@bry911 You said: "That means about 90% of cost differences of homes in a specific zip code in the Bay area can be explained by the function." Probably you meant the cost differences can be explained by the *size* of the home.

@Jennifer Hogan "Income inequality" is not a broad-based statistic. The source of this inequality is that the top 1% has gotten massively more wealthy due to low-interest-rate and monetary policies, and implicit support by the Fed for equity markets. While the enrichment of the super-rich is an enormous problem for this country, it has nothing to do with the reasons that homes have gotten so expensive in the US, and it is a specious political argument.

I see two reasons why housing got so expensive:

1) Because of the shock of the 2008 housing collapse, homebuilders have been conservative in building out new inventory, and ultimately demand outgrew supply, by a lot.

2) There is a very unfortunate trend for corporations to buy up about 15% to 20% of the new home inventory. Because of the Fed's low-interest policies, those large mega corporations are able to borrow at much lower rates than consumers, which gives them unfair advantages in buying new homes. You don't address this problem by "taxing the rich" or addressing income inequality.

So we have too little inventory and, at the margins, we have given unfair advantages to corporations in buying new homes. As the economy slows demand should fall, and that might help bring supply and demand into a better balance. As far as corporate ownership of homes, we might need legislation that changes the economics for corporations buying homes. As a social policy, we might want to make those homes available for citizens and penalize corporate ownership.

^^ Don't forget about investors buying up inventory for short-term rentals.

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - I meant the f(x), but you are right saying size of the home would have made it more understandable.

@mxk3 z5b_MI In the areas where homes have gotten mega-expensive, gross rents are less than 3% of the price paid for the property. It barely covers property tax. It might be a type of long-term savings and plan for retirement, but as a current-year investment, it is an awful choice.

"But there is plenty of investor research that is available and they show the price to square foot regression in a specific zip code has an R-squared of 90 and is not logarithmic.

That means about 90% of cost differences of homes in a specific zip code in the Bay area can be explained by the function."

Experiences of my own and what I've heard from others about the real world of real estate buying and selling and investing and developing, and my acquaintances whose occupations involve same (including a close friend who was a C-Suite officer of a public real estate developer) suggest that the markets function as they do, from day to day and place to place, and people do what they do without any regard or reference to any kind of nonsense that academics produce and try to sell others as being insightful or useful. (How's that for a long sentence!)

As with so much of "research" endeavors outside of the hard physical and medical sciences.

One insight that I think I've offered before is that a 5 year global study determined, with a 95% confidence level, that 87.65% of "data" presented anonymously on the internet, especially that presented quantitively, is baloney. Often made up, as this contributor has admitted to doing in the past.

^^ I didn't comment about the wisdome of the investment; rather, my comment was in agreeance with the other poster noting housing being snatched up by corporations and to add it's not only corporations, it's non-corporate investors. It is a MAJOR problem in some parts of my state -- AirBnB/short-term rentals have caused housing shortages and skyrocketing prices, thus pricing out many of the locals; many businesses, including healthcare facilities, have reported staffing shortages not so much because of COVID but because potential employees can't find anywhere to live.

@Elmer J Fudd said, " Experiences of my own and what I've heard from others about the real world of real estate buying and selling and investing and developing, and my acquaintances whose occupations involve same (including a close friend who was a C-Suite officer of a public real estate developer) suggest that the markets function as they do, from day to day and place to place, and people do what they do without any regard or reference to any kind of nonsense that academics produce and try to sell others as being insightful or useful."

I find it odd that you always have an overqualified professional that you have talked to about this stuff recently. The number of times you have claimed to have specific conversations with people who are accomplished about the specific issues we are discussing suggests that you, in fact, don't have them and need that appeal to anonymous authority to add heft to your argument.

Karl Case and Robert Shiller developed something called the Home Price Index (HPI). The HPI is an actual study of same home sales. This was needed because homes have been getting larger for a while and some of the market price increase was due to new homes getting bigger. Because the HPI only looks at the price for the same home it is a much better measure than median sales price. Since it is looking at the actual property transfer data in the Bay Area, these are real sales and not an academic exercise. I have never met a C-suite real estate investor who would ignore the HPI, I guess you have...

The raw data is available from the St. Louis Fed...

As you can see, according to the St. Louis Fed, you and your C-suite friend are wrong. In fact, the lower third has appreciated higher than the middle and upper third of houses. Please understand, I am not saying you are wrong... the Fed is. You should call them up and let them know what your "real world friend" told you.

@bry911 It is also useful to see the Shiller HPI going back to 2000 so that we can see the current boom for what it is. That blow-off top at the end I guess we can blame on the Covid monetary policy, but I am less clear on how policymakers thought it was okay back in 2018 and 2019 for housing to get so overheated. They should have been unwinding the Fed's balance sheet and taking the pain before Covid ever showed up. I am actually starting to think that no one is managing the ship, and economic policy in central banks has become much like heroin addicts just looking for the next easy high. Everything is short-term gratification. There is no long-term planning.

@bry911 Since you pulled down SF Bay Area data, if you have a way to generate a graph going back to 2000, and through the last reporting period, it would be very interesting to see the whole historical picture for one of the top-tier markets in the country.

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - Where did I say that prices were increasing due to income inequality. I said that if we do not address income inequality at some point only the rich will own their own homes.

When you look at the graphs I provided can you see the trendlines? Each generation is less able to purchase a home by age 30 than the generation before them. . . Housing prices are going up 4 times faster than median incomes . . .

Income disparity isn't just about the rich getting richer - it is about the rich getting richer while the not rich get poorer. The median household income is stretched further and further as prices for everything increase faster then their income. Look at just a few numbers from the last 20 years. . .

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that home ownership is getting further out of reach for median income families every year. As this trend continues will it eventually culminate in a society where only the rich own real estate? I see no evidence to the contrary.

As far as corporate ownership of single family homes that got it's big kickstart with Blackstone / Invitation Homes buying massive amounts of the 2008 forclosures. All the people who lost their homes would need a place to live and would have to rent since their credit was destroyed and their equity lost.

What are those corporate executives at Blackstone and invitation Homes earning?

Dallas B. Tanner President and Chief Executive Officer $5,518,018

Blackstone Inc. BX, -3.31% CEO Stephen Schwarzman drew in $1.1 billion in 2021 as one of the highest, or potentially the highest, paid executive on Wall Street.

I think the rising costs of homes, the corporate buying of single family homes and income inequality may be related.

If only the government owned all housing and distributed it equitably. From those according to their means to those according to their needs.

The first baby steps include a multi-trillion dollar public housing program, abolishing housing speculation, corporate home ownership and profiteering private rental monopolies. What a wonderful world it will be!

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - Is this what you wanted?

"I find it odd that you always have an overqualified professional that you have talked to about this stuff recently."

Read it again, or don't I didn't say I'd spoken to this one particular person (who happens to be a close friend from college days) recently. He worked for a large developer, not an investor.

I know a lot of successful people from all walks of life and often spend my time listening to their answers to my questions about their lives and expertise. This one happens to be a best friend from college years, I've known him my entire adult life and we've spent a lot of time together. Too bad if your circle of friends and contacts is limited - one learns from listening, not from talking. Don't convince yourself it's the other way around, a trap for people who like you work in any level of child education.

I was talking about price LEVELS, not price changes. Knock yourself out, spend today in never never land looking for more studies or stats. Be sure to find graphs - those can make off-topic data seem relevant.

@Elmer J Fudd said, "I was talking about price LEVELS, not price changes."

Please tell us more about how you were not talking about price changes when you said, "This puts a lid on appreciation."

You responded to a point in a discussion about housing price increases, how exactly were you commenting on house price increases without commenting on house price changes?

I don't believe you have discussed the fact that the housing market is generally driven by entry level appreciation with some successful friend, which is the point we were discussing.

I fully believe you have many acquaintances that are successful. I fully believe you drop their titles or their success when giving your own opinions in order to bedazzle people. I don't believe anyone here is really that simple. If they are, and they want to believe your vague assertions, there is no data that is going to change their minds.

I'm sure your perspective from Kentucky or wherever you are, of the area I've lived my whole personal and professional life, is much clearer than mine is. As I said, teachers don't get honest feedback because the people they spend most of their time talking don't know much and tend to accept what they say. Adults and people like me and those I know, who you can try to cut down by calling us overqualified, tend to know better.

Bye.

@Elmer J Fudd - Corelogic, the company who produces the HPI, has 5,100 employees and are headquartered Irvine California. Would you like the number to their headquarters so that you can let them know they are wrong?

However, to really respond to your assertion. I think you just needed to argue on the internet so you said some ridiculous thing just to be contentious. Now, when I point out it is ridiculous, you are going to point to where I spent the first 17 years of my life as the reason you are right and I am wrong.

@bry911 That chart is a gem, thanks. I need to spend more time on the Federal Reserve system. Is there a site that cherrypicks key charts from the FRED site and keeps them updated? I imagine going through the Fed interface will involve so many options that it is hard to see the forest from the trees. Getting some time graphs to show wage growth, income distribution, inflation, economic growth, etc, would be really useful if a website kept them updated.

@worthy

"If only the government owned all housing and distributed it equitably. From those according to their means to those according to their needs."

Why is it every time someone says that we need to fix the system that we have someone who assumes socialism and complete government control?

How did we manage to have greater equality from 1945 -1970? We were not a socialist nation when the American Dream was a reality, so why is it that this is now the only answer?

After the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti Vietnam War Movement their was a concerted effort to limit the power of the people. The elite and those in power did not like that the people had enough power to influence policy. News outlets were purchased by the elite and powerful and they fed the nation the ideas they wanted the public to hear.

The idea is simple and a long standing war tactic. Divide and Conquer. Keep the right fighting the left - make sure everything is polarized and keep the attention focused on right vs left so that the top can continue to win without anyone paying attention.

I have watched some of these things in action. I found a government agency that was doing something really wrong. I spent a year fighting them, going to city council meetings, writing to news outlets, trying to get things corrected. I finally had a break when a bleeding heart story hit the news and I was able to respond to the story publicly and the newspaper didn't see my response before a public outcry began. The public agency was knowingly doing something wrong, had been fighting me tooth and nail for over a year. Now they had to change their policy, but instead of calling the agency out the news editor told me that they were giving them 72 hours to fix their policy and then publishing the story. The agency came out smelling like roses - "They discovered the issue and have corrected the problem." Not a word about the campaign they had led to mislead the public, to profit from their misdeeds or to fight against doing the right thing. Nothing about the public meetings with city council where they misrepresented the facts and won the right to continue to do the wrong thing. I gave the newspaper all the evidence they needed to bury the agency but none of that was ever published. As far as the public knows the agency just made a mistake and as soon as they found out they corrected it.

You seem pretty bright, but when were fed information every day it is hard to recognize what impact the propaganda has had on your thinking. So many people I know who used to think with their own brains have become parrots of the far right or the far left. What happened to the center?

I am only citing the housing cures promulgated by "progressives" in the US and Canada.

The first line of the quote is from a respected US housing academic Interviewed for the Financial Post of Canada some 40 years ago. He also added that the population wasn't yet mature enough to accept the necessity of government home ownership. Closer now, eh?

Bernie Sanders' multi-trillion dollar programme envisages nationwide rent control, "affordable housing" subsidies, direct building, elimination of exclusionary zoning.

Canadian jurisdictions have added anti-speculation laws, including fully-taxing owner occupied homes if held for less than a year, underused home taxes and extra taxes for non-resident buyers--including Canadians purchasing second homes out of Province.

As I've struggled with local bureaucracy for 31/2 years for a two-family building permit, it's so encouraging to hear that more government is the answer.

Wealth and power inequality has been around in every country since the beginning of time. It’s never going away. There is no “problem” to “fix.” There is no inherent right to equality. Anywhere.

Wealth and power inequality has been around in every country since the beginning of time. It’s never going away. There is no “problem” to “fix.”

There actually is a problem to fix. The type of inequality we are discussing is not trying to make everyone equal, it is attempting to keep capitalism from eating itself. Free market capitalism suffers from the game theory problem.

Put simply, every company will benefit from providing more for less, which puts downward pressure on wages. However, consumers need money in order to buy goods and services. So there is no position where an individual company should avoid reducing costs (worker wages), however, the best position for all companies is where consumers have more money to spend. Therefore, companies benefit from some type of cooperation.

ETA: Before I get attacked from some anonymous cartoon character. This and the following post are very simplified and are not meant to be taken as an exhaustive discussion.

I am not a big fan of the Gini index and most inequality discussions. In my opinion, this isn't a problem with the wealth and income the rich have, rather it is a problem with the lack of wealth and income for the lower and middle class. CEO pay discussions are especially problematic.

Most CEO's are not making multiple millions per year, average CEO compensation is much lower, it is just the largest companies that have really high CEO pay. The problem simply isn't that 1 in 600,000 Americans is getting paid too much.

Furthermore, CEO pay has increased a lot but so has the size of the companies they are running. Today Apple is worth three times more than the entire stock market was in 1978. So while executive compensation is ten times larger than it was in 1978, the combined value of the companies has grown 50 times larger. CEO pay per revenue dollar is also down.

I do agree that we have a problem with income levels in the U.S. right now, the lower and middle classes need more money. I also agree that CEO pay being this high when workers are so low adds insult to injury. However, I think focusing too much on the top runs the risk of fixing the wrong part of the problem. Even if CEO pay hadn't grown at all, we would still have this problem.

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I don't think homes are ever going to become unaffordable as a whole. There is simply too much riding on private ownership of homes. Even corporations who are buying homes right now are not really interested in rental incomes, the rental cap rates are at an all time low, they are buying homes because they are predicting further price increases while the supply problem works itself out.

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - Try not to have too much fun...

San Francisco HPI

You’re right. There is a problem to fix. You are the problem.

You’re right. There is a problem to fix. You are the problem.

OK Boomer.

ETA: Can you point out why I am the problem or did you just need to take a jab at someone who disagrees with you?

There is always someone who thinks that incredibly complicated problems need simple wisdom. To quote Mencken, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The relationship between production and consumption is well known and rather obvious. How anyone could think you can have sustained production with slowing consumption is beyond me. Even Greg Mankiw is talking about the problems with low wage worker pay.

ETA: In some ways, people also follow Newton's first law, or the law of inertia, they continue on as they were until a force acts upon them. For many years a lot of knowledgeable people have been warning that worker pay has been spent sustaining work and any disruption would cause a drastic shift.

Put simply, work drives a significant amount of consumption, much of the entertainment industry, clothing industry, automobile sales, convenient food options, etc., are largely due to requirements for work or the result of dwindling time away from work. When the pandemic disrupted work, many workers realized they could be happier with less work and less consumption. This is the driver for the great resignation.

As a result of this we have massive middle class wage compression.

@ShadyWillowFarm "Wealth and power inequality has been around in every country since the beginning of time. It’s never going away. There is no “problem” to “fix.”"

Racism and discrimination are not new, so I guess it isn't a problem. . .

Pollution isn't new, so climate change and global warming aren't problems?

Human Coronavirus was first identified in 1965, so SARS, MERS, COVID strains aren't a problem?

Men have been sexually assaulting women for centuries - so we shouldn't teach our sons that no means no? It's okay, boys will be boys.

I realize that this discussion has gone far afield from the original question, but isn't part of whether a particular house that is within a group of similar houses will sell and others will not, or will not sell when the others will, at least partly due to chance?

My SO was buyer's agent for a house that sold pre-pandemic for over asking in a multi-bid situation in a brisk but not yet low inventory market. Because of covid and other factors, the buyers decided not to move, and my SO then acted as seller's agent two years later and it sold in a low-inventory market at a significantly lower price after sitting on the market for a while.

I noticed this when I used to sell on eBay. I had competitive auctions on an antique or something where the winner defaulted and when the next highest bidders (#2, #3, and #4) were contacted offering the piece for their bid , or less, suddenly there was zero interest, in a matter of days. (And some of these things continue to sell years later at even higher prices, it's not like these were fad items)

@palimpsest - I think there is a bit of luck in every real estate transaction, did the right buyer walk through the front door. But if you can get them through the door, your best chance at winning the sale is by having the nicest home in the price range.

When you went looking for a house didn't you look at all the houses you could afford and then pick the one that best fit your needs? You didn't look at 20 houses and say - the one on Chestnut Street is the best one I can afford, but maybe I should leave that for someone else and take one I don't like as much.

It’s a couple people thinking they can make the world over into their rosy utopia with a swipe of their magic wand.

It’s a couple people thinking they can make the world over into their rosy utopia with a swipe of their magic wand.

No one has said anything of the sort. This is just a red herring. We have discussed affordability of housing, wages, and income disparity which are all real problems that have been acknowledged by most people on both sides of the political spectrum. No one, who is arguing that the problem exists, has posed anything approaching a solution.

This is my biggest problem with uninformed political arguments. It is OK to recognize there is a problem without agreeing on the solution. You are not magically going to turn into a left wing radical if you admit that the middle class is shrinking fast and wages are growing slower than any other economic measure (which they are). These things are indisputable facts, it is also indisputable that if prices continue to outpace wages that more things are going to become unaffordable, whether that gets to houses before a correction is debatable, but the rest is hard to debate.

Which I guess is why you are not really debating it, you are just throwing around the ad hominems.

You didn't look at 20 houses and say - the one on Chestnut Street is the best one I can afford, but maybe I should leave that for someone else and take one I don't like as much.

I am probably not a typical buyer, but I have not ever wanted to buy the best or most I can afford. I have wanted to buy the least expensive house that still meets the criteria. Unfortunately in a HCOLA this can be problematic, and people will be excluded even at entry level, and the choices of what you can afford may be limited. We probably looked at several dozen houses over a period of several years and I don't think there was any point where I was deciding between several houses, it was a one at a time situation.

@palimpsest - When I bought my first home (1990 - San Diego) the only thing I could afford was a shoebox with rodent guests. It took me 8 months of looking - moving further and further out from center city till I found a deal and could lock in a home that I met my basic needs and didn't give me the willies. I was lucky - owner moved to Hong Kong and had a bank handle disposing of the home for what he owed on the mortgage. It was 50k under market, lowest comp in the neighborhood was $190k and I was pre-approved for $140k ($2 k under ask). The house was posted to the MLS after 8:00 pm. By 8:00 am I had gone to see the property, took a GC with me to check it out for any big issues, wrote a clean offer and was waiting at the doors of the bank when they opened. I was in escrow by 10:00 am with a 15 day escrow.

More often than not I have found that best someone can afford in a HCOLA or when they are starting out isn't over the top, it is meeting their needs.

The last home I bought was $60k under my "top budget" (1./2 the proceeds from sale of last home (ended my marriage at the same time) less planned retirement savings). Moved to PA, housing was less expensive and I found the perfect home, in the perfect neighborhood for me (2000 sf, 2 br, 2 ba with just under 1/2 acre of land / located between my 2 sister's homes who live 6 miles apart). MCM that was maintained, but not upgraded since it was built. Needed electrical, plumbing, HVAC, new flooring, paint . . . ). The rest of the budget is going toward renovations.

"The best" and "most you can afford" are relative terms and priorities change with life stages.

Hmm. I am not sure that "the most one can afford" is really relative to some people, I think it literally means they will buy something at the very top of their budget even if they could spend less. Around the time I was buying one of my places, one of my employers bought a house roughly 10x the size and 10x the price of the place I bought. He did not make 10x my income. Being stretched to the limit by home ownership is one thing if you can't avoid it but being stretched to the limit when you could avoid it, I don't get it.

I am not sure that "the most one can afford" is really relative to some people, I think it literally means they will buy something at the very top of their budget even if they could spend less.

Afford means to manage without serious detriment. I am not sure the semantics are worth arguing over really.

I believe that at times stretching your budget for a home is a very good idea, while at other times it isn't. Certainly there is some wisdom in having other money available, but if buying at the very top of your budget keeps you in a home significantly longer, it may be a great idea.

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I think what @Jennifer Hogan was getting at (and I could be wrong), that calling a home sale "luck" is a bit of an oversimplification. In the end, you are looking for a buyer to make a good offer on your home. The best way to do that is to get those people to look at your home, which means marketing the home in such a way that you have the highest probability of attracting those buyers.

Certainly, you can get lucky and have the right buyer just drive by and knock on your door, but I suspect those situations are rare. It is really about the numbers, you are trying to get your home in front of the right person and the best way to do that is to make your home appealing to the largest number of people.

Well, in the case of the house sold twice, I feel like there was some good luck/bad luck involved. Good luck for the first seller, selling a first-time-on-the-market-in-50-yr. "as is" time capsule sort of house and having a number of people interested in it all at once, and selling for over asking and then not-so-good luck for the next seller, same house, some condition issues actually fixed, and selling it for less than they paid for it. A number of people wanted it all at once at one time point, and the next time point not so much, and actually in a tighter housing market.

Well, in the case of the house sold twice, I feel like there was some good luck/bad luck involved.

Luck quite literally means a low probability event has occurred. The odds of hitting any single number in roulette are 1 in 37. If you walk up to a roulette table and put your money on 26 black and it hits, you were lucky. If you stay and put your money on 26 black thousands of times, it is a certainty.

My position doesn't exclude yours. However, it seems that you are downplaying the benefit of getting more of the right people into the house when compared to just getting lucky. I don't think that is really how it works.

Regarding affordability, my town has been squawking lately about lack of affordable housing. Totally true. They hired a consultant who keeps 'finding' that people who chose to buy less expensive housing than they "could afford" are part of the problem. Gee, thanks -- I'm to move to a bigger house (which as an empty-nester I don't want), probably not in a walking-friendly neighborhood (which mine currently is), AND risk my long term retirement plans (I am planning to live to 100 at least ;-) so a less affluent person could live in my house? Um, no.

bry911, I love what you said here: It is OK to recognize there is a problem without agreeing on the solution.

@Jennifer Hogan Please teach me some real estate tricks:

* How were you able to find a general contractor who would be willing to act as a consultant on a home purchase? Most general contractors are running construction companies and would see that as out of scope. Home inspectors sometimes have GC experience but I am interested in how you search for and screen such people. It was a great move to bring that person with you.

* How were you able to find the responsible person at the bank so quickly, in order to move on the offer like that? Is that person's name and location in the MLS listing?

Whenever I have called banks on any bankruptcy situation - which is different than your situation - they have always acted coy like they do not want to give you a price, and they always seem very unmotivated to sell. After the 2008 financial crisis, it feels like banks were all underwater and simply hid their assets and relied on government support to get them through.

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - my best friend's husband was the GC - met me at my house at 6:00 am. He also came to my house at 10:00 at night to fix the hole in the ceiling when my husband fell through the ceiling from the attic and we had house guests showing up the next morning. Sadly, both Toni, my best friend and her husband, Richard have passed away, so I no longer have my pocket GC.

As far as the bank - I had my realtor's license at the time and the information was on the listing. The owner wasn't in default, but wasn't planning on making any future payments. He gave the bank power of attorney to get the sale done and get the money they were owed. I didn't know that he had moved to Hong Kong until after I moved in and met the neighbors. He was some type of electrical engineer and according to the neighbors he was there one week and a week later the house was empty and he was gone.

@Jennifer Hogan Your situation with the GC was something rare and very valuable. It is hard to find a good GC who will talk to you like an impartial consultant.

How do we identify situations like this on an MLS listing? Is there something in a footnote about the bank's ownership, or is this a code on some field in the listing?

@westes Zone 9b California SF Bay - I don't know if there is a way to know a really good deal without studying the market and really knowing the inventory. I wasn't exaggerating when I said I searched for 8 months, and I wasn't looking every Saturday, I was looking at every listing that was within 20k of my top price and wasn't in the worst neighborhoods (gang territory) and I was going through the listings every night before I went to bed and going out early in the morning to look at the houses before work. It was my second job. I knew the market like the back of my hand.

Back then the real buys were often when someone died and their kids lived somewhere else and listed the house without knowing how much houses sold for in San Diego. As awful as it sounds, AIDS was a really frightening back then for a lot of people and if someone in the home died from AIDS it drove the price way down. Same thing if someone was murdered in a home or some Lifetime Movie worthy tragedy occurred in the home.

Some of that is still going on, but the investment buyers are preempting sales. My neighbor's mother passed away recently and they had an investor contact them the day her death certificate was recorded. They offered to buy her home site unseen for cash, no inspection, no contingencies, but the price they offered was about 15% below market. If it wasn't such a hot market and things weren't selling above market price they may have done it. It would have saved them the 6% commissions and the headaches of staging and showings. The investment buyers are counting on people being overwhelmed and not wanting to deal with selling the home.

When I bought my home in PA I knew more than a year in advance and started window shopping. I flew in every few months and spent a week looking at everything on the market from new builds to total gut jobs. I knew exactly what I needed and exactly what it should cost all in. I had done enough reno work to know what it was going to cost for me to renovate, what work I could do myself and what I would need to hire out.

Even with the best planning no one has a crystal ball. I have had major medical expenses that ate a huge chunk of my reno budget and limited my ability to do some of the more demanding physical labor. It slowed down my reno schedule and pushed me into renovating post the exorbitant price hikes of materials and labor due to COVID.

@Jennifer Hogan When I list a home, is there any good strategy for keeping the investors far away? They just take up your time and I don't really want their offers.

There are ways, but I don't recommend it. You can ask a realtor to list the home on the MLS without the address and require all buyers/buyer agents to contact the realtor for an appointment.

Personally, I saved 3% commission (listing office commission) and used an MLS listing service when I listed my home. For a few hundred dollars they put my home on the MLS and provided all the necessary paperwork. I took my own pics, wrote my own description, fielded the calls and negotiated with the buyers/buyer agents. The company I used offered cafeteria style options. I used minimal services, but had the experience to do it on my own.

@Jennifer Hogan What is the name of the MLS service that you listed with directly? I am really confused why services like Zillow seem to make it very hard to do a FSBO. It feels like some conspiracy with agents. I am also confused on how many different listing services there are, and which ones are only available to agents.

The agency I used was Yeager Realty - https://www.yagerrealty.com/

I got a job in 1986 working for a Real Estate Attorney (specialized in Eminent Domain/Inverse Condemnation Law) that was located in the San Diego Board of Realtors building. The entire 2nd floor of the building was filled with mainframe computers and printers. My boss was incredibly progressive. He hired me because I knew how to use an IBM PC, I knew how to link to the internet and look up data on a computer via a modem (placed your phone on the modem and dial into the database).

The MLS or Multiple Listing Service was run by the Board of Realtors. Most Real Estate agencies didn't have computers or the internet. The Board of Realtors collected all of the information from the Real Estate Brokers and produced/published/delivered a book that had all of the listings, and information on all of the closed sales.

I was able to research property values by using my computer and dialing into the database and searching for sales in a zip code that met certain criteria. It could take hours to pull the information onto a floppy disk. When I left the Attorney's office I got a job with a Real Estate Broker and my job was to enter listings into the MLS and pull comps from the MLS. There was one computer for the entire office.

I also created flyers for our new listings and got them scheduled for the weekly brokers open.

The local Title Rep would come by and get the flyers, take them back to her office where she made up packages of flyers for all the houses that were going to be open for Brokers/Agents to tour on Tuesday (our brokers open day). She would drop off the flyers a few days before the tour and our office would go through them and see which agents were going to which properties so we could share the information and figure out which agents would be hosting each of the open houses.

When a client would walk through the door they didn't have a list of properties that they saw on the internet, they had called us because someone they knew had recommended that they call us or they had seen a sign on a house or had seen an ad that we had placed in the local newspaper.

A good agent had seen every listing in the local area and could draw the buyer in by rattling off 2 or 3 properties that fit their needs and describing them, setting up time to take them to see some properties and after the left you would go back to the computer and research other potential properties or have the research assistant (me) do it for you.

It was this shared information that made it possible for realtors to show people properties that their office hadn't listed. Listing agent/brokers earned a commission and the selling agent/broker earned a commission. You had to belong to the Board of Realtors to participate in the service that they managed.

This has always been a way for realtors to share their listings with other realtors. Why would they allow someone who is not a realtor to participate?

So the MLS and Realtor.com are both owned/developed by the Board of Realtors.

Other services like Zillow and Trulia scrape the data from the over 700 MLS databases that are managed by various Boards.

I miss the good ol' days of being driven around by the realtor to tour houses LOL!

@Jennifer Hogan You would think it would occur to Zillow that they could add their own proprietary listings on top of the MLS database and create a superset of that data. Apparently, they try to do that but do it in a way that is so difficult to use that no one knows it is there.