McKae Properties Real Estate Market Commentary

 The increase in home values has gotten much attention.  Prices have less to do with inflation and more to do with increase in value due to remodeling and updating older homes. As I look over the sales for the past year and work on Broker Price Opinions I find that the homes either for sale or sold have been fully updated to today's standards and buyer desires, marketability.  When an older home sells and then is remodeled and listed and sold the increase reflected in home prices have more to do with updating costs and buyer demand premium.  Increased home prices show that the new home is completely different in interior and exterior that the homes sale in the most recent past.  (Buyers are looking to buy what is current.)  The result of the sale price or list price is increased by the cost of remodeling with a demand contingent applied.  This is more a redevelopment phase in our real estate market.   Buyers today are among three groups.  The first group is the buyer who does not w

 At the end of a piece of literature there is an "Epilogue" that brings "Closure". Let's see if closure occurs in the "Fix & Flip" movement.  It appears to have been the case for Zillow. The error is human nature and the belief that a bunch of wires and semiconductors can replace the greatest computer that has been created...the brain and mind of an individual. The CEO of Zillow stated in one of the commentaries I read was that they got the formula wrong.  REALLY?   Algorithms are mankind's' answer to the future.   I thought the Zestimate was wrong from the start when I used it the get values of Estate Properties in Woodside and Portola Valley. They were all under priced.  Land, on which improvements are upon, is the largest part of real estate value.  The structure is only the desire and likes of the individuals occupying the structure.  We humans are unique and our likes and dislikes are as unique as we are.  Initially the Zestimate could

  Oops I do not want to say that losing a lot of money on a trade is  as good  as making a lot of money on a trade. It is not. For one thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you have money, which can be used to buy goods and services. For another thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you were at least in some rough sense  correct  about the trade, and being correct often about big questions is a valuable skill in finance and life.  If you lose a lot of money on a trade, neither of those things are true. And yet there is a certain prestige to it? Being correct is not the whole ballgame. Being  important  is important. “Important people like to deal with important people,” the  Goldman Sachs commandment  goes; “are you one?” The most famous JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader of the last decade, the one JPMorgan trader whom many people know by name or at least by nickname, is Bruno Iksil,  the London Whale , who is famous for losing $6.2 billion of the bank’s money.