Sold Real Estate Quotes

Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.

But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all.

Everything in US history is about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market. US

There will come a day when the properties my partner and I own will be sold. But until that day, the cash flow generated from them, and their appreciation in value, ensures that we have the ability to do the things we love today, and in the future.

Into the 1960s and even the ’70s, players held offseason jobs not to fill the time but to feed their families. Yogi Berra worked at a Sears, Roebuck. Lou Brock became a florist. Players sold real estate and insurance, worked in mines and on ranches.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

Our reservation is not real estate, luck fades when sold. Attraction has no staying power, no weight, no heart.

Two years later, when Lara sold out her real estate holdings, she had a certified cheque for three million dollars. She was twenty-one years old.

The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.

In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold.

For example, “1031” is jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. Real estate is one investment vehicle that allows such a great tax advantage.

The ARM, Adjustable Rate Mortgage, was invented in the early 1980s. Prior to that, those of us in the real estate business sold fixed-rate 7 or 8 percent mortgages. What happened? I was there in the middle of that disaster of an economy when fixed-rate mortgages went as high as 17 percent and the real estate world froze. Lenders paid out 12 percent on CDs but had money loaned out at 7 percent on hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages. They were losing money, and lenders don’t like to lose money. So the Adjustable Rate Mortgage was born, in which your interest rate goes up when the prevailing market interest rates go up. The ARM was born to transfer the risk of higher interest rates to you, the consumer. In the last several years, home mortgage rates have been at a thirty-year low. It is not wise to get something that adjusts when you are at the bottom of rates! The mythsayers always seem to want to add risk to your home, the one place you should want to make sure has stability. Balloon mortgages are even worse. Balloons pop, and it is always strange to me that the popping sound is so startling. Why don’t we expect it? It is in the very nature of balloons to pop. Wise financial people always move away from risk, and the balloon mortgage creates risk nightmares.

If you've thought that investment advisors were hired to invest, you may be bewildered by this technique. After buying a farm, would a rational owner next order his real estate agent to start selling off pieces of it whenever a neighboring property was sold at a lower price? Or would you sell your house to whatever bidder was available at 9:31 on some morning merely because at 9:30 a similar house sold for less than it would have brought on the previous day? p213

Most of the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods in New York City, especially areas like East New York, where many of the characters in Eric Garner’s story grew up, had been artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams. One of the most infamous had involved a company called the Eastern Service Corporation, which in the sixties ran a huge predatory lending operation all over the city, but particularly in Brooklyn. Scam artists like ESC would first clear white residents out of certain neighborhoods with scare campaigns. They’d slip leaflets through mail slots warning of an incoming black plague, with messages like, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!” Investors would then come in and buy their houses at depressed rates. Once this “blockbusting” technique cleared the properties, a company like ESC would bring in a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done. The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000. The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation. Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair. This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

When I started in real estate, despite high ambition, I was constrained by the same 24 hours as everyone else. My early success came from a grueling schedule, long hours, and the high price of near burn-out. In self-defense, I devised a system that featured direct marketing in place of traditional prospecting plus a highly effective team, with all the non-rainmaker tasks delegated to them. This took me to the top of the profession, twice #1 in RE/MAX worldwide in commissions earned, and 15 years as one of the top agents—working less hours than most. While an active agent, I consistently sold over 500 homes a year, even while starting and developing a second business, training and coaching more millionaire agents than any other coach. Without the inspiration of Dan Kennedy’s direct marketing methods and his extraordinary, extreme time-management philosophy, these achievements simply would not have been possible. LEVERAGING yourself, by media in place of manual labor, and with other people is very intimidating to most real estate agents and to most small businesspeople. It frankly is not easy to get right, but it is the quantum leap that uniquely and simultaneously lifts income and supports a great lifestyle. —CRAIG PROCTOR, CRAIGPROCTOR.COM

Especially in the world’s biggest cities, the explosion of housing prices has been staggering. In New York, for example, the average rent on an apartment in the 1960s was $200 per month, and a square foot of residential real estate cost $25 to buy. By the 2010s, average rent had grown to $3,500 and a square foot sold at $1,070.

Friend! There’s a subtle feature of speculative behaviour which reflects the public attitude to money itself. When money is in its right place, fulfilling its proper function, men’s minds are fixed upon the goods and services which money can help them to exchange. In such an economic environment the producers of real wealth are seen to earn a fitting reward for their labours and expertise, and in fact productive and community endeavour are portrayed universally as almost the sole means whereby the individual can get himself a goodly share of the world’s riches. Let there just be a change in the emphasis however. Raise the interest rates. Exacerbate the debt structure. Turn money into a commodity which can be bought and sold at a profit. Then you create a breed of men who live by their dexterity at the exchanges. When these men are seen to prosper more considerably than the producers of goods and services, there is a desire amongst the ordinary plodding citizenry to command a share of the action, and to participate in what are seen as easily made profits. Many a fond illusion was wiped out in the collapse of Wall Street share values during the crash of 1929. Whole volumes have been written about its causes and repercussions, and about the sinister shift in real estate ownership which took place during the spate of liquidations and forced sales which followed. But we shall content ourselves meanwhile with the comment that it was just one of a chain of events that were set in motion way back in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Bank was formed to lend money to the Government.

In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold.

28 Cherry Street is currently listed at $145,000, and recent comparable sales show that the similar homes have sold for between $140,000 and $170,000. 28 Cherry Street, however, needs about $25,000 worth of work to be in nice condition. Therefore, if you pay $145,000 for it and put in $25,000 - you'll be at $170,000 and that doesn't count all the closing costs, holding costs, selling costs, unforeseen overages, or other fees that you'll have to pay. You will be underwater (owe more than it's worth) on this property no matter how much work you do to it. However, if similar homes were valued at $225,000, you would find that you had, indeed, made your profit when you bought.

There was a dress we always kept in the family---a little girl's dress that once belonged to my great-grandmother. Ashley." Millie hesitated, as though to emphasize the name. "Ashley was just a child when she was sold, and her mother sewed the dress and embroidered a rose like that one on it." "Kind of reminds me of the color of that huge rosebush at Eliza's old estate in Charleston," Sullivan said, and Peter agreed. "I mean, I know it's comparing a real bush to an embroidered one... but isn't it strange. Eliza would have a bush with that color rose in her yards both here and in Charleston, and a collection of needlework displays with it in her attic?" Alice shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Roses are very popular flowers and were especially popular during that time period. It certainly could mean something, but I'm more interested in the sequence of the flowers this person chose to embroider and the connection Millie mentioned to that dress." Alice leaned closer. "Millie, are you sure the stitching is the same?" As a renowned seamstress, Millie's eye could be trusted. Millie nodded emphatically. "I have no doubt about it," she said. "The gentle curve of the petals. Shows remarkable craftsmanship. I remember admiring it when I was a little girl myself. It's one of the first memories I have of falling in love with textiles.

There are three key financial statements that are made up of 5 main elements. These elements include: 1. Assets: Assets are items of value that are owned by the company. Items that can be listed under assets include cash, equipment, real estate, etc. 2. Liabilities: These are items that decrease the net worth of the business. In other words, liabilities are what the company owes other companies, individuals, or investors. Liabilities include items such as accounts payable, long term and short term loans, etc. 3. Equities: These refer to cash or cash equivalents that are used to represent the ownership of the company. The term equity, as used in accounting, determines the value of the company and its ownership. 4. Revenues: Revenue is one component of financial statements that mainly appears on the income sheet and the cash flow statement. Revenue represents all the money that is earned by a business over a given trading period. The revenue of a business can vary from one accounting period to another. The revenue of a business determines the net income of business after expenses have subtracted. 5. Expenses: The expenses of a business are usually used in preparing the income sheet and the cash flow statement. Expenses represent the ways a company uses its funds. Among the expenses include direct expenses such as the cost of goods sold and indirect expenses such as rent and taxes.

Outreach to a For Sale by Owner (FSBO)/expired listing Hi it’s (insert name) calling from (insert agency) You may not know me, but I have sold a lot of properties in your area and I have noticed you were looking to sell (insert property address) Is this property still available?

Non-Round Numbers Are Better at Anchoring Choosing a round number will send the message—especially to experienced negotiators—that you have no specific rationale for that price. And, if you have no rationale for a price, it’s reasonable to assume that you aren’t committed to that price. For example, if a house is listed at $250,000, and you offer $200,000, a smart seller will realize that it’s unlikely that $200,000 number has any specific meaning to you, and that you’re likely just fishing to see if the seller will budge on their price. On the other hand, if you were to offer, $204,200 on that same house, the seller will assume there was thought put into that offer, and will likely believe that the number has some specific meaning. You could reinforce this belief by communicating additional information to the seller when making the offer. For example, before offering $204,200, you might say to the seller: Investor: “I’m glad I met you today… this is actually perfect timing. I just left a closing this morning where I sold a previous property, and I have some cash available to make another purchase.” You haven’t said that the amount of cash you have available is $204,200, but given that your offer is so specific, the seller will likely assume a connection. The seller is now anchored to your $204,200 number, subconsciously thinking that this number is important to your side of the negotiation, perhaps even a requirement for you. Later in the negotiation, you can reinforce this anchor by saying something to the effect of: Investor: “I only have a specific amount of cash available to invest right now. I may be able to increase my offer a little bit, but not much.” Without saying it, you have reinforced the belief that $204,200 is the specific amount you have available to purchase the property, though you’re willing to reluctantly try to find a few more nickels under the sofa cushion.

Mrs. B’s story is well-known but worth telling again. She came to the United States 77 years ago, unable to speak English and devoid of formal schooling. In 1937, she founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart with $500. Last year the store had sales of $200 million, a larger amount by far than that recorded by any other home furnishings store in the United States. Our part in all of this began ten years ago when Mrs. B sold control of the business to Berkshire Hathaway, a deal we completed without obtaining audited financial statements, checking real estate records, or getting any warranties. In short, her word was good enough for us. Naturally, I was delighted to attend Mrs. B’s birthday party. After all, she’s promised to attend my 100th.

In late 2014, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson sold his company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Notch published a depressive justification for his desire to recede from public life thanks to the impossibility of satisfying the onslaught of demands from his customers and fans—another thing that can turn on you, it turns out. Then he bought a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion, along with all the furnishings, accessories, art, even the cases of champagne and tequila, even the ultraluxury vehicles the real estate speculator who built the place had installed within its sprawling garage for staging. Notch, the man who made a blank canvas world in which you could make anything, used the spoils to buy a prepackaged, off-the-shelf billionaire’s life. As for his fans, undeterred, they dutifully reconstructed a version of the $70 million mansion in Minecraft.16 It’s an addict’s logic: only one more hand, only one more hit, then I’ll be satisfied. Then I can stop. But, of course, that’s not how addiction works. With every repetition, the effect of a compulsion reduces, requiring even more stimulation to produce formerly intoxicating results. Such

When Pestonjee died in November 1962 his son Minoo took over the management. And the business gradually wound up for good. Unlike Pestonjee, who had started his life with nothing, Minoo was born in the lap of luxury – the type who can turn into a spoiled brat. Pestonjee knew his son well and left the management of only the Patna dairy to him. The management of Anand dairy went to Pestonjee’s son-in-law, Lt Col. Kothawala. One day Minoo came to me and said: ‘If you want to ruin anything, ruin the Anand dairy. Don’t touch the Patna dairy because that one is mine.’ The statement revealed the kind of man he was. Periodically, Minoo would discuss the sale of the Anand dairy with me. One day he told me that he had spoken to the board and this time he was absolutely serious about selling the dairy. I spoke to our board members, who agreed that we should buy it, and a price was decided. Then Minoo backed out. He came a second time, again offering to sell. Once more I got the board’s approval to buy the dairy and again he backed out. When Minoo came to me for the third time wanting to sell the dairy, I ordered him to get out of my room. I told him that if he was serious he should bring his entire board to Anand to meet and talk with our board. He brought his entire board – a very distinguished board – and we discussed the sale and the deal was clinched at Rs 17 lakh. The next day, Minoo sold the same dairy to a Marwari gentleman for Rs 17 lakh and, some said, took another Rs 17 lakh under the table for himself. The board of directors of Polson were aghast and exceedingly embarrassed. They came to see me and apologised profusely, saying that they never expected he would do something like this. The legitimate amount of Rs 17 lakh went to Polson Ltd, while it is said that the under-the-table amount went into the Devakaran Nangi Trust which later went broke. By some mysterious divine justice, Minoo lost his entire Rs 17 lakh. This was the end of Pestonjee’s legendary Polson dairy. When Minoo sold the dairy to the Marwari gentleman (who bought it only for its real estate value), the first thing the Marwari did was to order the bust of Pestonjee, which graced the entrance, to be removed and thrown out. Variava called up Kothawala to inform him of this and he immediately telephoned me to say: ‘Dr Kurien, can you please save my father-in-law’s bust from being disgraced?’ I promised him that I would and it has since then been given pride of place in NDDB’s library, a reminder to all of the role that Pestonjee Edulji played in the history of Indian dairying.

problematical real estate sold before some

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties.

The Probate Home Sale When an offer to purchase a home being sold through probate in New Jersey has been accepted, a notice will be mailed to heirs of the estate. This notice is the Notice of Proposed Action. The Notice of Proposed Action enables estate heirs to object to the sale of the home. Should an estate heir - or, should estate heirs - object to the sale of the home, a court date will be set. Any offer to purchase a home being sold through probate must be equal to - or greater than - 90% of the appraisal value of the home. The appraisal value of the home is provided to the court by a licensed real estate appraiser who has been designated by the court to conduct such an appraisal. Whats next? The attorney for the estate schedules a confirmation hearing. This hearing takes place within 45 days of the filing date. Throughout the process, the listing agent of the home being sold through probate continues to show the home to prospective buyers. One directive the listing agent has in continuing to show the home to buyers is to determine whether an over-bidder emerges. An over-bidder is a buyer who submits their offer to purchase the home at a sale price which is greater than offers which have been received, to date. Thus, raising the sale price of the home. Increasing proceeds for the estate. In the event that there is an offer submitted by an over-bidder, the over-bidder attends a confirmation hearing. At the confirmation hearing, the over-bidder is required to present a certified check which is equal to or greater than 10% of the proposed sale price.

For example, let’s say you bought a rental house five years ago for $300,000 and rented it for three years. When your tenant moved out, you and your spouse moved in and stayed there for two years. You just sold the house for $400,000, a $100,000 capital gain. You can exclude two-fifths of that gain ($40,000) from taxes.

The semi-liquid status of interval funds also works as a protection for shareholders. When investors hear bad news about a stock, they panic and a massive sell-off follows, which sends the share price down to dirt cheap levels. That can’t happen with interval fund shares because they can’t be sold at will.

MBS can be harder to buy and sell than other types of bonds, as they’re bought mainly by institutional investors. Many MBS are issued and sold in large denominations (like $25,000 minimums), but some are issued at $1,000 (like most other types of bonds). You can trade MBS through specialty bond brokers, which you can find at most major brokerages (like Charles Schwab or Merrill Edge). The easiest way to invest in MBS is through specialty mutual funds or ETFs. Though technically MBS are not fixed-income investments (because the payments can vary monthly), they’re usually included in that category (because they’re bonds).

One common complaint among real estate investors is the lack of liquidity, especially with direct or unlisted property investments. Blockchain tokens bring liquidity to real estate investments, because they can be more easily traded on secondary markets, rather than having to wait for a building to be sold to cash out.

At least that was Ivar’s reputation. The truth was more complicated. A large portion of the dividends recently paid by Swedish Match and Kreuger & Toll came from cash raised by International Match in America. In other words, the dividends paid to old investors came from proceeds raised from new ones. That pyramid approach, which had elements of Ponzi’s scheme, couldn’t last forever, and Ivar knew it. Nevertheless, Ivar really was making money, a lot of it, from match operations throughout the world. Unlike Charles Ponzi’s postal reply coupon scam, Ivar’s profits were real. Swedish Match made and sold billions of boxes of matches every year. Kreuger & Toll built landmark buildings throughout Europe. Ivar had real investments in real businesses, ranging from matches to real estate to film. No one could fake that.

OVER THE next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers.

Agents need to be many things all at once. At times you will wear the hats of legal counsel, therapist, financial advisor, friend, organizer, market expert, and salesperson.

After five years, I did the math around what I made from the sale of my first book, More than Cashflow: The Real Risks and Rewards of Profitable Real Estate Investing. At the time, I earned $68,000 from the sale of books through Amazon, Kindle, bookstores, and libraries (not including the more than 1,000 books sold in bulk deals). On retail sales alone, if I had a traditional publishing deal, I would have made $8,892—more than 80 percent less.

One such way is Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. As long as you keep trading up in value, you won’t be taxed on the gains until you liquidate. Those who don’t take advantage of these savings are missing a chance to build their asset column.

Agent Life: When you no longer hold something people want, you go from white hot to stone cold in the blink of an eye!

Ray Kroc, of McDonald's fame, sold hamburger franchises, not because he loved hamburgers, but because he wanted the real estate ; under the franchise for free.

Of course, Mimi would deny it. She was, or pretended to be, unaware of the benefit the chaos of the Popkin clan afforded her. Instead, she complained about how her house was always overfull, and given the size of her house, this was no small feat. Richard referred to the place as the Clue House, because it boasted a study, a library, and a billiard room. There was also a solarium, a media room, a dedicated closet for Neil’s fly-fishing equipment, and a carriage house out back, which Mimi was currently using as a studio, now that she was an artist. Quilts were her current thing. Before she started quilting, she’d been a real estate agent. Prior to that she owned a children’s furniture store. She’d also sold organic cosmetics and ran a small food cooperative.

McDonald’s fame, sold hamburger franchises, not because he loved hamburgers, but because he wanted the real estate under the franchise for free.

Bernie Sanders’ public career as a socialist, most notably his presidential runs, have catapulted him from the middle class to “one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed,” as Politico put it in a recent profile, “The Secret of Bernie’s Millions.” Bernie cashed in on his wife’s severance package after she ran Burlington College into the ground. He also did well with real estate appreciation and with the proceeds of a bestselling book, which he boasts “sold all over the world, and we made money.” Bernie and his wife now own three homes, including a lakefront summer pad.

The real profit is made when real estate is bought, not when it’s sold. You need to have a specific value creation strategy for each property, whether that value will be found in operating the real estate in an optimal fashion or whether renovation and/or repositioning can lead to a higher value.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

Although the federal government had been trying to persuade middle-class families to buy single-family homes for more than fourteen years, the campaign had achieved little by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. Homeownership remained prohibitively expensive for working- and middle-class families: bank mortgages typically required 50 percent down, interest-only payments, and repayment in full after five to seven years, at which point the borrower would have to refinance or find another bank to issue a new mortgage with similar terms. Few urban working- and middle-class families had the financial capacity to do what was being asked. The Depression made the housing crisis even worse. Many property-owning families with mortgages couldn't make their payments and were subject to foreclosure. With most others unable to afford homes at all, the construction industry was stalled. The New Deal designed one program to support existing homeowners who couldn't make payments, and another to make first-time homeownership possible for the middle class. In 1933, to rescue households that were about to default, the administration created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). It purchased existing mortgages that were subject to imminent foreclosure and then issued new mortgages with repayment schedules of up to fifteen years (later extended to twenty-five years). In addition, HOLC mortgages were amortized, meaning that each month's payment included some principal as well as interest, so when the loan was paid off, the borrower would own the home. Thus, for the first time, working- and middle-class homeowners could gradually gain equity while their properties were still mortgaged. If a family with an amortized mortgage sold its home, the equity (including any appreciation) would be the family's to keep. HOLC mortgages had low interest rates, but the borrowers still were obligated to make regular payments. The HOLC, therefore, had to exercise prudence about. its borrowers' abilities to avoid default. to assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know something about the condition of the house and of surrounding houses in the neighborhood to see whether the property would likely maintain its value. The HOLC hired local real estate agents to make the appraisals on which refinancing decisions could be based. With these agents required by their national ethics code to maintain segregation, it's not surprising that in gauging risk HOLK considered the racial composition of neighborhoods. The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. For example, in St. Louis, the white middle-class suburb of Ladue was colored green because, according to an HOLC appraiser in 1940, it had 'not a single foreigner or negro.' The similarly middle-class suburban area of Lincoln Terrace was colored red because it had 'little or no value today . . . due to the colored element now controlling the district.' Although HOLC did not always decline to rescue homeowners in neighborhoods colored red on its maps (i.e., redlined neighborhoods), the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks.

When I sold the house years later, it was the best return on investment I ever experienced.

Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. Real estate is one investment vehicle that has a great tax advantage. As long as you keep trading up in value, you will not be taxed on the gains until you liquidate.

Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate.

Unfortunately, the Bull that gilded Renaissance New York did little for most Americans. Eighties Wall Street was about institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, and, most of all, the debt that made it all possible. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, financial euphoria always starts with new ways to borrow money; this time it was triggered by the Savings & Loan crisis. Volcker’s rocketing interest rates had forced S&Ls to offer double digits to new depositors while only getting back single digits on the old thirty-year mortgages on their books. S&Ls were going under, and getting a mortgage was nearly impossible, so in March 1980, with the banking system and the housing market on the brink, Carter had signed a law to allow them to issue credit cards, invest in commercial real estate, and offer checking accounts in order to stay in business. Reagan then took it a step further with a change that encouraged S&Ls to sell their mortgages in search of higher returns, freeing up a $1 trillion that needed to be invested in something. Which takes us back to Salomon Brothers, where in 1978 one Lew Ranieri had repackaged an old investment product the government had clamped down on during the Depression: A group of home mortgages all backed by government insurance would be bundled together, then sliced into bonds, thus converting the debt some people owed on their homes into an asset for others. Ranieri had been a bit ahead of the curve then—the same high interest rates that killed the S&Ls also made his bonds unattractive—but now deregulation let Salomon buy up the S&Ls’ mortgages at a deep discount, bundle them into bonds, and sell them back to the S&Ls who believed they’d diversified into the bond market when in fact they’d just bought ground meat made out of their own steaks. In June 1983, Salomon Brothers and Freddie Mac together issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation bonds (CMOs), which bundled up debt and cut it into tranches based on the amount of risk: you could choose between ground chuck and ground sirloin. It would be years before technology would allow doing this on a huge scale, but the immediate impact was that all kinds of debt, not just mortgages, were bundled, cut into bonds, and sold: credit card debt, car loans, you name it. Between 1983 and 1988, some $60 billion of CMOs were sold; GM’s financing arm became more profitable than its cars. America began to make debt instead of things. The

1031: Jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. CORPORATION: Merely a legal document that creates a legal body without a soul. It’s not a big building or a factory or a group of people. Using it, the wealth of the rich is protected. FINANCIAL IQ: Financial intelligence that comes as a result of financial education. People with high financial IQ learn to use other people’s money to become rich. FINANCIAL LITERACY: The ability to read and understand financial statements, which allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of any business.

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. Thus many white neighborhoods began declining before colored residents even arrived, Hirsch noted. There emerged a perfect storm of nervous owners, falling prices, vacancies unfillable with white tenants or buyers, and a market of colored buyers who may not have been able to afford the neighborhood at first but now could with prices within their reach. The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of it.

1031: Jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.

1031” is jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. Real estate is one investment vehicle that has a great tax advantage. As long as you keep trading up in value, you will not be taxed on the gains until you liquidate. People who don’t take advantage of these legal tax savings are missing a great opportunity to build their asset columns.

At the height of this construction frenzy, a couple of opportunistic real estate developers hang a sign near the top of the hills surrounding the valley to advertise their new housing development. It has fifty-foot-high white letters that spell out HOLLYWOODLAND. It is meant to stay there only for one year, or until all the units are sold, whichever happens first, but it never comes down. Shortened to HOLLYWOOD in 1949, it becomes a hovering symbol of the industry of dreams, and to this day watches over Tinseltown like the giant statue of Jesus over Rio de Janeiro. With

California’s McEvoy Ranch makes high-quality real extra-virgin olive oil, available by mail order and at gourmet stores. McEvoy’s acclaimed oil maker, Deborah Rodgers, also recommends Australia’s Boulder Bend, sold under its Cobram Estate label in the United States. Cobram is Australia’s most-awarded olive oil, winning more than 150 medals in competitions. Their top-shelf ultrapremium collection is guaranteed milled within four hours of harvest and is sold online, as is Spain’s vaunted Oro Bailen.