The Disneyland Thing

Just a quick note on the subject because a lot of you have been asking about it since my entry a couple of weeks ago. But after this I'll never bring it up again.

My friend Nina and my friend Ted, adults whom I greatly respect, have both related to me that they love (love) Disneyland. Ted went so far as to say he'd live there if he could.

I don't get it.

Other adults I know take the party line that "It's not for you, it's for your kids." Yes, my kids liked it. They're kids, they like everything except taking naps and wearing clothes. They would have been just as happy to see me fall down the stairs at our house as they were at Disneyland. So, for that matter, would I. And it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper, even with medical costs what they are.

As it turns out, it probably would have been less painful, too. I've been in walking, waking agony ever since the first day there. We weren't farsighted enough to take a stroller along with us. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference, anyway. I'm told that kids will ride in them for about 10 seconds (or about halfway down Main Street USA), at which point they will demand to walk or have you carry them anyway. (And as the old saying goes, a crying baby is a majority of one.)

So I'm carrying an irregularly distributed 35 lb. load of kid around my shoulders for an accumulated 5 hours per day for three days. I'm telling you my spine was compressed beyond recognition. If the Spanish Inquisition had really wanted to coerce a tortured confession out of a heretic, they should have used my son Baxter to mash his vertebrae together instead of using a rack to stretch him. I went to Disneyland as an already short 5'7" man and came back looking like one of the dwarfs (I'll give you one guess which one of the seven I'd be).

But enough about me and my physical problems, let's talk about me and my new financial problems after paying for the trip.

Let me first state that I'm one of those free-market capitalists who believe the invisible hand of the market will always wind up setting prices at a level which will benefit society. Apparently, neither Adam Smith nor I could have ever foreseen that the Walt Disney Corporation could somehow get an exemption from this.

Using kids to get to their parents' money is nothing new, I suppose. (I'm sure my mom wouldn't have, of her own volition, bought poisonous crap like Cap'n Crunch when I was a boy had I not insisted on it after seeing those irresistible animated commercials during the Saturday morning cartoon block.)

But it's the spectacular level to which Disney has taken that concept that unsettles me. I don't need to catalogue the list of extortions...any adult who's been there can recall with shocking clarity the number of times they had to make return trips to the ATM. Everything. EV-ERY-THING there in Captiveland costs four to five times what it would anywhere else.

Ironically, the only thing that I actually would have gladly paid quadruple the market price for (a huge tumbler of scotch) they refuse to sell in the park. My second and third day might have been completely different if they did.

I got a call from my friend Jesse the second day we were at the park. He asked me how things were going. I told him. He replied, "Somebody has to tell the truth about that place, Ken." And so this is my version of the "truth about 'that place.'"

And yet, when I look at the pictures of my kids there, I know I'll be back in a couple of years.

Monday's Can of Worms

Monday I briefly mentioned the Indian family I met at an open house on Sunday. We were talking about feng shui and various other ancillary house mojo.

They mentioned they had friends who wouldn’t buy a house whose address numbers add up to 13 (3208 Elm Street, for instance) because that was bad luck.

They also mentioned that houses facing the west didn’t sell very well because it was bad feng shui. I’m as open minded as the next guy (but not, in fairness, as the guy on the other side of him), so I kicked it around with them.

I don’t know a thing about feng shui, I told them, but I do know a thing or two about the damage this desert’s afternoon western sun can do to the exterior of a house. Maybe it isn’t so much about the feng shui as it is about the sun-bleached, cracked and faded front door. Maybe it wasn’t energy flow, but scortched and dried up pyracantha in front of the house.

Still, it got me curious. So I did a down and dirty, 10-minute research project.

You know what I discovered? It’s true.

But by the slimmest of percentages.

Of the homes that faced west that were listed since July 1st, 13.2% got contracts compared to 13.3% of east- and north-facing houses, while south-facing houses did slightly better at 14.0%.

The west-facers also did worse when I looked at expired and withdrawn listings with 7.9% of them going bust, while only 7.4% of the east-facers and 7.1% each of the north- and south-facers expired or were withdrawn.

I’m not sophisticated enough to compute a margin of error on that spectacularly unscientific survey, but based on those numbers, I’m not about to buy that horse.

Other aspects of feng shui make more sense to me. I still don’t know how to calculate what homes have better energy flows than others, but I can tell you that there’s something to that.

Richmond American used to have a floorplan called the Barnegat (it had other names in various communities, but in their “Mystic” communities, it was called the Barnegat). Great floorplan. One of my favorites ever. DR Horton currently has a modification of it that’s one of their most popular plans.

Everyone that walked into it felt at home. Great home for entertaining and a smart use of the “wings” of the house with the master on one side of the great room and three bedrooms (or two bedrooms and a media room) on the other. You kind of angled off to the right between the formal living room and formal dining room to get to the good stuff.

That is, you angled off to the right in the majority of them. When the floorplan was reversed, which builders do to almost all floorplans to give neighborhoods some exterior variety, the good feeling left you. We called these left-handed Barnegats, and after seeing enough of them, we would often skip that house altogether. If energy flow can make that much difference with two exact same floorplans that are merely reversed, I can go along with it on a larger scale, too.

Besides, I’m from Oklahoma. And while Missouri is the “Show Me State”, we’re more like the “Hey, Chief, Whatever Floats Your Boat State.” That’s the flow I go with.

The Art, Science & Magic of Selling Homes

With the housing market slowing to a demi-crawl, I’ve been getting inundated via email with various plots, plans and proposals to help people sell their homes.

Some of them are financial tools like point buydowns (mentioned in the August 27th entry) and owners carrying notes until the lending mess evens out.

The most emails we agents get these days have to do with someone offering to get our web site higher up in the search engines. These appear in our inbox every single day.

New magazines promising maximum exposure for our listings are commonplace, as well.

A sub-genre of real estate that has been popping up lately has been home staging companies. For a modest fee, an interior designer will come to the house and make suggestions on how to increase the appeal of your home with some simple techniques and, maybe, a throw pillow or two.

Other concepts are not so easily grasped.

About four or five times a year I get email offers to help my listings sell using the ancient oriental practice of feng shui. I have had it explained to me many times, and have even gone so far as to read books about it. But they’ll have to dumb it down a lot further for me to understand much more than the simple basics.

I can, for example, get my arms around the idea that the front door and the back door of a house shouldn’t be in a straight line, but when it gets any deeper than that, my eyes start glazing over and my mind starts wandering the way it has on both occasions when I tried to read James Joyce. Or watch John From Cincinnati.

The latest email I got was from an outfit selling statues of St. Joseph to aid people in selling their home. While feng shui has been around for 3,500 years, this practice is relatively new at just over 400 years.

The tradition of burying St. Joseph goes back to St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), who prayed to St. Joseph (Patron Saint of the family and of household needs) for more land to build a convent. She encouraged her Carmelite nuns to bury St. Joseph medals in the ground they wanted to own as a symbol of their devotion.

It’s caught on.

Today, people have upped the ante and now bury statues of St. Joseph instead of medals. (Some smart alecs say the reason he is depicted as bald in so many statues is that he's been buried upside-down too many times.)

Methods differ on exactly how and where to perform the burial. One camp insists that Joseph be buried in the front yard, upside-down, facing away from the house. Others maintain that he should be in the back yard, right side-up, facing the house. Some say once the house is sold, you have to dig him up and take him with you. Others say, no, you leave him in the ground at your old house and buy a new one.

Most agree that you need to say a prayer. And as long as you’re getting divine intervention, you may as well ask for full list price and that the buyers waive all inspections.

Does it work? Who knows? More than 2,000,000 St. Joseph statues are sold nationally each year, which ought to tell you something.

There are quite a few online vendors doing this, in fact. Among them are stjosephstatue.com, burystjosepth.com, stjosephhomesaleskit.com and ourfather.com. One of these sites even offers you options. You can get the Basic St. Joseph Home Sales Kit, the Deluxe St. Joseph Home Sales Kit or, if you’re in a really, really, really tough market, the Combo Kit featuring St. Joseph and St. Jude (Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes).

More boldly, yet another site charges you to have St. Joseph buried for you "virtually". No shipping, no actual statue, no real burial. Just faith, baby! And $4.95 US.

If anyone has heard of any other para-traditional methods of getting a home sold quicker, let me know via email or post it on this blog

I’m all ears.

Random Thoughts in My 50th Year

The Clock, She Ticks

At 6:32 a.m. PDT Saturday morning, I began my 50th year here on earth. The very minute that I turned 49 years old on the 15th, I started Year 50.

Today, two days into my fiftieth year, I'm heading to Disneyland for the first time with my wife, 4-year old daughter and 2-year old son. I don't know what 50 is supposed to feel like, but I'm sure this ain't it.



Between Holly and the kids, I feel 20 years younger. Besides the joy I'm experiencing just sharing time and space with these three, I'm also experiencing a rebirth in learning. Just a zig here and a zag there in my personal philosophy and I'm absorbing information and opening new doors in my life at a pace that rivals my that of my kids. Amazing. Exciting!

Everywhere I turn, I see things that relate back to living and learning. Last Friday, I was pruning/training the jasmine vines we planted to climb up some chains at the front of our house.

I hadn't been as diligent this summer as I was last year. I worked for about an hour on it, whereas when I was doing it last year each Sunday morning, it would take no more than 10 minutes. Blam! It dawned on me that it works the same way with everything else in life: family; business; physical health; finances; you name it.

Gardening has always been a popular metaphor for life, dating back at least as far as the New Testament, so I'm not claiming that this is anything profound. The point is that things like that are popping into my head at all. positive things. Hopeful things. Growing things.

From what I understand (and what I see in a lot of men my age) your late 40s and early 50s are often a time of melancholy reflection and spiritual restlessness. Mid-life crisis. Male menopause. Harley. Mistress. Whatever. All that stuff will have to wait until I hit my 70s.


I suppose it's because of the young kiddos, maybe the strong and patient wife, maybe because of the things I've been reading lately. Quien sabe? Whatever the combination of events, I have the feeling that I'm getting away with something these days. I'm feeling spiritually the way I used to feel physically back in my youth in Oklahoma right before a big tornado would come through...there's a palpable excitement that something huge was about to happen.


So bring it on, Papa Time. Today, tomorrow, next week. These are the "good old days."


Abraham Lincoln and Meth
My friend Nina Radetich is doing a story for KTNV on former meth houses and homes that were used for huge pot-growing operations that are being sold in the open market these days.


Her angle on the story isn't so much that these places exist or that they're horribly toxic (I had no idea just how poisonous they are and what an enormous task it is to make them habitable), but that people are selling them without disclosing their sordid past.


Almost all of them now are bank-owned properties, having been foreclosed on by the lenders (who could have guessed that pot growers and meth makers were bad credit risks?).


Nevada Law requires homeowners must disclose all material information about the home they are selling, via a document called the Sellers Real Property Disclosure (SRPD). And while, as yet, there is no specific question on it that asks about the production of methamphetamine, there is one about the storage of hazardous chemicals such as urea-formaldehyde. That chemical is involved in the production of meth (either as a catalyst or by-product, I haven't looked into it). In that sense, there's a roundabout way for a potential homebuyer to learn if the home had been a meth lab.

But here's the problem. Banks, according to Nevada law, are exempt from filling out an SRPD when they've taken a property back. So ironically (and quite unfortunately), those who "own" virtually all of the meth houses are the only ones who don't have to disclose that they were meth houses. The law is de facto rendered useless.


Explaining this to another Realtor last Saturday, I was reminded of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in 1863. Funny thing, though, it only applied to the Union states where slavery wasn't being practiced anyway. In the South (where all the slaves were), the proclamation had no weight because those states had already seceded from the Union.


I'm hope the legislature will get this rectified next session. It's bad enough what that damn drug does to our community in general. At least we can tie up this loophole.


More Later
Okay, I had a couple of more things to hit today, but I see by the little clock in the lower right hand corner of my screen that it's 1:00 and it's time to hit the road to "The Happiest Place on Earth" with the wife and kids. I'll be talking to Goofy within a matter of hours.

In Praise of Home Ownership

My first real entry into the grown-up world was buying a home. Even though I was 31 years old, I consider that to be the first time I actually entered the portal into adulthood.

Oh, sure, I already had a job. I paid taxes. I did battle with insurance companies. I carped about politicians (first about the Republicans, then about the Democrats, finally about both). I drank too much. I complained about teenagers not having any respect. You know, the usual adult things.

But I consider owning my own home to be my official initiation into adulthood.

I remember the first time it hit me to own a home. I mean, I literally got hit. The guy doing my taxes actually hit me on the head with my tax returns and, "Buy a house, dummy. You need the deductions."

It didn't take me long to take him up on it. I contacted a fantastic real estate agent named Laura Zook who had been in the business for 20 years (and who is still practicing real estate 17 years later!). She was a guiding light for me and calmed my every fear/worry/agitation/aggravation.

Even with that soothing presence there was an excitement and anticipation like I'd never had before during that time between having my offer accepted and actually closing & moving in. My friend Jesse told me that I would not have a good night sleep for those 30 or so days. I blew him off. After all, I knew I could handle the payments. I was actually going to be paying less for my mortgage than what I was paying in rent! And at the end of the tax year, I'd be even better off. I was golden.

He was right, though. I woke up somewhere around 2 a.m. every night and usually couldn't go back to sleep.

But it was also a thrilling time. I loved the neighborhood (Westleigh) I was moving into. It was the first Las Vegas neighborhood built west of the tracks after WWII. Cute, small homes on big lots. Lots of trees. Every time I drove someone by to look where I was going to live, I got one of two different comments. Always.

They would invariably say either, "Boy, this reminds me of back home" (wherever "back home" was to that particular person) or "This place reminds me of where my grandmother lives." I must have heard both comments a half-dozen times each. I always took both comments as sublime compliments. I felt the same way.

You notice a lot of things when you become a home owner for the first time. You realize that you have many more enemies than you ever thought possible. Rust. Weeds. Bugs. Moisture. You never gave them much thought until you own your own home (especially an older one). Now, all are seen as encroachments into your happiness and security. You guard your borders from them with a tenacity you didn't know you were capable of.

These particular borders had plenty of gaping spaces to breach.

The house was 40 years old when I bought it. And the previous 20 had been pretty rough on ol' 1218 Barnard Dr. If the house had been human, the previous owners would have been convicted of multiple counts of neglect, abuse and assault with the intent to uglify.

One of my great regrets about that period is that I somehow did not take "BEFORE" pictures of that house. It was truly awful, but I was somehow persuaded that it just needed my skillful hand to realize its charm. (That persuasion eventually proved to be correct, although it took many years to become reality.)

One could make an argument that I would be better off living in a tent in the back yard than living inside that filthy, funky place. Except for one thing, the back yard was worse than the inside. The biome of the Mojave desert is described as a "dry, tropical climate". The backyard lived up to both "dry" and "tropical". Where there wasn't dead grass and cement-hard ground, there was an overgrowth of nasty-smelling 20-foot tall trees that were probably, in actuality, giant, woody weeds.

After a couple of months, I finally brought both the inside and the outside to livable standards, but my war on mechanical decay and the insect kingdom never waned.

On the other hand, a much more pleasant, and totally unexpected, revelation of home ownership was how much I liked being home.

Living in an apartment, I would often find myself dejectedly saying at the end of a long work week, "Man, it's Friday night and I've got nothing to do." But when I had my own house (incredibly humble though it was) that same phrase would be uttered with utter peaceful contentment. "Ahhh, Friday night and I've got nothing to do!"

I think back to the carefree moments of pre-home ownership and it's paradoxical. They were filled with freedom and no responsibility. But they were somehow (though I didn't know it at the time) empty and devoid of purpose. I was adrift...happily adrift for the most part, it's true, but adrift. As you get older, though, you realize that it's nice to have anchorage.

And in that respect, home ownership is a lot like the second time adulthood forced its way into my life, that being the birth of our children. I look back on those carefree days before Holly and I had Sadie Belle when we could come, go, whoop-it-up, relax, etc. as we pleased and don't miss a moment of that era, either.

I hear the phrase "saddled with a mortgage" tossed around from time to time, and, frankly, I'm amazed that those words are put together in the same thought. Home ownership is, in my opinion, an honor and a tremendous gift. There are few things in life more satisfying than owning your own home. If that's a saddle, then throw one on me and let's giddy-up!

"Say it ain't so, Tony"

Listening last night to Tony Dungy, brilliant coach of the Indianapolis Colts, speaking to Jim Gray before the game about Michael Vick's situation, the coach mentioned that he "Felt badly for Michael."

The future Hall of Fame coach broke my heart just then. Not for his sentiments about Mr. Vick, but about his grammar. He just hit my biggest pet peeve, using the adverbial "badly" when he should have used, simply, "bad".

I hear this all the time and I cringe.

Jim Rome says it all the time on his radio show. I fume.

I heard it in Sharon Stone's narration of one of HBO's "Harold and the Purple Crayon" episodes that my children watch. I wanted to fire off a letter to HBO and Sharon's agent.

I actually did fire off a letter to Sports Illustrated after reading Gary Smith's wonderful story about Andre Agassi last summer.

I felt like a creep bringing the "badly" thing up, because the whole story was fabulous. I got choked up it was such a great story. Agassi is a hero. I got to know the guy better through the story. He became even a bigger hero. And yet, I grumbled at Smith's "feel badly" somewhere in the first few paragraphs. I wrote something about their copy editors letting the English language go straight to hell in a Sports Illustrated monogrammed tote bag. I thought it was a great line.

I won't use this space to gripe about grammar too often--ever again--because no one wants to hear this kind of whining. Also, because once you open yourself up to criticizing usage and grammar, you have to be perfect yourself, which I ain't. (see there).

But one of my great quixotic crusades in life (along with getting the federal government to impose mandatory jail time for motorists driving slowly in the left lane on the highway, and enacting a law that would subject those with more than 12 items in the express check-out line at the grocery store to some kind of public humiliation like letting the rest of us hurl vegetables at them) is to get people to stop using "badly" when they mean "bad".

Last year after the Super Bowl, Tony Dungy was probably pleased that Peyton Manning finally won "the big one" after people said for so long that he couldn't. Tony wouldn't have said that he felt "happily" for Manning. Or if he learned that Marvin Harrison's grandmother had passed away, he wouldn't say he felt "sadly" for Marvin.

I don't know how that got started, but I hear it from people who should know better.

Tony, I love you, man. Gary, keep up the great stories. Rome, nobody does it better than you. Sharon, you were great in Casino and you're gorgeous, to boot. But will you all quit it with the "badly" thing?

Okay, I'm over it.

The Credit Crisis*

*AKA “Crunch”, “Meltdown”, “Debacle”, “Catastrophe”, or--heck--make up your own horrific, hyperbolic noun!

Someone with access to Nexis-Lexis ought to research which story got the most ink (real and cyber) in the month of August, Michael Vick or the “sub-prime fallout”. I hate to keep harping on this myself, but as long as the press keeps telling this story, I feel compelled to tell it accurately.

Workaday journalists are pecking away on the story du jour and scaring the daylights out of the public with all the hand-wringing. Not that it isn’t scary, mind you. But it’s made much worse and self-perpetuating by the often lazy or sensationalist press who give the phenomenon a name, but do very little to break down the systematic reasons it took place.

Things haven’t changed all that much in the 700 years since the Black Plague. We know now that it was caused by a bacteria in rats. Back then, though, they were fairly convinced that it was the work of the devil. Or the Jews. Or the Muslims. Or that scary looking woman down the lane who yells at your kids to quit playing on her front porch. They didn’t have a clue as to what was causing it, but they gave it a catchy name, eh?

The story that ought to be written now isn’t about “How did this mess happen?”, but rather about “How could we have thought anything else could have happened?”

I don’t want to oversimplify this, because nothing in economics is simple. (Think about that Econ 101 class you suffered through. If you weren’t one of the 99.4% of us who were completely bewildered that first semester, then I don’t want to sit next to you on a long flight. Then again, you’re probably sitting in first class these days while I’m back in coach.) But the number one cause of the Sub-prime Credit Fiasco (oh, look, another slick name!) was lenders giving mortgages to folks with no business having mortgages.

It was pedal-to-the-metal. As bad as no documentation loans (basically, a “We’ll take your word for it that you can pay this back” situation) were, the 100% financing (no money down) loans were worse. The combination of the two has led to the current foreclosure rates. When someone has neither the means (not enough substantiated income) nor the motivation (with none of their own money down, they’ve got nothing to lose by defaulting) to pay a loan back, take three guesses as to what they’ll do.

So after 2-3 years of whooping it up with other people’s money and partying hard—business-wise—the lending community finally woke up with the current default hangover. Rubbing their eyes, and clearing the cobwebs, they found themselves wondering what happened last night and whose cat is that in the kitchen.

More accurately, the lenders didn’t wake up until the investors whose money was being used started looking more closely at their returns. It’s like your parents returning early from a trip after you’ve already invited half the senior class over to your house for a big party.

This current problem in real estate isn’t unprecedented* and it isn’t permanent. Nor is it as bad as it seems. There are still many investors out there with lots of money to responsibly loan for mortgages. Things will (and already are) beginning to change. And we’ll all get through it if, as Rudyard Kipling advised, we keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs.

*Read "Funny Money" by Mark Singer if you want to read a hair-raising, but hilarious account of a similar banking disaster (for eerily similar reasons) back in the early 80s.