Black couple ‘erases themselves’ from their home, its value goes up by $500k
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
For an outsider, the obsession with race as a primary identity is bizarre. I can’t help but wonder, if you focussed less on how to treat people differently to make up for the past and instead just removed skin colour from the equation, whether a lot of this divisiveness would disappear.
Their first appraisal was fine, second one was low, third was fine. Normally, anyone would assume the second was simply a poor appraisal - yet they immediately made it a race issue and sought to generate the conditions to ‘prove’ it. All sounds a bit manufactured, to make a good story and to stir racial tensions.
In essence things like race have been vertically integrated into every facet of culture outside of traditional politics possible. From elementary school to media companies to corporate diversity statements to Hollywood movies - an efficient (and remarkable really) propaganda machine. It is integrated into institutions which gives the most radical and militant a safe place to retreat to for cover.
Why do I have to do the work for you when you can’t be bothered to be aware of the world you live in?
I’m Black, I wouldn’t say I fully identify with the left or right politically, but I was raised with some conservative values because most of the rural black community I’m from holds those values. Where I from we seek to conserve values and traditions important to us and restore institutions we would like preserved. Whether that’s religious institutions or better education for community.
It’s just ridiculous to me that you would say identifying as conservative means you are not Black. Much of black people of southern United States have conservative values and identify with them, however voting for conservative officials doesn’t make one conservative. You can vote for someone who is in a left political party and still be conservative. Being Black is as political as non-black people make it. As stereotypical things go I can go about hunting, going to church, and whatever else without being labeled an outsider. Your assumptions drive just as much division from where I’m standing.
Point being I just think your view is limited and you should take time to see how Black populations may think in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana. Carolinas, the list goes on.
It's just another form of the social media derived "[citation needed]" thought terminating cliche.
Any time someone either doesn't feel like a topic should be discussed, or that your point isn't even worth addressing, can just silence you by suddenly requiring you to speak through someone else. Original thought, open debate and honest inquisition is no longer allowed!
As for the second paragraph, I noticed there was a difference between the way teachers treated me and other students that looked like me before I even knew there was a word for it. It’s hard to remove it from the equation when it keeps being forced back in.
But, I guess you can use White if you want, who’s going to stop you?
Just look at the "open letter" signed by 1,288 "public health professionals" (https://archive.md/v8ehj) which demand an unequal response to the "protests". Demanding strict condemnation of "white protesters resisting stay-home orders" which "are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives."
1) Institutions, like in most of the world, sort people by class and reward success; therefore, they may propagate class divisions and allow (or even amplify) differences in achievement.
2) Due to the history of the USA, the class in the USA is tied to race to a considerable degree.
(2) can and should be solved separately with policies ranging from affirmative action to reparations/better redistribution; however, this is not what (or not everything that) activists want. Books like New Jim Crow for example are explicitly ambivalent about affirmative action, because it allows some people success while leaving the rest of the poor behind and distracting from the struggle/compassion for them.
Leftists instead bundle those together and use it as a wedge against unsuspecting/apolitical center - if you are against "solving" (1) with leftist policies, you must be a-ok with (2) and therefore you are racist. When in reality, (1) in isolation is one of the greatest things for a society and should not be "solved" at all. Kendi is the most explicit and obvious example of this that comes to mind, others may be less explicit about it.
It's important for Americans to distinguish race from class, and to understand that, just like in the rest of the world, inequality as such is totally fine, and in fact good for society; "equity" is evil beyond school age, as proven thru history every time it has been tried. I grew up ~poor in Russia surrounded by other ~poor people, all white; that made me extremely classist. I personally cannot wait for a wonderful day where every kid has a chance to make a life for themselves, and a representative (M% white, N% black, etc.) upper-middle class in America can look with a slight pity and disdain at similarly (M% white, N% black, etc.) poor and say "you've had your chances, so why cannot you be more like me?" :)
The whole "calling people racist for not advocating for equity" thing is ridiculous I agree; I think only a noisy subset of "woke scolds" actually do this. The actual idea is that institutions that ignore the reality of race in America are perpetuating those conditions, and thus are "institutionally racist", but that doesn't mean that the people in that institution are racist; it just means they're not anti-racist, which means they are basically just neutral/ambivalent/unaware.
The postmodern left has a lot of pretty bad behaviour in the public eye, but the underlying theory is sound.
That's not due to lack of opportunity, despite what the race peddlers insist is the only possibility. Plenty of discriminated immigrant groups have surpassed your average White household wealth in a matter of a couple generations.
The problem is largely behavioral, but any discussions of the topic are typically controlled by people that don't let that be an acceptable angle to look at.
Immigrants moving from other countries are not necessarily stuck in the mindset that comes from poverty and crime. This isn't a uniquely racial thing either; here in the UK we have a near identical problem (minus gun violence) with young poor majority-white men, called chavs. Poverty and lack of opportunity drives crime, and crime tends to perpetuate the same problems that caused it. Thus, the systems-theory aspect of critical theory, which is the complex part I was talking about previously.
I'd love to know how you think racial equality will be achieved in the US though. Be warned, I am expecting the "personal responsibility" argument and am more than ready to debunk it.
It absolutely is.
> explicitly anti-racist policy is required to collectively get black people out of it.
That's racist. There's White people caught in that same trap. Ignoring them doesn't help anybody, it just codifies racism.
> I'd love to know how you think racial equality will be achieved in the US though.
Personal responsibility is an insufficient summary, but definitely a main thread of what the community needs to do.
> Personal responsibility is an insufficient summary, but definitely a main thread of what the community needs to do.
I'd love to know how they're supposed to solve their own poverty, I've no doubt you have a comprehensive plan designed to systematically alleviate such a challenging and destructive social condition.
Source: am American tribal member
You actually do, it's called the "land back" movement. The idea is the same in both cases, which is to say restorative justice. Reparations for black people is to compensate for the non payment of labour under slavery and land back is to compensate for stolen land from native people.
Poverty traps are generally evil, true, and I think that UBI or something like that is a good way to address ahistoric poverty - but poverty rooted in historic actions by the American government should be addressed too, because black and native people today are still suffering from the repercussions of those actions. Germany addressed its actions in ww2 with reparations and concessions, it's a pretty typically American thing to not want to right America's historic wrongs.
Reparations are evil. The welfare state is a big part of what keeps people down.
The welfare state is the only thing keeping some people from starving to death. I know you libertarian types are OK with that though, as long as you don't have to watch people die.
However, I also don't think that to the extent that it is true, this theory correctly identifies the biggest problem. For example, for all the abstract faulting of race-blind institutions in New Jim Crow, most of the actual examples it gives (poll tests, housing segregation, where to enforce the law against drugs/deals, sentencing disparity, etc.) follow the same formula - government power + personal discretion. I.e. good ol' racism that is given the power that can be applied selectively. I think that is a much, much bigger problem than the classist institutions that propagate the resulting racial disparities. If the former issue was resolved by (1) not creating opportunities for it (2) creating compensatory policies like affirmative action/etc.; classist institutions would stop being race-correlated over time.
What does the end of this mean? If you're talking about conservative sites and they are also not neutral on racial stuff when it comes to conservative topics then that's the same as mainstream media. I don't know of any hard left [bigger] news outlets. There are a number of conservative outlets. They are usually mirror images in terms of caring about race as mainstream media. Check CRT or Rittenhouse + Andrew Coffee coverage as quick recent examples. The primary difference will be the conservative outlets saying they don't care about race. The actual behavior does not show that though.
I’m curious if there’s an actual style guide out there that mentions this and what rationale is given.
Op article is a great example. There's still a discrepancy in treatment. I'm not convinced that is caused by the capitalization of Black by the media so much as the other way around. But the media being the media-- manufacturing stories people want to read may play a part. Although that can be said about.. well just about everything. If it's true, it's still important to me
Please, define CRT for me. Please explain how the founding fathers who didn’t give black peoples or women much if any rights, did not then view the world and base what they did on that thinking.
Unfortunately this proves the point. People like you largely want the status quo to remain. Sometimes people will even, without a shred of awareness or irony, quote MLK while espousing this stuff.
No, they capitalize Black when it refers to a racial identity group (which only very loosely relates to skin color.)
This is nonsense. It's all about the color today, like in the bad old times.
No, its about identity forged largely in shared experience of White racism now, and in the bad old days (and for the racists that haven't left those days still) it was (and is) about ancestry, not color. The older racist rules specified a specific degree of African descent below which a free person of mixed descent was considered White (at various times in various US jurisdictions, this might be anywhere from 1/4 to 1/16), while later (mostly in the Jim Crow era) many jurisdictions adopted a “one drop rule”.
(No dog in this fight, I'll just use what everyone else uses, but the whole thing's a mess).
Asia is a place. European and Caucasian get capital letters too.
Citation needed. Also, can you name other countries as diverse as America which are less racist?
How many Americans are against CRT for a solid reason that doesn't become hypocritical immediately. Vs the amount who are against CRT for purely identity and other no substance reasons. The fact that CRT is even a big "thing" at all is a major issue in and of itself. Would it be better if the OP said 1/3 of America? Or would saying even 10% of Americans are racist require citation?
> Also, can you name other countries as diverse as America which are less racist?
What is the relation of the first part of your comment and this? I don't think there is a country like that. It doesn't change many people in those countries and in America from being racist.
That's upon who makes the claims you make. You should have clarified you didn't have a source and you were guessing, other people may take it seriously.
> What is the relation of the first part of your comment and this?
It's relevant in order to put into context how racist USA is, you're telling for it's diversity, this is the least racist nation you can think of?
Not in the way race peddlers would have you believe. The problem is overblown, and used to manipulate and control.
There is a common theme of people based in homogenous societies finding American race behavior out of place. At best there's places like the UK. Which is still a far cry from the diversity and size of the US.
> I can’t help but wonder, if you focussed less on how to treat people differently to make up for the past and instead just removed skin colour from the equation, whether a lot of this divisiveness would disappear.
When do you cut off the past? Would you say 75-100+ years is too long ago? So we should let go of the insane murdering and pillaging of places like Tulsa and North Carolina by white supremacists. Is 5, 10 or 20 years ago okay to be upset about? Can't enact this sort of behavior if there can't even be agreement on can't agree on this,
> if you focussed less on how to treat people differently to make up for the past
"make up for the past" has never really happened. If every part of the 2nd paragraph is divisive, it is hard to imagine it would stop divisiveness.
maybe the middle appraiser was just bad at their job or pandemic effects were in play? if i'm reading this right, they didn't have to hide their identity for the first high appraisal, right?
The low appraisal appears to have been Jan 2021, and the first one early 2020. The drop coincides with everyone moving around during the pandemic.
Whole story is bunk, and there's an ulterior motive smell in the writing: All instances of "black" are capitalized, all instances of "white" are lowercase. This isn't normal, but is a trend among political activists.
According to [1], the NYT style guide capitalizes "Black" because "it refers to a shared cultural identity (like Latino, Asian, and Native American). "Brown" is not capitalized because it refers to a wide range of cultures, and "white" doesn't represent a shared culture and history, and additionally is capitalized by hate groups.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
This both confirms my statement that it's a recent trend, and that it's political instead of just about race(ism).
the fact that you're asking makes this especially important!
I think this is pretty objectively false, if it were true, then the white-black dichotomy wouldn't work.
> I think this is pretty objectively false,
It’s imprecisely stated, perhaps, but it gets at the real difference. Perhaps more accurately, “‘white’ is not usually the primary ethnic identity of the people to whom it, as a racial label, applies, in the United States.”
> if it were true, then the white-black dichotomy wouldn't work.
The real difference in the degree to which the two identify a shared culture is central to the dichotomy. The Black American experience of White racism involves the forced erasure of preexisting, more specific historical culture communities, ties, traditions, and identity. The White American experience leaves more specific ethnic identities intact and generally dominant over White identity except among a subset within White supremacists.
As for how to prove any one event is racially motivated: sure, it's basically impossible. Which is precisely why this kind of problem persists. Are lawsuits against million dollar home appraisers the best way to address the imbalance? Certainly not. But you go to war with the army you have, as it were.
It's bad, really bad. It essentially robbed Black Americans of significant generational wealth.
here's some of her research findings:
"Today, Black families have a median net worth of $11,000 compared to a white family’s median of $141,900. Pew Research Center data reveals that white families have 13 times more wealth than Black families. The wealth gap exists at every income level, with a third of Black families having no assets at all. The perpetuation of poverty is stunning—75 percent of Black children who grow up in families in the bottom wealth category remain in that same category as adults. A 2013 study found that for white families, every additional dollar they earn in income leads to $5.19 in wealth. For Black families, each dollar creates only 69 cents in total wealth. This growing divide perpetuates injustices hard to capture in the latest news of riots and protests. The racial wealth gap is where past injustice breeds present suffering."
our systems are still inherently racist and we are a long ways away from equity.
source: https://prospect.org/civil-rights/no-justice-no-peace-fix-th...
The median net worth for middle class Americans is ~$20k.
To put it in perspective, I was consulting for a payroll system for a hospital where the salary of the CEO was about the same as the sum of about 2,000 employees. (Most specialist doctors are not employed by the hospital)
To me though, highlighting race also reinforces stereotypes. We americans like to pretend that class differences don’t exist when clearly they do.
> To me though, highlighting race also reinforces stereotypes.
what's the alternative? so called 'color-blindness'? [1] what stereotypes are reenforced by mentioning race/ethnicity when discussing relations of power? right now it sounds like you're trying to refute structural racism.
> We americans like to pretend that class differences don’t exist when clearly they do.
i agree with you that class consciousness is low, yet both critiques/angles can exist/meet/intersect. that's what intersectionality is for.
[1] an example of where this leads: "[...] the organization was informed by a form of “colorblind” Marxism that was incapable of dealing with the realities of racial divisions in the class structure of the United States. While more progressive on issues of race than other political parties in the United States, the WPUS/SLP ultimately failed to make a connection with the black working class, a grouping in society that had shown itself to have enormous revolutionary potential in the period of Reconstruction. While standing for class unity and recognizing the need for inter-racial organization, the WPUS/SLP ideology under closer scrutiny reveals an inability to recognize that black workers in the United States faced a form of oppression that was unique to their racial status, with white supremacy acting as a key linchpin in the class structure of US capitalism. This “color-blind” socialism was ultimately incapable of resonating with black workers. It also falsely expected the proletariat to organically unite under economic pressures as it grew as a class, responding to immiseration and crisis in an almost automatic way. This was a vision that was incapable of taking into account the role of white supremacy in dividing the US working class to develop a strategy that could effectively win the most oppressed sections of the proletariat to socialist politics."
https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/02/17/early-american-socialism-a...
I find it really bad that the mien of (inherently) racist people has evolved to a point where it can pass undetectable. Yet, the effects are still there as they have learned to operate in a different, more subtle level.
Example, super friendly white boss would never dare to say anything politically incorrect, yet, bonuses, opportunities and valuable information always reaches their white subordinates sooner than it reaches others. The way they get away with it is by just simply waiting for an appropriate opportunity to arise so no one gets suspicious or nobody can point out what they did. Like, you cannot send an email only to white people to talk about a promotion, as that would be too obvious, but one day you may be having coffee with the exact set of people that you like and that's when you drop the news about whatever info that is meant for them, and only for them.
I haven't been a target of that but I have observed it as I've been part of the inner circle several times. I found it quite vulgar, tbh, as I believe strongly in merit above other things. Part of that is what led me to become an entrepreneur so I don't have to deal with people like that in order to make a living.
Reminds me of an observation that affinity fraud is really a continuum. Exploiting that is a skill. The better you can pass the better your opportunities. Once you see it, it's everywhere.
Bloodletting has only been rejected as a viable treatment for most illnesses for less then a century. Lets not delude ourselves into thinking that it's not still commonplace...
Didn't take me up on it :-/
A single sensationalist anecdote makes it less likely that real, legitimate claims receive the attention they deserve, especially in a more progressive city like San Francisco.
> The couple, who is Black
Anyone else find this grammar jarring? I think it's probably technically correct, because it's one couple, but "The couple, who are Black" would read much better. Or just reword it to avoid it.
You'd use "are" if both people are mentioned: John and Jane, who are Black.
"The couple, who are" is incorrect. What "sounds" better is not always correct.
US says “Ace of Base is coming to the States” Versus UK “Ace of Base are…”
In Minneapolis there was some good reporting on how racial covenants split communities and our city's culture.[0]
There was a link to racial covenants in the article that shows how prominent they still are even in more left leaning districts like the bay area.[1]
I had no idea that this was a thing until a few months ago. It boggles the mind that there's no legislation for removing this nation wide.
[0] https://www.tptoriginals.org/learn-about-minneapolis-history... [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Reversing-redlin...
For example, how a house is oriented wrt the sun is a big deal, but that never factors into an appraisal. Build quality, comps, etc., do not affect this. Around Seattle, susceptibility to water damage depends on a long list of things that never factor into an appraisal, either, but there's no way I'd buy a house that had a driveway that sloped towards the garage.
Not to nitpick, but you did imply that appraisals didn't matter when you dismissed appraisals and then said "the only thing that matters..." while naming something other than appraisals.
https://www.millerandperotti.com/StaffProfiles.aspx?ID=53209...
https://www.yelp.com/biz/miller-and-perotti-san-rafael
Her reviews on Yelp were already pretty bad (and now getting spammed because of this article). I'm curious why they picked her to begin with.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/couple-faced-discrimination-home-a...
> Abena Horton’s employer Black Knight Inc. Who is her employer? Black Knight, Inc., formerly known as Black Knight Financial Services, is an American corporation that provides integrated technology, services, data, and analytics to the mortgage and real estate industries. Black Knight is one of the leaders in AVMs (Automated Valuation Models), which uses algorithms, much like Zillow and others, to estimate a home’s value based on public record data
https://appraisersblogs.com/why-is-only-one-side-of-the-raci...
Have you found any news articles about this incident promoting Black Knight as a superior alternative?
https://appraisersblogs.com/why-is-only-one-side-of-the-raci...
Now although the laws have changed, people who were previosuly racist in the 1960s did not simply die out overnight. They had no real reason to abandon their views, so they simply maintained them and passed it down to their children.
Unless they or their children actively uprooted their baises, you'll find there are still plenty of people who are biased today.
> State by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, black families pay 13 percent more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/black-pro...
https://web.archive.org/web/20211127203735/https://www.washi...
In order to solve the problem, it seems important to ascertain whether it's institutional racism or direct discrimination.
I don't know the answer to why local government can't function on a fixed percentage of the tax base everywhere. Something that made an impression on me years ago, was how a bike trail ran from a well-off suburb into a small city, and after a snowfall, the plowing stopped exactly at the city limits. They had, and have, about the highest tax rates anywhere but they basically did not plow.
In the data set you reference, I wonder how they deal with different owners grieving (or not) their assessment.
That seems pretty obvious no? Town of 100k people each making $20k a year, taxed at 10% (just making a number up) means you have $200 million in taxes. Vs another town with 100k people each making $50k a year means you have $500 million on taxes. Further, probably (maybe) the town with people only making $20k a year, the residence probably need more government support (examples: free meals at schools, free child care, more policing (lower incomes correlates with more crime). etc...
Given that more services are needed in a town with lower-income people it makes total sense to me at least that the taxes would need to be higher. Heck, even if they didn't need more services, a 100k people need the same services but the tax base of the lower-income people is lower so they need higher taxes to pay for the same services for the 100k people. The alternative is the higher income town pays for the services of the low-income town. That happens to some degree via federal grants in the USA but I suspect most people in the high income town would not want to be paying for the low-income town's needs.
I don't see any racism or discrimination here. It just seems like fact. 1 < 2. There's no racism or discrimination in that fact.
If there is any discrimination, it's why that low-income town has low-incomes, not why it's taxes cost more.
It seems pretty obvious to a lot of people that the cost of schools is not proportional to the number of students who are being educated.
I remember years and years ago someone explaining how, if you have X fewer students, you can't just heat part of or sell part of a building, so costs don't decrease.
>I don't see any racism or discrimination here
I'm sure there is both individual racism and institutional racism.
I'm not certain how the former works, since I have never seen a tax assessor in person. For that matter, I've never seen an insurance assessor, they seem to just drop by when I'm not there.
Cities don't just levy higher taxes on minorities. It's more likely the city retained the levied amount and did not change it after the white people moved. Now because it's in a "bad" neighborhood, appraisal values fall, but the city government still believes it retains it's specific value.
One would hope so. But your unsourced claim isn't especially compelling given that the post you are replying to directly provided evidence to the contrary.
Edit: Looks like only a strong majority as opposed to the vast majority: https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t...
Chicago has 50 aldermen (city councilmen) and not a single official Republican. That has been the case for at least a couple decades if I recall correctly.
The de facto segregation or concentration of minorities in urban areas, in say, the northeastern US, and the progression to having the highest tax rates in areas with declining tax base, without a doubt, produces a substantial correlation between higher tax rates and minorities' property.
Is that an excuse for anything? Of course not. But it's institutional racism that does not require specific human beings to look at skin color and discriminate.
Institutional racism hardly rules out there being also regular discrimination. But when a problem is pervasive everywhere, and intractable, shouldn't institutional racism, the way the system produces outcomes without individual intent, be a primary focus?
Both because it might be a larger contributor to the problem and because, while difficult, reforming it might be easier than changing the nature of individuals.
[P.S. Other people in this thread are making this an either/or, to try to dismiss evidence of ordinary discrimination. I'm not, just saying I think institutional racism should be a priority]
What should (can?) that town do about it to address the problem?
In general, I think it's a technical problem that lives in the details.
How can institutional racism be anything else, as it is defined?
article: racism means that as a black person your home increases in value by a whopping 50% if the appraiser does not know you are black.
you: does anyone know if i could make a similar person-switching trick work to reduce my taxes?
> you: does anyone know if i could make a similar person-switching trick work to decrease my taxes?
That's a wildly belligerent take on what the parent actually said. They never implied in any regard that it was a personal question, using "I" or the equivalent to indicate an interest in personal benefit.
> Would this work to have a black family show up to meet the tax assessor next time they come by?
you write:
> That's a wildly belligerent take on what the parent actually said. They never implied in any regard that it was a personal question, using "I" or the equivalent to indicate an interest in personal benefit.
wow that's a creative take. the person typed the question themselves, but because they didn't say 'my tax assessor' it's all ok? i mean, sure, technically i agree. i guess my reaction came from the amazement that this question was the first thing they thought of after reading this disheartening article. OP's comment was also the very first comment on this thread.
Half the time lenders and us would joke saying we could be an appraiser. It's so easy, just look at your database of "comparable" properties and just say "heres a ballpark figure."
We're headed for another 2008 like a goddamn train with no brakes. Whatever the federal government did to curb that, they didn't police the mortgage industry enough. Appraisers, realtors, and lenders are all complicit with only the banks getting oversight. Lenders can go through banks, but they don't have to be immediately affiliated with them. So they can literally be ignoring rights "guaranteed" by the government since 2008. On top of this, they charge single digit percentage fees for the loans. It is such a giant joke that honestly the government shouldn't bail out at all. Owning a house should be a legitimate risk. Not this farcical system of laundering money.
The average house price is $374,900 [1].
The most common real estate agent commission is 6%.
6% of $374,900 is $22,494.
That is how much income a real estate agent can make on average if they buy and sell one home. Of course they have expenses, so it's not all profit.
Real estate agents have to network and advertise to get the higher value houses, and those are going to skew the average, so most real estate agents make less income than that on average.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/989588150/too-many-real-estat...
[1] https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-house-price...
Some agents may specialize in acting as buyers agents, and they wouldn't tend to have any listings.
Other agents may not be looking for a lot of income. If you want to make $50k a year (gros and you get half the comission amount you mention, you need to make 5 sales a year. If your listing is up for a month (which is a long time in my area), you'll have a listing up for 5/12th of the year, and if you sell to a dedicated buyers agent, between the two of you, that would suggest 24 agents for every 5 listings or almost 5 agents to 1 listing. The article says 3 agents to 1 listing, so agents are more industrious that I suspect (or listings are up longer)
There's a fair amount of work for agents on both sides during the closing process as well, managing inspections and repairs and shepherding lenders and title companies and the parties to make sure things happen on time, and some sellers agents will manage pre-listing sales work like staging, needed repairs, sometimes even light remodeling. So just because they don't have any listings up doesn't mean they're not working.
If there are 100 homes bought and sold, and 100 agents, then on average each agent buys 1 home and sells 1 home. If the 6% commission is split between buyer and seller, then on average each agent gets 6% of each home (3% for selling the home + 3% for buying the home).
In other words: If there are two agents per transaction (buyer and seller), then there would have to be 200 agents to only have one comission each, but if there are 100 agents, then each agent receives two commissions (3% + 3% = 6%).
I'm not surprised. I'm sure there is a long tail of realtors with licenses but who aren't very active.
I know who the get-up-and-go agents are in my area. There's no way to not know, as they make sure you know :-)
Becoming a realtor is not a good choice for someone lacking get-up-and-go, or someone who needs to be managed.
I talked to one a year ago, wondering how on earth he thought he could get $3m for the house he was showing. He said the other realtors all thought he was crazy.
He got it, and the 6% commission. Ka-ching!
I have a "drone services business". It isn't even very active - it's more of an enjoyable way for me to make some money for my hobbies and a fallback if I lose my tech job since I live in the middle of nowhere.
I've looked at becoming a licensed real estate agent for the ability to "join" a brokerage and get access to upload photos directly to MLS for the agents who are my customers. It's not that expensive to do, doesn't take that much time, and what downside does it really have?
Of course, the ones that do have to be willing to put out the effort to learn salesmanship. Most people are too lazy to, and drop out. Yes, it is survivorship bias, but survival is up to the person, it isn't automatic or random.
A lot of people would still be underwater on their mortgages, but a smaller number would default (if central bank rates spiked, it would only impact adjustable rates), and the the spillover onto banks would be substantially less.
Which is how it should be: housing corrections should suck for homeowners, but not topple well-capitalized banks.
In some areas, tax assessment values are supposed to be the market value and in some areas the tax assessment has no clear connection to market value. Looking at tax assessments to say someone paid too much doesn't make much sense.
The market is a market, and that a seller and a buyer got together on a price is prima facia evidence of the market price. Assuming it was a arms length transaction. Especially if there were several similar bids, that's strong evidence of the market value. For a purchase mortgage, an apprasial is kind of confirming the price is somewhat reasonable, and should only come in low in case the buyer, the buyer's agent, and the inspector (if any) missed something big.
For a refinance or similar, there's no direct evidence of the market value, so an apprasial needs to more closely gauge condition of the house in question as well as that of comps and it's more subjective.
This is certainly not the case in all states. In Texas, the actual sale price is considered the private details of a private transaction (unless, of course, a public entity is party to the transaction). Companies like Zillow and Black Knight make a big part of their business by making educated guesses.
For example, here's an article explaining that "Texas REALTORS® opposes all legislative efforts to require the disclosure of sales-price information":
https://www.texasrealestate.com/members/government-affairs/l...
Still, there's a substantial amount of data out there (such as the last publicly offered price and how long it took to close, so you can get a pretty good idea for how low the seller had to drop the price to close the deal).
In Texas, appraisals (both tax and financing) are based, in part, on the estimates that companies like Zillow, Black Knight, Core Data, etc all provide.
Since it is germaine to the article, it's interesting to note that none of these automated appraisal companies record the race or skin color of the current home owners.
It’s rarely as cut and dried as “I hate [race X]”. Many acts of racism aren’t thought of as racist by the perpetrators.
Consider a traffic stop. Black drivers are pulled over disproportionately. We know this because the difference goes down at night when it’s harder to see. I bet the cops aren’t generally thinking “he’s black, let’s pull him over”. It’s one piece of information that feeds into preconceived notions.
Likewise, if an officer is relaxed at a traffic stop things will likely go smoother but they may end up escalating the situation by expecting trouble.
All of this is really what critical race theory is about. It’s not about making people feel bad for the Sims of their fathers. It’s about recognizing that the legacy of that still exists and that, as white people in particular, we continue to benefit.
Institutional racism at work. Everyone trying to immigrate to primarily white countries. Even immigrants are racist.
The US and to a lesser extent Europe are immigration destinations because they wanted to be that way.
Thats definitely why.
Jim Crowe laws are institutional racism. Individual appriasers may be personally racist. The KKK are terrorists (who are personally racists and wish they could make institutions racist too).
What really grinds my gears is when people call it "systematic racism". "Systematic" and "systemic" are not even close to synonyms. No one is out there making sure everyone gets a little bit of racism and no one is missed.
> grinds my gears is when people call it "systemic racism"
clearly you wanted to use a different word in one of those - which one is it?
I have a browser extension that automatically replaces the term. I've just "cloud-to-butt"ed myself.