There’s No Pace Like Home (Sales)

For one of the few times in my life, I’m in great demand.

Well, in full disclosure, not me personally, but rather my address. There isn’t a week that goes by when at least three or four mailings from local real estate agents are not sardined in my mailbox. It has gotten to the point where they outnumber junk mail, or those barrages of eternal credit card offers advertising 0 percent interest for 24 months.  The real estate fliers usually begin with the typical sales bromides, “Thinking of selling? Call….” or “If, you’re ready to downsize, we’re here to help.”

Now as a couple who have been empty nesters for several years now, I can understand why we are viewed as prime sales leads. And post COVID, to label the housing demand in my neck of the woods as “off the charts” would be a severe understatement. A realtor I know revealed he has a stable of 105 buyers and an inventory of 14 homes. Let me reiterate that wildly unbalanced ratio for emphasis- 105:14. And trust me, he is not atypical.

There are now bidding wars for homes not seen for decades. Case in point, a good friend of ours recently put her home on the market and not only received the asking price the first day of showing, but the couple who are going to eventually buy the home offered her $65,000 OVER the listing. On the one day she hosted an open house, she received 33 visits. My niece and her husband listed their “starter home” and had 67 potential buyers vying to own their piece of America. Some desperate home buyers have even done the unthinkable – at least in my book – by purchasing a house and bypassing the traditional inspection process. To me that’s like buying a used car without taking it to a mechanic first.

Return of the Trade Show

 

Recently I read an article in Sports Illustrated that documented how the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles represented a quantum leap in technology, unveiling such radical concepts as EMS or electronic messaging system – the precursor to today’s email, as well as digital judging and scoring for various events.

This mind you followed the 1976 Games in Montreal, which was originally slated to cost $250 million but eventually carried a $1.4 billion price tag, a debt Canada was not able to discharge until 2006. Then four years later, the U.S. was one of 65 countries to boycott the Games in Moscow. Just months before the LA Games, Newsweek ran an article positing the uncomfortable question “Are the Games Dead?”

I bring up this bit of past history because for nearly a year, I held similar feelings about trade shows and conferences. For 18 months most of the large annual gatherings in the accounting space and countless other sectors were either being held virtually or canceled altogether. I was ready to write their respective epitaphs and do not let anyone, anywhere tell you that attending a conference via Zoom or Microsoft Teams is the same as sitting in a live lecture or conversing in person to a vendor.

It isn’t and never will be.

Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

 

Some things just defy logic.

For example, why does Hawaii have interstate highways?

How did former New York Mets’ owner Fred Wilpon – a victim of not one, but TWO Ponzi schemes including the massive one perpetrated by Bernie Madoff which almost cost him the team, get appointed to the Financial Committee of Major League Baseball?

You get the idea.

Then can someone please explain to me how does a person sentenced to 24 years in prison for investor fraud and was complicit in one of the largest bankruptcies in the annals of American history, somehow get enough financial support to launch an investment venture?

Sounds absurd right?

But in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” Jeffrey Skilling the onetime CEO of Houston-based energy conglomerate Enron, has kicked off Veld LLC, described as a digital marketplace to sell packages of oil and gas production to investors. The entity promises to “lend a “technology edge” to oil and gas returns.

For those who were either too young to remember or living somewhere in the Himalayas in 2001, a bit of background on Mr. Skilling.

UBI: An Idea that Should be DOA!

 

Perhaps the nine scariest words ever uttered in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

In full disclosure, just writing that sentence made me uncomfortable as a burlap shirt in July.

The same august body that oversees the U.S. Post Office and the Department of Education to name two entities that would give Homer Simpson cause for concern, is now mulling the possibility of implementing UBI – universal basic income.

This is a program where Uncle Sam issues checks to all citizens in a pre-set amount regardless of employment status or actual need. In other words, if you possess a working pulse and an average body temperature of 98.6, then you would be eligible for this head-scratching largesse.

If one took it upon themselves to look up the meaning of wealth redistribution, I’m sure it would be accompanied by a diagram of universal basic income.

For those unfamiliar, this is not a new proposal spurred on by the pandemic.

Nope, this was floated by Silicon Valley magnates some years ago – possibly to provide much-needed camouflage from how many jobs would be lost via the roster AI products currently either in place or in development.