings Time]
We got an extra hour of sleep last night (in theory) as we left Daylight Savings Time.
I came across this post yesterday that got me thinking (more like chuckling), why doesn’t the National Association of Realtors rally public support for shifting the US from using Standard Time to go all Daylight Savings Time in order to promote more housing activity?
Afterall, who wants to get up early and view a purchase or rental property and isn’t housing significant part of the economy? Daylight in early hours benefits farming while daylight in later hours benefits housing activity. Agriculture is about 1% of GDP and housing is 17% to 18% of GDP.
From Wikipedia:
As modern societies operate on the basis of “standard time” rather than solar time, most people’s schedules are not governed by the movements of the earth in relation to the sun. For example, work, school and transport schedules will generally begin at exactly the same time at all times of the year regardless of the position of the sun…if “standard time” is applied year round, a significant portion of the longer sunlight hours will fall in the early morning while there may still be a significant period of darkness in the evening.
Admittedly this idea is way out there, and NAR would be unlikely to lobby this point anytime soon because they would look foolish.
I guess I just don’t like it getting dark at 5pm and I don’t even sell real estate.
Tags: NAHB, Realtor.com, NAR, National Association of Realtors
I’m just back from vacation and had taken a break from social media. Now that I’m back, this New Yorker cartoon struck a chord.
Source: New Yorker
Tags: New Yorker
Tom Royce over at Real Estate Bloggers – who always has interesting things to check out – posted a video that will make you “squirm.”
How NOT to brand yourself as a professional.
Tags: Tom Royce, NAR, National Association of Realtors
Getting to the point in Knoxville, TN.
Tags: Bill McSpadden
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About five years ago, my wife and I were bidding on a house (that we didn’t get) but later found out from friends that the sellers were moving because of a nightmare neighbor. Scary.
It sounds like this seller has one of those neighbors, or more likely, the seller is the problem – they can’t seriously think a buyer is going to purchase their home. This ran last Friday [hat tip: Curbed via CityNoise] but I thought about it this weekend seeing all the for sale signs in my neighborhood and how such a sign would stir things up.
Good grief.
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Since attaching my head to other people’s photos appears to be in vogue, here’s the latest. Gotta love Curbed Hamptons.
They are referencing our two market report releases covering the Hamptons & North Fork 4Q 2009 and 2000-2009.
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| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Honor Bound | ||||
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Straight from the Colbert report – about halfway through the clip in his “The Word” segment, Colbert refers to Roger Lowenstein’s NYT piece in favor of abandoning your mortgage obligations and sources pundits about sending the wrong message to your family. Of course banks placed a lot of faith in your word to pay – your honor – so much so that they gave you a free toaster and they…
…bundled your honor with other people’s honor, with other people’s honor, cutting those honors with securitized honor derivatives, etc. But that doesn’t mean that banks are responsible. Only we are?
This insane honor logic is worth listening too since its basically what happened.
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Jonathan Miller is President and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate appraisal and consulting firm he co-founded in 1986. He is a state-certified real estate appraiser in New York and Connecticut, performing court testimony as an expert witness in various local, state, and federal courts. He holds the Counselors of Real Estate (CRE) designation, is an Appraiser “A” Member of the Real Estate Board of New York, and is a member of RAC.
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You'll be able to choose from an array of robust housing metrics compiled using research developed during the preparation of our market report series. Expanded significantly from prior offerings, use this resource to build charts and custom data tables or leverage your own information for more powerful research and presentations.
In the meantime, here is a small sample of the aggregated data we will provide.
Forbes ('20-)
Appraisersblogs ('17-)
'Three Cents Worth' column 3CW ('05-'16)
When Curbed was acquired by Vox, my eleven years of 3CW chart art and column links were broken on Curbed NY, Curbed DC, Curbed Miami, Curbed Hamptons, Curbed LA, and Curbed Ski.
Many of my 3CW charts can be found here:
Curbed 3CW Full Chart Archive
Op-ed column ('14-'15)
'Economic Spotlight column ('03-'09)
New York Times experiment ('08-09')
Huffington Post (09')
Favorite "How to Value" Posts
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