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Actually, he only looks to own maybe 5 or 6 homes (which is only double the stated number*) although he does own a lot of property scattered across the US.

As far as Amazon walking away, I imagine that--presuming they weren't dead set on NYC--they'd either go through with it because logistics make it a better place, or they may pull out precisely to reinforce the notion that they'll only develop in places where they're given government welfare. Like you say, if they do walk away it might be better for New York. Honestly, I think them backing out on the corporate welfare would be better for New York.

* Two homes is a "lot" for most people, but in context I wonder how many of those houses he uses as actual homes. If he really only lives in the three mentioned, I'd tend to argue that heavily reinforces the idea of the comparison. To be honest, I don't really know.

Just because someone else can afford my house and I can't afford the tax on it doesn't mean I should lose my house.

Yes it does.

Oh, sorry--- didn't realize you were typing on a commodore 64 powered by a bicycle powered generator in your grass hut.

Perhaps I can help you with your back strain from moving the goalposts all the way from a 7,000 square foot house in your original post to a modest 2200 square foot house.

As you seem to be a bit clueless about what you were really saying in your first post...

7,000 square foot houses typically cost multiple millions of dollars.
https://www.realtor.com/news/r...

The link was eaten by /, so here is is again: house for sale in nice neighborhood in Bay area at less than $1M.

You obviously have no clue how expensive Alameda County is to live in. Where else are you going to find borderline condemn-able victorians selling for $1.5+M.

And you're obviously just another ill-informed whiner. There are plenty of active listings in the $100k range right here. And if you start crying that they're not Victorian mansions, you'll simply prove my point that people find their incomes inadequate simply because they want to live outside them.

It's always laughable to see someone talk about it being responsibility rather than where they live.

See above. Where you choose to live is part of being responsible and living within your means, Mr(s). Anonymous Coward.

We've got the hottest housing market in the nation

According to who? From what I can tell, Seattle isn't even in the top 20 hottest housing markets.

Source 1
Source 2

$1M house in Gilroy, what's that, 750 sq ft and no garage?

Five bedrooms, 3K- to 4K-sft and three-car garage. Lot size is from a little to a lot.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Gilroy_CA/beds-5-5

Started as plausible, finished as crazy. Loved it.

What's crazy?

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Gilroy_CA/beds-5-5

Here I went and found the place and forgot to post the link to it.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/472-Racquet-Club-Rd_Leland_MS_38756_M86585-83323?ex=MS553220259#modal_PhotoGallery

Based on typical real estate prices in the area, it looks like Apple paid between 500% - 900% more than what the house was worth. Not bad.

Living in this home --

http://www.realtor.com/property-detail/6747-Minnow-Pond-Dr_West-Bloomfield_MI_48322_cc4f3302

while a lot of us, his victims, are just scraping by.

Just to drive this point home, they are literally giving houses away in Detroit:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Detroit_MI/price-na-20000/type-single-family-home?sby=1

3,785 listings between 0 and $20,000. 212 of those listings are for between 0 and $1000. Its a fine time to "drop out" if that is a life you want.

With a house you have an agent acting as a proxy.

Except in most cases a real estate agent doesn't really work for the buyer. Unless an agent is specifically hired as a buyer's agent the agent may tell the seller what you tell them. For instance if you are willing to pay $500,000 for a house but try to get the seller to reduce the price to $450,000 the agent may tell the seller you'll pay $500,000. You avoid this by either paying a buyer's agent to represent you or by going through a Realtor.

Falcon

The American Medical Association restricts the supply of MDs, and by law you can't get most medical care from anyone who isn't an MD.

AC is correct: you cannot be a "realtor." You can be a "REALTOR" (Registered trademark) if the National Association of Realtors permits it.

Both restrict capacity of the labor in their industries. This is known to create at best Cournot competition. Meanwhile, a market that is not capacity constrained has Betrand competition - where the mere threat of entry can keep prices near their minimum. Cournot competition reduces economic efficiency (id est, screws you out of money).

I'd estimate the average working American is getting "screwed" (how much he pays less what a competitive market would cost) by about $6,000 per year (of the approximately $16,000/yr of medical expense he and his company pay). Your paycheck is probably light by $500 per month due to the AMA tax.

It is also worth noting that a supply shortage of saved lives is equivalent to preventable deaths. This artificial shortage raises prices of having your life saved while simultaneously reducing your odds of having your life saved.

The AMA and NAR are de facto monopsonists, restricting the ease of health care and real estate purchase respectively, and using your medical bills and need for housing to make their members artificially richer.

Don't believe that doctors are getting paid "too much"? See if you can find the trend in the Forbes best paying jobs in America:
1. Anesthesiologist
2. Surgeon
3. Obstetrician
4. Orthodontist
5. Oral Surgeon
6. Internist
7. Prosthodontist
8. Psychiatrist
9. General Practitioner
10. Chief Executive Officer
11. Physician and Surgeon, Other
12. Pediatrician
13. Dentist
14. Airline Pilot
15. Podiatrist
16. Lawyer

Productivity in the US has been going up steadily over the last decade, but real median income has gone down. Where does all that extra money go that you're not getting paid? Your company spends it on health insurance, most of which ends up in the hands of MDs.

OPEC dominates the trillion dollar global petroleum industry. The AMA dominates the two trillion dollar national medical industry. Politicians blame OPEC for our economy because doctors write big checks.

I'm not sure what kind of "lock" she has on the information stream; everyone can view the basic information from the MLS on http://realtor.com/ and my wife is always responding to folks who come to her website asking for the more in-depth information on the MLS. Now, a few notes on this:

1. She prefers to work with people who are willing to sign a buyers agreement with her, because she spends a lot of time following up with the people she works with, including scanning new listings for similar homes that the clients might also be interested in, and her time is valuable and unpaid unless the client uses her to make an offer and close the deal.
2. A lot of the information on the MLS is fairly private for the seller, often including contact numbers and instructions about how/when/who to contact about appointments to show the property. Realtors like my wife have an ethics code about protecting this information and following the instructions, and there can be severe penalties for failing to do so. That's why the information is restricted on Realtor.com. In fact, there are three levels of MLS reports; the public one you see on Realtor.com, a client report that is for giving to potential buyers, and an agent report that shows everything.
3. There is also a code of ethics regarding what goes into an MLS listing which Realtors must follow; if the system were opened up to the general public, you'd get inaccurate and outright deceitful listings, with no real recourse for the MLS. Craigslist is an example of this; most of the listings are basically honest, but if you're going to buy a $500k property from a Craigslist listing, you're going to have to do a lot more due diligence to make sure the basic facts about the property are accurate.

Maybe in Kentucky $60k/yr is a decent family income, but you would be hard pressed to afford a $200k house on that.

Wow, you're pretty off-base, I'd say. First, let's look at median state incomes: I count 32/51 states+DC that have a median income less than $60k. Even California's median income is less than $65k. If you look here instead, you get much lower numbers -- I don't know why.

Anyway, I live in Louisville, Kentucky. It is, according to the US Census Bureau, the 27th largest city in the US (I point that out just to make it clear I'm not in a rural area, where (I'm fairly sure) housing is much cheaper by $/sqft).

My fiance and I have a combined income of $70k, and just bought our first home. We were approved for a mortgage of up to $300k. Granted, I thought that was a little ridiculous, but I later realized we *could* have afforded to pay it. We got our loan at 5.875% (30-year fixed) due to good credit, and we're fairly frugal people, but it would not have required much effort -- maybe a bit of attention to how often I upgrade my computer equipment, and that sort of thing. According to this, a 95% loan on a $300k house would cost less than $1,700/month. Add on property taxes and home insurance, and we'd be looking at around $2k/month. The amount of money we put into savings each month plus the amount we're actually paying for our mortgage easily tops that (well... it doesn't really stay in savings because I usually dump it back into the mortgage as additional principle payments). Now, I admit would couldn't afford that if we had 2 children, and we're making $70k instead of $60k, but on the other hand I'm talking about a $300k house, as opposed to $200k.

But let's back up a minute -- this begs the question (yes, it really does, you grammar Nazis -- it "fails to consider the question") of whether you need a $200k house in Kentucky. I can promise that you don't. See, I don't know what $200k will get you in the San Francisco area, but with just a quick search out here you can get a 9-room ranch-style house (4-bedroom, 2-bath) with an unfinished basement on 16 acres of partially wooded land (with pond(s), a stream, a deck, and a 2-car carport) with an asking price under $180k. With a bit of effort looking around and some negotiating, I'm sure you can get more for a full $200k.

Telecommute for the win.

All these ad-supported services are chasing the same pool of advertising spending. In that sense, they're competitors of Google. Now AOL has gone advertising-supported, so they're going after the same revenue.

The result is probably going to be that online advertising rates go through the floor, like banner ads did. We'll also see some sites get desperate and try annoying ads, popups, popunders, interstitials, and adware. Total spending on advertising is not going to increase; it has to stay a fraction of total retail sales. Somebody has to lose.

Print newspapers are already getting killed by this. Craigslist is draining off their classified ad revenue, and now Google has a deal witih the Associated Press. As a result, most newspapers really have very little content today. Take a typical newspaper today and mark all the articles that were generated by the newspaper's own reporters, and did not start as a press release. You might find ten per day. Only a few papers still have big reporting staffs.

There are two things that need to move to the web to finally kill off newspapers - real estate ads and car ads. So far, that hasn't happened. People have tried; Cars.com was supposed to replace auto dealerships, but today it's just a lead generation service. Realtor.com tried to take over real estate, but hasn't made a big dent. Now that's where to work on "Web 2.0" ideas - those are huge markets with real money being done badly.

I lost my job, and a friend of mine found me work in Pittsburgh, and so I moved from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, PA. I'm afraid I still haven't recovered from the culture shock of being in Pittsburgh. I now plan to move to the Philippines instead of staying in Pittsburgh because the place is so depressing to me. I'm going to keep my cost of living very low so I can make a startup venture work, but above all because I think I'll find a better life there.

In moving to the Bay Area or Los Angeles, you can be assured that your destination isn't depressing, but it will look horribly expensive. Food's actually cheaper (and higher quality) thanks to intense competition, but housing makes up for all that and more. However, the fact that you won't have to pay much for heat helps a lot. Heat in the east is more expensive even than air conditioning in Los Angeles. Real estate taxes are high, but lower than you might think based on the value of the homes. A $150,000 house in the Pittsburgh city proper actually has higher taxes than a $428,000 house in Los Angeles.

I'd recommend checking out http://www.craigslist.org/ and http://www.realtor.com/ for your destination city to get a handle on the cost of living adjustment. Check out the housing sections for Craigslist.

Don't find your mover via Craigslist, though. The one I eventually used was unprofessional and did a poor job with my stuff. The actual worth of your stuff is likely to be very close to the cost of moving it; unfortunately, that's not true of the cost of re-buying it new. In other words, if you have a desk that you bought for $1,000 you'll be lucky to sell it for $200, but moving it will cost $300. If you're patient and can find something equivalent for $300 at your destination, then you're better off selling your stuff than moving it. If it's something that will be difficult or expensive to find at your destination, then you're better off moving it.

If you're driving your own car, ignore the advice I saw elsewhere and cram as much in it as possible. I took most of my computer equipment that way, and boy was I happy to have it before I got the rest of my stuff!

In the end, unless you have really strong ties where you are, you'll probably like the west coast more than the east. The cold-weather East, at least to my eyes, has been an exceptionally drab and depressing experience and I will be very glad to leave it.

Good luck!

D

When I purchased the "new" WRT54G, version 5, I expected a router that would at least have better performance than my old, reliable Pentium-II firewall running Windows 2003 and Routing and Remote Services.

Boy was I wrong. Many sites, such as: http://www.tmobile.com/ http://www.realtor.com/ and http://www.gamespot.com/ all had great difficulty loading. It turns out a **LOT** of other people are having the same problem with the Version 5 WRT54G.

My longstanding issue was finally escalated to Linksys Customer Support (you will be escalated to Customer support after dealing with Technical support). At Customer Support, they RMA'd my v5 router, and replaced it with a v4 router. I demanded that they replace it with a v4 router, and I noted that a *LOT* of people on this bulletin board are having the EXACT same problem.

I have literally spent hours trying to solve this problem on the v5 router. As soon as I plugged the v4 router in, my problems were solved!

Of course, Linksys being a company that enjoys wasting their customers' time by not even admitting a problem, you will be forced to pay for shipping charges. No matter that the item is clearly flawed by engineering defects to begin with. I will never, ever, consider buying a Linksys in the future. What a mistake I made thinking they were a premium brand. The fact that they are going to sell a version that finally works as it should, under a different model number and at a higher price, rather than fix the WRT54G Version 5 tells me that they are not interested in providing a quality product. I hope their strategy blows up in their face!

This house isn't even the cheapest I found that meets/exceeds the spec, at $85k. However, I took something from near the middle of the list to avoid trotting out this 5 bedroom house selling for $35k and claiming it was representitive.

This house isn't even the cheapest I found that meets/exceeds the spec, at $85k. However, I took something from near the middle of the list to avoid trotting out this 5 bedroom house selling for $35k and claiming it was representitive.

How well does it work with JavaScript-heavy pages?

If you want a laugh someday, try http://www.realtor.com/ and try searching for property.

it has one of the worst JavaScript dependencies I've ever seen. If you can actually get property listings to come up on it, I'll be pretty impressed with the BlackBerry's JavaScript.

D

• Two story
• 3 bedroom(s)
• 1 bath
• Approximately 1134 sq. ft.
• Electric heating
• 1 car garage
• Approximately 1 acre(s)
• Public sewer service
• Public water supply
• $7,500

$8500 House in Kansas City, Missouri
2 Bedrooms / 1 Bath / Looks like a ghost house.

Try buying a house in Silicon Valley on $80K a year.

go ahead, check it out ...

punch in a silicon valley city.

I live and work in Edge City. Have you read Joel Garreau's work? It's quite fascinating because it shows what people really want, not what planners want to give them.

My new house is ten minutes away from my work. I'm not one of those guys who buys a $279,000 house in Pacoima or Lancaster and spends $1,000 a month keeping my car running and insured. No; I realize that's folly. So I buy a $428,000 house so I can be ten minutes away from my work. I should be a Hero of the New Urbanism, except that I think light rail is as much of a folly as heavy commuting.

In order to convince me that sprawl is bad, you're going to have to create a more convincing alternative to it than has been hithero created.

Here is my $428,000 house

Here is a condo in the same general area. Note that I'd be nuts to buy a "condo downtown", because I would have to commute for an hour to get to my job!

The condo is not in the same, exceptionally nice, area the house is in. Instead, it's surrounded by similar concrete ugliness. In fact, a house in the same area is very similarly priced once you add on the HOA dues to the condo's price.

Now, I have some questions for you that are very important.

Does this condo make you feel good when you look at it?

Would you feel pride, if you worked and slaved very hard for years, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments, and the end result was ownership of this condo?

Would you feel good about making a $2,000 monthly payment (including homeowners' dues) to buy this concrete monstrosity? Remember that homeowners' association dues make it very nearly as expensive as a single-family home in the same area.

Personally, I think I would have been nuts to buy the condo.

What do you think?

D

Your manager is salivating already, just think how well a programmer could live on 70% of your salary. Billings vs San Jose.

Your manager is salivating already, just think how well a programmer could live on 70% of your salary. Billings vs San Jose.

Stop and think about it: In Houston, which has probably the cheapest real-estate market of any major city, $100,000 gets you a stripped-down ~2,200 sq. ft. house about 30 miles from downtown.

must be nice. In my neck of the woods ~$100,000 will get you a 660 sq. ft. shoebox to live in

I used to live in Sarasota FL ("Peter Pan Kindernook" anyone?) and also Bartow FL (Floral Avenue Elementary anyone?) and it is true that central Florida is the lightning capital of the nation. The weather can be genuinely awe-inspiring.

You are right, property there is reasonably priced.

I just don't pay for garbage web content. Sites like slashdot are just a waste of bandwith for the most part. They rarely provide any new and/or useful information.

On the flip side I do pay for access to assorted electronics databook and publication sites as well as buy a lot of books. For instance the IEEE page is worth the money. The Intel Developer site is worth paying for as is the National Semiconductor site but they are free because these sites make their money selling the product. The techical documentation is an aid in use.

There is another type of site that makes money on the internet. Its the type of site that provides a REAL service. These are sites like REALTOR.com, bill payer services, job search services, dating services, etc that work well on the web.

The problem with the web is this pay for bandwith scheme that is kicking everyone in the butt. Take internet radio for instance. You could be part of a band co-op and try to put your music on the web. If your site becomes popular though you could potentially be paying a whole crapload to serve the content. With IPv6 you only pay for a miniscule amount of bandwith required to send a single stream which gets broken up by the multicast routers. Sites like slashdot which are dynamic couldn't benifit from this because they try to tailor their views for every user. A nice idea, but completly useless when you compare the cost of running a site that doesn't provide a useful service and the tons of bandwith required to give ever user a unique experience. Slashdot could provide 99% of the user experience with just static content that could be cached in web caches.

The net is indispensible, and largely removes the realtor from your searches.

We used realtor.com for the most part. Basically, if you just call an agent, they're not going to listen to what you're looking for, and they're going to take you to things that they have listed and want to get rid of. They're salespeople, after all. They will also want you to sign an "exclusive" agreement stating that you will not use any other agents for a period of time.

What we would do is search realtor.com and harmonhomes.com (a local to CT site, which unfortunately was recently redesigned to the point of uselessness) and find the things that specifically fit what we were looking for. We would print out maps to them (a feature on realtor.com), and drive by to see if it was something we'd like before ever calling the agent.

If we liked it, we'd call the agent and they'd take us out to look at it. Only once was the "exclusive agreement" brought up, and we insisted that it be a 24-hour agreement. Don't get roped into anything else, although I understand that these things are indefensible legally.

This saved us a lot of time, kept us away from realtors as much as possible, and found us our dream home, which we just closed on last week.

One more bit of advice -- get your mortgage through a broker, not through a bank. Mortgage brokers *only* deal with mortgages, so they're not distracted by everyday banking things, they can give you a boatload of options rather than the bank's 1 or 2 options, and they can often get you approved more easily, since they deal with a lot more mortgages than just one, so your mortgage becomes part of a "package" where millions are borrowed rather than a couple of hundred thousand.

I bought a new house last summer and I used Realtor.Com to do my preliminary search. Realtor.Com allowed me to search by geography, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. This allowed me to create a short list (about 10 homes) that I thought I might be interested in. I printed the information about each home and then I visited each home and ranked them in order of preference.

Meanwhile, I still had a Buyer-Agent!!! The Buyer-Agent recommended several homes for me to go view. I actually did not choose any of her homes. The home I finally decided on was one that I found myself. However, my Buyer-Agent still walked through all of the price and improvement work negotiations (she got the seller to come down on the price and the seller did some basic maintenance to the house and some improvements), the phyical and termite inspections, and all the other sundry details of buying house.

I would not ever dream of buying a house with out a Buyer-Agent, but the Realtor.Com was a great additional tool in the process.

What advantage does a realtor have in spending time (and thus money) to put ads up on the internet?

My spouse and I just (two days ago) sold our house, and our realtor told us that close to 80% of their clients came to them and asked to see houses that they had found on the net. He said it was well worth the money to list the house (and get the IPix shots).

It's also great for us, since we're moving to the other side of the continent. We can pick some examples of houses we like, and give the MLS numbers to our buying agent, and save a lot of time by not looking at houses that don't fit our needs/wants.

At least in this part of the country, a seemingly common application for maintaining an area's multiple listing service (MLS) is using Technology Concept's Ultrex. (See, for instance, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls (IA) Board of Realtors and the Southeast Minnesota Association of REALTORS). The web sites are essentially a "web-ified" version of the MLS database. So this is probably your best bet for finding real estate on the internet.

Sites like REALTOR.com don't generally get updated nearly as often or as quickly.

Keep in mind, however, that in a lot of markets, agents can sell houses a lot faster than someone can enter them in the MLS database. My wife and I recently bought our first home -- doing so before it was even "officially" listed. It was never on the web, in the paper, or even had a sign. An agent will also have search capabilities in the MLS software that the web site probably won't provide. In most situations your best bet is probably to use an agent.

All MLS listings on Realtor.Com are two weeks old before being posted on the web.

Realtor.com is a popular home-buying site in the US. Century 21 realty gets lots of people to their site who can't spell 'realtor'

http://www.realtor.com/ = The real realtor.com site
http://www.realator.com/ = Century 21, which transfers you to: c21betterrealty.com
--

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

Aha! That explains it. See, I live in LA County.... Have a look at the crime stats for our affluent neighboorhood.