In this Wall Street Journal article from August 13th, 2021, they go through several things the latest census data (2010-2020) shows. The article goes for the clickbait issue of "White Population declining" to get people to actually read the article. That's mainstream writing these days, I get it, you have to grab people's attention to get people to check out the article.
Here's the data point I found most interesting in this article:
52% of U.S. counties shrank in population between 2010 and 2020.
The financial world is in a kind of Never Never Land right now, with the Covid shutdowns and then buoyed up by trillions of new money the Federal Reserve has created in 2020. Things are really out of whack, and now inflation is growing. There's a ton of confusing, and often contradicting data. So here's one solid point. 52% of counties, primarily rural and small town areas, are losing people, and the big metro areas, are gaining people, generally speaking. That was before 2020, but it's a major, longer trend. Real estate may be really cheap in small towns, but there's a reason for that, the majority of rural and small town areas are shrinking in population.
If you're in real estate, and looking at areas nationwide, this is big. The major metro areas are much higher priced, but generally speaking, they are still growing. There has been a lot of talk about people migrating to smaller towns and cities, and a number of upscale people did, during 2020. But it looks like many are heading right back to areas like New York City, we are starting to see those reports now, even though the pandemic is still going, despite having vaccines available here in the U.S..
There are several other data points in the article, so check it out.
I found the Kwak Brothers video in early 2020, I think, and have watched several of them since. They are two really intelligent guys who own several rental properties, and make videos about trends and happenings.
This video from yesterday (8/17/2021) looks into the World Economic Forum's concept of The Great Reset, which sounds horrible for us normal people. Is it just rich people talking crazy ideas, or will business people, particularly property owners, be adversely affected by these ideas? Daniel Kwak talks us through three events that have happened, that could limit property owners control over their properties, over time. This one is well worth 11 minutes of your time, if you're looking at the Big Picture of all the weird things happening in our world today concerning real estate.
In this Vice article article from August 13, 2021, they dig into the "arms race" between Zillow and Opendoor to buy as many homes as possible right now. Zillow is raising $450 million to buy homes, and Opendoor is looking for a $2 billion line of credit to do the same. Both have bought thousands of homes in recent months. They are still small time in the Big Picture of real estate right now, but some of you may remember the days when Amazon.com was a goofy website selling a few books, that got laughed at in the business news. This article is a good look at the emerging "ibuyer" trend in real estate.
Homes with backyard skate/bike ramps is just one board on the Big Transition Rea l Estate Trends Pinterest page. I'm going Old School for this photo, this is Vision pro skateboarder Ken Park, back in 1989, and that's me sitting on the railing, Tony Hawk's mini ramp, Fallbrook, California, 1989. My boss Don and I were shooting footage of Ken for a video that day.
Upside down homes. Homes made out of old ships, train cars, airplanes, and even a submarine. Homes with airplane hangars, helipads, waterfalls, slides, and fire poles. Homes with backyard pump tracks, indoor climbing walls, BMX jumps, skateboard ramps, and even homes in space. Hobbit homes, homes on stilts, homes in caves, underwater homes, homes with ultimate car collection garages.
That's just some of the fun stuff on the Pinterest page. There are a ton of more traditional ideas as well, bedrooms, patio, pools, as well as motivating quotes, design ideas from global architecture, castles, street art, and vintage items. I'm adding more ideas to the BTRET Pinterest page nearly every day. Check it out at the link above.
In this 7San Diego news article, prices finally dropped a bit, from 4 records months of highs. Single family homes in San Diego dropped .6% in July, and in California overall, they dropped 1% last month. Is the market just taking a breather? Or have we topped out? One month is not enough to be a trend, but it shows a bit of slowing in the race higher. The San Diego median price is up 19.6% from a year ago. Total escrow sales in California were down 1.6%, month over month, and down 2% from a year ago.
This is the "M2" money supply chart for the last few years. Basically, this graph shows how much money is being created by the Federal Reserve (which is NOT part of the U.S. Government, we don't elect Fed leaders). There's a simple rule I learned from former Fed chariman Alan Greenspan's 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence. When a government, or in our case, central banks like The Fed, create more money, that creates inflation. More money in the system means the value of each dollar (or other currency) goes down. So prices go up. There's a lag time, usually 12-18 months, that it takes for this to happen, because the money is given to banks and major players, and then takes a while to begin circulating through the real, everyday world. How fast money moves around is called the "velocity" of money.
But the basic rule is, When they make more new money, prices start going up, 12 to 18 months later. That's inflation.
Look at the right side of that chart, that's the biggest surge in newly created money in U.S. history. That money has gone into stocks, real estate, and other investments, keeping those markets from correcting... crashing, like they would in a "normal" recession. Instead, the markets surged upward.
The Fed has done everything it can to appease Wall Street and major corporations. That bought us time in 2020. But it has also completely warped the financial markets, and driven prices of assets like stocks and real estate, to absurd levels. This can't go on forever, which is why stocks are largely flat for about three months now, and real estate prices appear to be topping out.
When the crash, which is inevitable, does come, it will be bigger and more intense, and The Fed doesn't have much it can do now. The Fed has two basic tools to affect the economy, 1) Create new money, and 2) Lower interest rates. It has done both of those, more than ever in U.S. history, in the last two years. Those things are losing their effect. So we will have another major correction, a crash in stocks and real estate and other investments, before too long. It's inevitable. And The Fed is stuck, whatever it does then, will add to the negative effects.
But all the new money will also create rising prices on most other things. So it's going to be a weird, high inflation scenario, with "assets" losing value, for a while. When things do turn South, it will have a big effect on real estate, and other investments. Things are so out of whack economically, it's hard to tell how things will ultimately play out.
So on the everyday level, the real estate market is getting back to something more close to "normal." But we have this Big Picture money supply increase that delayed the real estate correction, and prices will drop at some time. That new money bought us time to deal with the pandemic crisis. But it just delayed the real estate price correction that usually happens a while after a recession starts. And technically it was a "depression" in 2020, not a recession, but that's a whole different issue.
Behind the scenes, the underlying world economy has been shaky since 2007. This video of dragsters blowing up is a metaphor for what's about to happen. Yeah, it's that bad. I knew there was another big downturn coming, mostly because he 2020 economic downturn wasn't allowed to play out.
I saw a thing on the Pinterest blog about "neon lights" for decorating you home. I thought, OK, that could be cool, or cheesy. When I looked it up on YouTube, a bunch of videos about RGB lights came up. This is the most in depth one. What you you guys think?
The "trends" Big Transition Real Estate Trends blog is mostly about the financial trends, like where is the housing market headed, is it a good time to buy a house? But As I've been building the Big Transition Real Estate Pinterest page to compliment this blog, I started going a bit crazy, and found all kinds of weird houses. When a design trend sounds interesting, I ll check it out. Personally, I think the guy above went overboard, but a bit of RGB lighting could definitely be pretty cool. What do you think?
You'll have to sign in to see this documentary, The Man Who Souled the World, there's something in it to offend pretty much everyone. But at 1:16:51, if you look quick, or pause it, you can see a guy literally throwing money out the window of a helicopter to people in bleachers below. That guy is Steve Rocco, owner at the time, and CEO of World Industries Skateboards. The crowd the money is landing people near the skateboard vert ramp at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco. That X-Games is best known for this, which happened on that ramp about 30 minutes later.
The metaphor of "Helicopter Money" is used when some entity gives free money, (or loans at super cheap interest rates) to people or businesses. It is unearned, undeserved money. Free money.
Free money feels good to receive. I happened to be on the pier at the X-Games when Steve Rocco threw the money in the video above out of the helicopter. I walked away with $4 of that money, each dollar bill stamped with one of the World Industries characters, Flameboy or Wet Willie.
In the Big Picture these days, our entire economy has been running on "helicopter money," almost entirely, for a little over a year. The Federal Reserve, who prints the money (technically it's unconstitutional since 1913) the United States uses, has been throwing out "helicopter money" at the banking system and large corporations, to try and revive the U.S. economy after the initial Covid-19 business shutdowns in the Spring of 2020. In extreme cases, like 2020, there is good reason to do this, for a short period of time. The rise in the stock markets since, and the surging real estate prices during a recession (actually a depression), that's all due to The Fed's helicopter money.
Our economy is not actually growing organically, we're completely dependent on The Fed continuing to add new money to the banking system right now. If they stop, the economy crashes, stock markets crash, and real estate goes into a serious (and to be honest, needed) downturn.
The thing is, there's a downside to helicopter money. If The Fed keeps printing physical money, and creating digital money, the total money supply increases, which makes each dollar worth less. That's inflation, and in everyday life, that's why the prices of pretty much everything, are going up right now. This is the delayed result of The Fed increasing the money supply by about 25% in the first year after Covid-19 hit our shores, and them keeping dropping helicopter money.
So we are in for high inflation, rising prices, for at least 2-3 more years to come, in my opinion. If The Fed increases the money supply at a continuing ridiculous level, like they are now (they loaned the banking system $998 Billion, LAST NIGHT, in reverse repo operations) then we hit hyperinflation. That's when prices literally go up every week or every day, even hour by hour in the worst cases. Eventually the currency, in our case, the U.S. Dollar (Federal Reserve notes) loses all its value, and becomes worthless over 2-3 years. We don't want that to happen.
So that's where we are now. If The Fed stops adding new money, we crash back into serious recession, if they keep increasing the money supply, which is what they are doing, we get continuing high inflation, rising prices, but wages will not go up as much. Maybe it gets out of control and becomes hyperinflation.
This is why "helicopter money" matters, if it keeps happening. This continuing helicopter money by The Fed is propping up the financial markets, and the overall economy right now. To get back to a healthy economy some day, we need actual growth, which is lots of businesses creating new products and services, and those getting bought by real, everyday people, on a continuing basis, to grow the total economy. That has to happen at a level where The Fed can stop adding money, and raise interest rates to a more historically normal level. We are a long way from that scenario. This is the back drop to the current economic picture, as businesses try to work thought the latest Covid-19 surge, and get back to "business as normal."
In this CNN article (8/10/2021), Harvard economics professor Jason Furman explains that U.S. workers' compensation is actually below December the 2019 trend line, when adjusted for inflation.
This is Christian Walsh of Wire Associates. I've found his videos to be a good, solid look at Southern California real estate trends. He's not crazy and flashy, he comes across as kind of your next door neighbor type guy, and he shows actual data, and he displays 5 year trend lines to put it in perspective, and gives a solid report of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, Ventura, and now San Diego Counties.
If you're old enough to remember pre-internet days, you know SoCal real estate doesn't move in slow rolling waves, it tends to go up strong, and fall fast when it does fall. It also tends to lead national trends, so even if you're not in SoCal, this video may be worth watching. Here are the basic trends going into August 2021:
-We're getting back to a more normal set of trendlines. Last year, 2020, with the pandemic, was nuts. No one could buy real estate last Spring and early Summer, then FOMO craziness took over, fueled by massive amounts of new money from The Fed (Federal Reserve). So things appear to be calming down, and getting back to the kind of general trend lines people expect, after the 2020 insanity.
-The housing markets are still strong, generally, and prices have jumped double digits in the last year, in most cases and places here
-L.A. and Orange County single family/condo prices have dipped slightly. This is a good sign, since affordability has become a much bigger issue with the crazy 2020 surge in sales and prices.
-The eviction moratorium is still in effect here in California, as Covid surge #4 is growing across the nation. So for the next 3-4 months, there won't be a massive wave of evictions, foreclosures, or new properties coming on the market. Plain and simple, things are much closer to "normal" than they've been in 12-15 months, and we have time before mass evictions and foreclosures become the main issue to focus on.
I recommend watching this video, Christian is a straight shooter, and uses his real estate experience to analyze the current trends, wherever they may be headed.
Disclaimer: I am not a real estate agent, broker, or other professional. I'm a blogger/writer/artist with a geeky fascination with future trends and forecasting. This info if for education and entretainment purposes only. Consult real estate professionals and do the proper due diligence before making any decisions or investments.
Covid era selfie in front of the Brady Bunch house. Yeah, it's a real house, at 11222 Dilling Street, in Studio City, CA.
I'm a blogger whose self-publishing roots go back to a zine about BMX freestyle in 1985. I started blogging seriously while out of work in late 2008. I began by blogging about my BMX industry days in the 1980's, the blog took off, found an audience in that weird niche, and I've been blogging ever since. By blogging, I don't mean, "I write one blog post a month, and 12 people have read my blog in three years."
In 12 1/2 years I've tried over 25 blog ideas out, written over 2,400 posts, and attracted over 438,000 page views on niche blogs. None of my blogs have been financially profitable in and of themselves. I blog about things that interest me. To make some money with my audience, I took to promoting a weird form of Sharpie marker art I invented, and selling that with the help of my blogs and social media, in 2015.
It was in that search to find cheap ways to promote my Sharpie marker art (#sharpiescribblestyle), that I got into Pinterest. I'd heard of Pinterest, of course. My sister is a teacher, and told me she loved it, back in 2011 or so. But I knew it as a social media platform for women looking for recipes, craft projects, and DIY home improvement ideas. So, as a guy, I ignored it for years.
Then, in 2016, as I started getting steady work for my art, I wanted to keep that going. I googled "Sharpie art" to see how other artists were promoting their work. I clicked over to an image search. As I looked at photo after photo of artwork, one thing became clear, most of those top images were on Pinterest.
So I signed up to Pinterest, and took to YouTube, looking for how-to videos about Pinterest. Over the next couple of years, I found out that Pinterest is a monster form of free promotion for anything visual. Don't believe me? Do a Google image search right now for, "#sharpiescribblestyle, Steve Emig." (That's sharpie scribble style). I just did this on my laptop. The first 31 images that came up were all my artwork. Over half of the next two rows of images were my work as well. I OWN the first page of Google results, and it didn't cost my a dime. I did it with blogs and Pinterest. For free. It just took a bit of time on a regular basis, and not that much time.
If you are a real estate agent, broker, or in the home design or decorating field, would you like to OWN the the whole first page of Google search results? Not just the top spot, but most or all of the entire first page or both text and image results? Yeah? I thought you would. Pinterest, as it turns out, is a monster, when used right, to help build your web presence, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and to promote real estate in particular. In coming posts on this blog I will go into more details of how to use Pinterest effectively, particularly for real estate and home businesses.
For now, here are some current stats on Pinterest, to get you looking at it for its real estate possibilities.
-Pinterest has 478 million active monthly viewers. Facebook has about 2.8 billion, for comparison. Yes, Facebook is much bigger, and has many uses in communication and promotion. But Pinterest is much bigger than most people think it is.
-Pinterest users are 60% female. That's actually down, percentage wise, for about 80%, 3 or 4 years ago. Pinterest has grown tremendously in users over the last 2-3 years, and got a big boost in 2020, like all social media. But it still skews towards women, who use it for "aspirational and motivational" purposes.
-The average user age on Pinterest is 40. That, combined with the large number of monthly users, is another reason it's a great platform for real estate businesses.
-34% of Pinterest users have an income between $50,000 and $74,999. That's individual income of the user, not household income. So by promoting on Pinterest, you're targeting an audience that's 40 years old and fairly affluent, right form the start.
-Home decor and design ideas is the number one reason people use Pinterest.
All of these stats are available with a quick Google search (August 2021). There are many more. But I think I've got your attention. While Pinterest worked well to promote my artwork, my Sharpie art, by it's nature, isn't very profitable. My drawings just take to long to draw. I was looking for new areas to blog about, and to use Pinterest because I just like Pinterest in general.
When I thought about real estate, I was amazed.
Hardly anyone in the real estate world uses Pinterest, and only a handful of people really use it well. It's a huge Social media platform that almost seems to have been designed for real estate professionals, and very few of them use it. It's wide open. So I decided to write a "How-to use Pinterest for real estate" book. In the process of that, another idea came to me. Why not blog about real estate trends, something I've had and interest in for years, and build a really cool Pinterest page to promote the blog? So that's what I'm doing. I decided to have some fun with my Pinterest page. Here it is.
Tip #1 for starting a Pinterest page to promote your real estate business. Start a personal Pinterest page, and learn to build boards on subject that you find interesting. Start with a personal page, and build it a while, learn the platform. You can turn a personal page into a business page at any time, with a few clicks.
Stay tuned for more tips that I've learned about using Pinterest, and other real estate related topics.
Disclaimer: This blog is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a real estate agent, broker, financial planner, designer, or any other kind of traditional real estate professional. I'm a blogger and artist, with an interest in real estate, financial, and social trends.
In this CNBC article, (8/6/2021), there's a nation wide chart showing how much U.S renters are behind on rent after 17 months into the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. According to this article, 11 million people are behind on rent in the U.S.. The statewide averages of back rent owed range from $2,700 in Alabama to $5,300 in California. The nationwide average is $3,700 in back rent owed, though it varies widely state to state and county by county. The article also mentions that the CDC has extended the eviction ban until October 3rd, 2021.
Here's Alvin Toffler being interviewed in 1987, on the Gregory Mantell Show, promoting his last book, Revolutionary Wealth. He talks about The Third Wave idea in this interview, and about Revolutionary Wealth, which went deeper into the themes he first wrote about in 1980.
The Big Transition is my concept, that piggybacks on the thinking of the late futurist, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi. In the 1960's, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, got seriously thinking about where society was headed in the future. It was the Space Age, after the Russians launched sputnik, the first satellite. Both the U.S. and Russia were racing to put satellites, and people, into space, and on the moon. It was also the decade of the Civil Rights movement, the rise of drug culture and the Hippies, when rock and roll was blowing up, and when the birth control gave women options for their love life. It was when theVietnam War started. A lot was changing.
In 1970, Alvin published the book Future Shock, with a lot of his and Heidi's initial thinking on how society was changing. After a decade of more research, he published The Third Wave in 1980. They thought it made sense to break down human civilization into three big waves, to help understand where they saw society was headed at the time.
The First Wave was the transition from indigenous, tribal, usually nomadic people, what we call hunter/gatherers, into the Agricultural Age. People began to plant crops, stay in one place, and villages and small towns began to develop. That started about 10,000 years ago, somewhere around Turkey, and it took a couple of thousand years for agriculture to circle the globe.
The Second Wave was the transition from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age. People left the farms and moved into cities to work in factories. New, mechanical technology made machines, and a whole new way of life, possible. Towns grew into cities, and some grew into huge cities. The idea of "jobs" was invented. This started about 350 years ago, and took maybe 200 years to travel around the world and become the dominant way of life for most people.
The Third Wave was what the Tofflers saw beginning, a shift from the Industrial-based society into an Information-based society. When Alvin Toffler published that book, most people had two landline phones, sharing the same phone line, and the whole family shared it. TV had 4 networks, and maybe 15 of those new cable channels. People were debating whether VHS or Betamax were the better VCR's. Personal computers were toys for weird, geeky people that other people made fun of, and only a few existed. Video games, like Pong were a new thing. Kids played outside until the street lights came on in the afternoons and evenings. But a bunch of new technologies were heading towards everyday life, and the Tofflers saw big changes in life and work coming. That wave of coming change was The Third Wave.
The key thing to take from each of these waves, from one form of society to another, is that, when these major societal changes happen, everyday life changes dramatically, for everyone. This wave of change the Tofflers saw coming in 1980 would happen faster than these changes ever had before. We're humans, we have a hard time with change.
Right about the time The Third Wave was published, something crazy started happening across the U.S., the factories where most people worked, and had good paying jobs, began to close down. Looking back, most people blame outsourcing for this. A lot of jobs were lost because businesses moved to areas with cheaper labor. At first some moved to other states, like Mississippi and Alabama. Then jobs moved to Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, and eventually to China. But just as many jobs were lost to new technology, like industrial robots, computers, and machines that could do what humans had done on assembly lines a few years before. Things we don't think about, like self serve gas pumps, ATM machines, and later on tax preparation software, took many jobs as well.
The Third Wave had a big impact with intellectuals, big business people, and political people. As new technologies emerged, like the Apple Macintosh personal computer, cell phones, and as factories shut down more and more across the U.S., the Toffler's ideas made sense. People said that Alvin Toffler's Third Wave spoke of the collapse of factories in the U.S. and other industrial countries. "The Industrial Age was over, and the Information Age had begun." Then those intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians moved on to other books, other ideas, other theories, and the Tofflers' Third Wave faded into the rear view mirror of history.
I found the Tofflers' work in the 1990's, being a geek into futurist thinking. Their ideas blended with 200-250 other books I read in the 1990's, on a variety of subjects. I found Revolutionary Wealth in about 2009 or 2010, as well as Previews and Premises, a shorter book on The Third Wave ideas, from 1983. I watched everything I could find, speeches and interviews, with Alvin Toffler, to better understand his and Heidi's thinking.
As I watched our world come out of the The Great Recession in 2009-2010, and limp into a slow, weak, pathetic, Fed-aided recovery, I began to think that The Third Wave was still playing out. The factories shutting down in the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, was only the part of it. One industry after another was being Disrupted (with a big capital "D"), as some new technology made a new business model possible. That was still happening, in fact, it was happening to more and more industries, at an even more rapid pace.
The example most of us (Millennials or older) remember is Napster and the music industry. In mid 1999, Shawn Fanning uploaded Napster, a file sharing program for songs and other audio files, onto the internet. With that one click of the mouse, by someone we'd never heard of, the music industry of that time was over. It took many years for new business models to be tried, and the winners to emerge. It took lots of chaos and stupid lawsuits for the music industry to get reinvented. But now we have a totally different series of music distribution models. My thought with the Big Transition is that a "Napster moment," that Big "D" Disruption event, will happen in EVERY single business, in EVERY single industry, and in EVERY single human institution. That has to happen before we can move fully into a functional Information Age.
This is the Toffler's Third Wave idea, continuing to play out over time. Telecommunications got Disrupted in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Personal computers disrupted office work and some media in the 1980's, with the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft software. The internet Disrupted newspapers, magazines, and later TV, in the early 2000's. Movies were Disrupted by digital and streaming in the 2000's and 2010's. What we have called the" Retail Apocalypse" for four years, the closing of tens of thousands of retails stores, is Disruption hitting the retail industry.
Amazon didn't kill chain stores. Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team saw that new technology (in 1994) was going to make a new business model possible, and they began to build that new business model and new infrastructure to distribute goods. So did eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and millions of small online retailers. It was going to happen anyway. The major retailers didn't see the internet and online shopping as a threat, for the most part. Sears, J.C. Penney's, and dozens of brick and mortar retailers blew it. Walmart and Target got off to slow starts, but then saw the writing on the wall. They tried several ideas, and found the "buy online pick up at your local store model" was viable for their companies. They're still going strong. Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney's and many smaller Industrial Age retailers are bankrupt or gone altogether.
What happened to music in the 2000's, and retail in the 2010's will happen to every other industry. Banking, Real Estate. Car sales. Lawnmowers. Health care. All these new technologies coming up, and going into practical operation, will change everything, eventually. I've been warning of the "College Apocalypse" for a couple of years. Around 100 small colleges have gone out of business or merged with larger ones. I think the pandemic has started the crisis period for major schools. Time will tell.
So The Big Transition, my concept piggybacking on the Tofflers' Third Wave idea, is that we are not IN the Information Age, we are in a long, sticky, chaotic transition period in between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Changes are happening more often, in more businesses, industries, and institutions. The Toffler's put the start of this change in 1956, the first year "white collar" office workers first outnumbered "blue collar' factory workers in the U.S.. I won't argue. But I don't see this transition period ending until at least 2040 or so. So The Big Transition is a period of business, personal, and institutional change from about 1956 to about 2040. It started really slow, and the rate of change is increasing as we go along.
Disruption happens, then chaos, then new models are tried out, then business fights between the old and new, and eventually the new model emerges and is widely accepted, in industry after industry. That takes time, not so much to initiate new tech, but for actual humans to get used to it, adopt it, and then for society to readjust to the changes that technology made possible.
I believe the 2020's will be one of the biggest decades of change, and therefore crazy and chaotic on pretty much every level. The rate of change has been increasing since 1956 or so. Now it's massive and rapid change everywhere we look. When you add major "black swan events" like the Covid pandemic, the fast change gets suddenly accelerated to light speed. Let's face it, after 2020, most of us are just hanging on. My thoughts are, 2020 was the intro to the movie, the really crazy parts are still to come.
With that basic Big Picture concept, that we're in The Big Transition, a long period of massive change, I'll use this blog to look at real estate and housing issues of all kinds, and see if I can help make some sense, in places, of what is happening.
I'm not an agent, a broker, a designer, a lawyer, an accountant, a financial planner, or any other kind of real estate professional. I'm a thinker and a blogger, who has learned of some ultra long term trends, including The Third Wave, and has been watching financial markets and real estate, from a distance, for over 30 years now. I'm trying to figure out where we are in the Big Picture of things, and share those insights. Hopefully I can help some of you reading this to make sense of the 2020's chaos, to help you make better decisions in your own life.
So that's The Big Transition concept, and why I put it in the title of the blog.
Blogger's note: Simply writing this idea down and linking this post on Facebook got this entire blog banned on Facebook and Instagram. Someone, somewhere is that threatened by this concept, that they felt the need to censor it on those platforms. Really. The world is weird these days.
I remember seeing a news report about John Travolta being a pilot certified to fly large jets about 20 years ago. The report went on to show his home where an airliner sized jet could park right out front. Since I'm starting a blog about trends in the real estate world, I might as well start with one of the craziest homes ever. Enjoy.
A new sunrise, a new blog, a new beginning. This photo is one I took at sunrise over the mighty James River, on the east side of Richmond, Virginia, when I was living there in 2019.
We all want some place to call home. But what does that mean? I've lived a pretty weird and creative life, with a lot of ups and downs. The downs have included extended homelessness, where the things most people take for granted become luxuries. That has shaped my thoughts on what it really takes for a place to move beyond an apartment or a house, and become a home.
A home is where:
You can tell your stories
You can sleep soundly (unless you have small kids)
You can cook a good meal, and keep plenty of food on hand for most occasions
You can charge your laptop, phone, and other devices, and have fast wifi (unless you have teenage gamers)
You can relax... at least sometimes
You can feel comfortable in super casual clothes
You can get your snail mail, and have a physical address for those pesky forms that require one
You can listen to you music loudly (though headphones may be needed)
You can work... on your job or your hobbies, and if you're really lucky, both at the same time
You can dream about how to make your home, and your life, more rewarding
