Today in Real Estate

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We do live in strange times, especially when it comes to real estate.  Here are just a couple of fun stories for your entertainment:

In Texas an obscure law might have enabled a man to take possession of a $300,000 home for $16 and three years of his time:

In other news it looks like the robo-signing practices that mortgage companies promised to halt have continued:

"Robo-signing is not even close to over," says Curtis Hertel, the recorder of deeds in Ingham County, Mich., which includes Lansing. "It's still an epidemic."

In Essex County, Mass., the office that handles property deeds has received almost 1,300 documents since October with the signature of "Linda Green," but in 22 different handwriting styles and with many different titles.

Linda Green worked for a company called DocX that processed mortgage paperwork and was shut down in the spring of 2010. County officials say they believe Green hasn't worked in the industry since. Why her signature remains in use is not clear.

"My office is a crime scene," says John O'Brien, the registrar of deeds in Essex County, which is north of Boston and includes the city of Salem.

In Guilford County, N.C., the office that records deeds says it received 456 documents with suspect signatures from Oct. 1, 2010, through June 30. The documents, mortgage assignments and certificates of satisfaction, transfer loans from one bank to another or certify a loan has been paid off.

Suspect signatures on the paperwork include 290 signed by Bryan Bly and 155 by Crystal Moore. In the mortgage investigations last fall, both admitted signing their names to mortgage documents without having read them. Neither was charged with a crime.

 

A Face for Radio

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Apparently I've picked up a second chin in my travels.  In other news we had great weather for PTAA's "Fill the Stands with Cans" event at the NewBridge Bank Ballpark in Greensboro last Friday (July 15) and we were able to collect a LOT of food and cash for Second Harvest.  This event was just one part of our annual food drive and we're still working hard to gather donations, so if you'd like to donate please feel free to drop donations off at any of the locations listed on our food drive website or give us a shout at (336) 294-4428 or email me at jon AT piedmonttaa.org and we'll hook you up.

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Cheaper Than Cash

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I just read a very interesting post over at Lex's place.  In a nutshell it says that right now it would be cheaper for the government to borrow money to complete infrastructure projects than it would be to wait and pay cash later.  Sounds crazy right?  Here's the scoop:

Karl Smith, an assistant professor of public economics and government at UNC, makes a counterintuitive but deeply important point: Because the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) rate of return on 5-year Treasury notes is currently negative, it would be cheaper to do the work now, with borrowed money, than it would be to pay cash later on.

As a person who struggles understanding accrual accounting, much less economic theory, I find this theory hard to wrap my brain around but I have to say that even I can see the logic in using money that's cheaper than cash.

Taking One’s Medicine

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If you are at all interested in taxes, and by that I mean interested in the US tax system, how it works, who pays, who doesn't, etc., then you've likely read David Cay Johnston's work.  He's a writer who covers the tax beat and I've read his stuff for years and found that, especially considering the subject matter, his work is easy to read and that he has the great ability of taking a very complex subject and boiling it down to the bare essentials so that even a layman can understand it. Reuters thought enough of him to take him on as a columnist, and unfortunately he chose his inaugural column to make a doozy of an error.  Here's the correction. He's right when he writes:

I often write tart notes at the Romenesko blog for journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Reports and elsewhere about what I consider flawed reporting by others. I lecture to young reporters around the world on the duty of care they need to take with facts and teach how to check and cross check. Until now I have never made a big mistake, but this is a painful reminder that we all put our pants on one leg at a time. The measure of character, I say in my posts and lectures, is whether when an error is found you forthrightly and promptly correct.

I've had to make my share of trips down the hall to report to my boss (or client, or spouse) that I've made a whopper of a mistake and I can't recall it ever being fun, and I do recall it always being a bit frightening, but I've also found that I sleep well at night, the sun always rises the next day and I'm usually a better man for it.

I still hate it though.

You Can’t Please Everyone

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I'm constantly fascinated by the perceptions that different people will have of one business. For instance there's a BBQ restaurant that I absolutely love, I think it's the best in town, but during a casual conversation about weekend plans I had a relative tell me she thought the food was terrible.  I couldn't for the life of me understand it.  On the other hand I have friends who LOVE a certain downtown restaurant that I think has mediocre food (at best) and terrible service.  I gave the place three tries and in my mind it failed to please all three times so it struck out with me.

From a business's standpoint it just has to try and please enough people enough times that it can be profitable.  Of course it, or rather the people who run it, should always strive to improve and provide the best product/service possible, but they will never please everyone all of the time.  I was reminded of this when I read this comment at Consumerist about the service one family got from American Express:

In 1989, my father died while traveling in another country. We were told by the State Dept. that we needed to deposit $2500 into an account to cover all costs of cremation, processing, and shipping him and his belongings home. Any monies not spent would be refunded to us.

It was a Sunday and none of our banks were open. My mom was frantic. In the course of a conversation with… someone from one of the banks? I don't remember… the woman whispered into her phone that if I had an AmEx card, I should call them, but not tell anyone she had suggested it.

So I called AmEx and spoke with an impossibly perky 15-year-old-sounding person who promised to take care of everything for me. Fifteen minutes later, she called with the transfer confirmation number and said that the State Dept. now had our funds. She also wanted to send the AmEx rep to take care of everything, but by then my poor dad was so wrapped up in red tape that no one could have gotten near him or his stuff.

In the course of the next few days, the State Dept. managed to lose my father in transit so he missed his own funeral, but that's another story. During that time, I got two more calls from managers at AmEx, asking if there was anything they could do to help us…

I know a lot of vendors don't take AmEx because their fees are higher, but I will never forget what they did for us when we had no other way out, and that they actually paid the substantial State Dept. fee for us and wouldn't let us repay them.

We have a friend who has had similar experiences with AmEx.

It's a pain to have to pay it all off every month, but well worth it to me, just to ensure that they are in my corner if, God forbid, I ever need them.

The same relative who disagreed with me about the BBQ place has a lifelong animosity towards AmEx for a reason I can't remember, but I can tell you that Hell will likely be frozen over before she ever uses an AmEx card again. There again we have the same company with two wildly divergent perceptions.  Obviously AmEx has pleased enough people to build a very profitable business so I suspect the 'lovers' outweigh the 'haters,' but it's good for all of us to keep in mind that no matter how well we think we're doing we absolutely have someone out there who isn't pleased with us.

BTW, my wife and I just applied for our Costco/AmEx card.  Hopefully we'll find our experience to be more like the Consumerist commentor's and less like my relative's.

*I posted this piece at the work blog as well.

 

Carmageddon

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I think the fine folks who are planning for the two year shutdown of Business 40 in Winston-Salem for repairs might want to watch how the folks in California are preparing for their own Carmageddon this weekend.

Los Angeles, home of notorious traffic jams, is preparing for a potential doozy. People are calling this weekend’s closure of 10 miles of the 405 “Carmageddon.” What’s happening is 10 miles of the very busy highway will be shut down to traffic as part of a reconstruction project. The big question is whether the work will result in massive traffic jams or if the impact won’t be that great because it’s a weekend project.

We’re seeing some examples of social media in action in preparation for Carmageddon. KABC is teaming up with the traffic app company Waze to offer an app that is powered by the audience. It detects your speed as you drive and keep the app open. Utilizing that information, Waze generates a map showing traffic. After your ride you can report what you saw along the way (typing is disabled while you’re driving).

 

Beer Money

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When I was attending college back in the '80s I had lots of friends who – how can I put this charitably – wrote papers that made me wonder if they'd been smoking crack for six weeks solid.  I just read a robo-comment spam on another post that reminded me of reading those papers and wondering how my friends could possibly believe that a six pack of beer was adequate compensation for helping them.  Here's the comment:

In order to purpose concerning trust, and provide any reasoned (and reason-responsive) security regarding trust as a possible added sounding opinion worthy of specific thought, Now i'm desperate to enjoy. My partner and i undoubtedly offer the particular lifestyle with the sensation regarding trust; just what I must notice can be a reasoned soil when planning on taking trust significantly as an easy way to getting for the fact, rather than, point out, merely as an easy way folks ease and comfort by themselves and also the other person (a worthwhile operate that we carry out acquire seriously). Yet you must not assume myself to be able to go with the protection regarding trust being a way to fact when with virtually any level an individual interest ab muscles dispensation you might be apparently wanting to rationalize. Prior to deciding to interest trust any time purpose provides an individual guaranteed in to a nook, think of whether or not an individual genuinely wish to get away from purpose any time purpose will be working for you.

Seriously, one guy showed up at my dorm room at 10 p.m. with a four page paper devoid of paragraphs or punctuation and asked me if I could help him get it in final draft form in time for his 7:30 a.m. class the next morning.  I got a case for that one.

Navel Lint

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Fair warning – some of you might consider this a TMI post.

My wife is constantly amused by the lint that can occasionally be discovered in my belly button.  I have a pretty significant "innie" that's proven to be a pretty efficient lint collector.  I honestly can't tell you why lint will sometimes appear, but it happens every once in a while and whenever she sees it my wife laughs at me.  When I was growing up it never occurred to me that I'd have to do regular "lint checks" to avoid being laughed at by my mate, but then again I never thought the top of my head would burn if left uncovered for more than 10 minutes either.

So what prompted this little episode of, well, navel gazing?  This post about the world record holding collection of navel lint. That's seriously strange, but who am I to judge?

Shirky’s News Machine

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Clay Shirky has a very interesting post on the news/newspaper business.  An excerpt:

None of the models being tried today are universally adoptable; the most we can say is that each of them happens to work somewhere, at least for the moment. This may seem like weak tea, given the enormity of the current changes, but if our test for any new way of producing news is whether it replaces all the functions of a newspaper, we’ll build things that look like newspapers, and if replicating newspapers online were a good idea, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

If we adopt the radical view that what seems to be happening is actually happening, then a crisis in reporting isn’t something that might take place in the future. A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now. Any way of creating news that gets cost below income, however odd, is a good way, and any way that doesn’t, however hallowed, is bad.

Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches. It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.

Worth the read.