Category: Consuming

At the movies the other day, one of the preview/ads was for realtors in general, as in, the professional association of property promoters. It’s quite the field to be in. As the NYT notes, it’s getting more crowded by the day:

More than 350 people take the state real estate exam at 9:30 a.m. every Tuesday at 123 William Street in New York. According to the New York Department of State, 13,609 people took the sales license test between Jan. 1 and June 25, up from 9,680 for the corresponding period in 2002. There are so many newcomers in the field that another test time has been added to accommodate the overflow.

Too many sellers may mean that the service fees have to drop. As is, I’ve already decided that I’m going through ZipRealty or Isoldmyhouse.com if and when I buy. I mean, realtors have inherent ethical conflicts, plus you could really replace several hundred of them with a competent DBA and a half-dozen data-entry temps– if only the main association didn’t have such a lock on the damn database.

For awhile now, I’ve been trying to explain to people how the National Association of Realtors is really a gigantic drain on society: housing is overpriced around here, and commissions are obscene, and that money could be more productively invested in things like home improvement, housing construction, junk bonds, or malt liquor and prostitutes. This is particularly obvious in Boston, where the housing crisis could probably be alleviated by replacing broker’s offices with apartments, where every FSBO seller’s phone rings off the hook with realtors trying to convince them to use an agent, and where apartment websites are filled with no-fee listings that realtors will always say have “just been rented, although there is one in the same neighborhood that’s full-fee…”

I tried to write an article about it several times in the past year, but someone else finally did it right: Douglas Gantenbein, who writes for Slate and The Economist. It’s nice to be agreed with by someone with those credentials, but I kind of wish I’d said it like that before.

I ate pork belly last night. It was delicious. It was from Niman Ranch and it was grilled. It was like eating GIANT BACON.

Today’s food: Coffee and muffin, at some random cafe. Fresh fruit, iced tea, at Citizen Cake. Burger with avocado and cheddar, fries, Stella, at Flippers on Hayes. Crepe with chocolate, fresh figs, and vanilla ice cream, at Ti Couz. Booze at Zeitgeist. Giant bacon pork belly at Blue Plate. More booze at Argus, featuring, dear lord, a drink called the Jon Benet Ramsey, which includes ginger ale, vanilla vodka, and a crushed cherry.

Branding becomes difficult when you’re producing something that isn’t directly seen. It’s not like you can flash “Mentor Saline Inside” on the screen during boot (or while knocking boots), and I don’t imagine it’ll be popular to use tattoos or literal brands to promote a particular variety of implant. Are there any real differences between brands of saline implant? “Well, mine have 0.4 mm walls and are guaranteed for 10 years or 100,000 miles.” Or maybe “You got a Hemi in there?“

Vomitola has been all about the intimate apparel recently, so I thought I’d contribute a link to Neighborhoodies, where you can buy, say, Allston-themed lingerie. Some items are suitable only for three-letter neighborhoods, apparently. Such a shame– you can say so much more with four letters!

Interview with Bill Nygren, fund manager, including “favorite mistakes.”

And more on the housing bubble and Freddie Mac, going over six reasons why there isn’t a bubble– more agile manufacturing, longer hold times and higher transaction fees, etc. etc. But the fact is, people are speculating in real estate directly or indirectly (through REITs), and as agile as centralized homebuilders are, it still takes a long time for permitting and building. There’s an office/lab building on Third and Binney that I think is still unused two years after construction: finished building it just as the office rental market went from 1% vacancy to 10%. They’re still building, two years on: more office, more retail, more biotech, and yes, more housing (some 200 condos, I think). In Boston, supply really is behind demand, and over-regulation means construction is too slow to even come close to catching up, but even if construction is more agile than it was, it’s still not close to actually being able to respond to demand changes in less than six to twelve months.

Judging by the Boston area motorcycle listings. the Kawasaki Ninja seems to be the bike most rapidly outgrown, followed by the Suzuki Katana. The Katana is probably the more sophisticated of the two. I wonder if people are selling them to upgrade to larger bikes, and therefore a lot of items in the used market is a sign of healthy demand for Kawasaki products, or whether people are selling them to move on to something that’s not so … crotch-rockety, in which case Kawasaki had better watch out. Would have to compare bike sales new and used for a few years, then factor out the economy… generally impossible.

Another reason to get out of the real-estate market—right now!

Not much else to say about this, really. Still have my eye on overpriced real estate, of course.

Why the best cardiology departments are in the southern US: Deep. Fried. Cheeseburgers. “Ochsner clinical dietitian Eve Dansereau reacted with astonishment that a deep fried cheeseburger existed, and I didn’t even tell her about the one that’s stuffed with bacon, hot sausage and two kinds of cheese.”