Great. Okay, that's good, so I don't have to the fact that
I don't know who is another problem? Excellent. Ask not what your country
can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country, mister
Gorbachev. Tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and
Peter Robinson. I'm James Linnacks. Today we talked to Jack Ryan about why
you maybe don't need to own a home. So let Sapersel's a podcast.
In a brilliant move, you're in closing arguments. Simpson attorney Johnny Cochrane put
on the nitcap. Prosecutors say OJ war the night he committed the murders,
although OJ may have heard his case when he suddenly blurted out, Hey,
easy with that. That's my lucky stabbing hat. It's no disguise, it
makes no sense, it doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must
acquit. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. This happens to be number
six hundred and eighty seven. Wow, next week six hundred and eighty eight,
And I hope I'm going to be there. And I wasn't there last
week for the famous six eighty six because I was off in Florida rare peregrination
to another part of the world for me. Of course, Rob Long,
who's with us, bounces all over the planet constantly. We never know where
he's from. I believe today you are in one of the directions that attends
Palm Beach, right, I am. I'm in West Palm today, West
Palm Beach. And what is it? Just west and north and east and
south the rest of it? Well, this Palm and the others. Palm
Beach is an island which is sort of off. You know. You take
a couple of a couple, I think the three bridges from West Palm to
Palm Beach island, so we will say Palm Beach. What they really mean
to say is Palm Beach Island, but they don't. And West Palm is
sort of the mainland half of that considerably cheaper. And if you're if you're
here a fundraising for a certain thing called Ricochet, you stay in West Palm,
but the people you meet are in Palm Beach. Would be get so
if you were to, if you were to map the status of the Hamptons
onto the Palms, how would it work. Southampton is Palm Beach and West
Palm's, Bridge Hampton. How does it all work? Yeah, that's a
really good que I don't know. I think West Palm would be like,
yeah, Bridge Hampton maybe, or water Mill. You know. But but
you never have to do that because it's the same people. So you you
one place is empty while the other's full. They never falls. The time,
I was at dinner last night and I was by myself, and I
was sitting there having enjoying my my quiet little you know, one of the
joys of travel is that you get to like sit at a nice restaurant and
have a nice meal and have a glass of wine and read your book.
But the people of the table next to me was you know, they were
every third word was either Saint Bart's or Nantucket or Hampton, And I thought,
oh my god, these are I mean, you know, come on,
Rob, this is the crowd to which you and I have inspired all
decent people. But yeah, how about give it us some money? How
about that? That would be nice keep this thing going. But you know
that's a separate issue. I just I just googled Palm Beach to see exactly
where was the whole island thing and the rest of it, and the first
thing that my I didn't google it, actually I Duck duck go did because
I'm done with Google. And the first first thing that came up in the
map when I zoomed out, I was surprised was Palm Beach, Canada.
There is a Palm Beach, Canada, and I'm expecting that it probably isn't
as nice as the one you went. It's odd. In the Mexican resort
where I just was, the place was absolutely infested witha with Canadians. I
don't know why, but of all sorts. You know, one guy would
be a heart doctor, the other guy would be a pharmaceutical rep. The
other guy would be a plumber, and that was great. I had the
best conversation with the plumbers. They just lots of them, the nicest people.
I love Canadians. They are absolutely nice people. And you get them
going and you sort of probe them a little bit to find out where they
are about certain things, and you start gently with something like, you know,
if I was Canadian, I would have not been completely and utterly opposed
to the truckers, and so that sort of lets them know where you are.
And then after a couple of drinks or so and they really start to
unburden. They're saying, well, of course, Justin Trudeau was Castor's son.
Everybody knows that. Heh it was fun. I predict trouble for mister
Trudeau based on my polling of the Canadians. You know, it's up there
with talking to your taxi cab driver to get the feel of a city.
But there we are different demographic though, some so some and so so.
Here we are, here we are. And a surprise note this week O
J. Simpson died. I think the Norm McDonald joke that I saw on
the internet was him at an anchor desk saying And in a stunning development,
the family of O. J. Simpson has announced that he will be buried
in the same coffin as his wife's killer. Norm did ride that one and
was absolutely unsparing in his frankness with which he addressed well. The other thing
assembled this week that surfaced in the wake of that was an interview with a
jury member who said, oh, yeah, yeah, he did it.
He did it, but but we let him off because you generally balanced the
scales, so to speak. I don't want to revisit the whole thing.
Everybody knows what it was, what he did, and what the ramifications were.
But well, how did you feel when you when you go ahead,
go ahead? Wrong? Well it first of all, does everybody, I
mean, you know, I have some bad news for you. Everybody.
You're an old you're an old man. This is thirty years ago, and
it seems it seems sort of quaint now when you think about it, that
the kind of world exploded and went insane because a celebrity, uh murdered his
wife and a waiter. And I have some I we had with some pretty
dark jokes about it from those of us who are living in LA at the
time. Murders wipe of the waiter, and they played the race card in
his defense and he got away with it, and people, just the whole
country watched. It's important to remember this is nineteen it's a mid nineteen nineties.
Nineteen ninety five is the year of the trial. No Twitter, Internet
still nascent. People still watched that thing called television, and the OJ Simpson
trial was carried by every television outlet NonStop, hour after hour. The whole
country watched it in a way that the whole country may have been following the
Lindberg trial but I can't think of any other anything else, certainly nothing since
the Internet, it seems. I think it's likely to be impossible to get
the whole country gripped by one crime story the way it was. Then.
My theory is that that act of jury nullification, when the whole country saw
the same evidence, and I saw poll the other day that even fifty percent,
that fifty seven what was it there was a Democrat. It was not
good for relations between the races because it was eighty some percent of whites thought
he was guilty, fifty seven percent of black still majority. And then the
jury nullification. My theory is that was the moment something snapped everybody who watched
that it's impossible to trust the justice system in the United States in the same
way. Again, I have the feeling that that was a moment some basic
faith, unthinking, unquestioning faith and institutions ended and can't be put back together
again. Huh, tell me I'm being too grim. Well, no,
I think that's interesting. I was going to say, kind of the a
parallel point with they actually maybe cause an effect in some way that the O.
J. Simpson trial created the idea of having the TV on all day
during the day at the office, Yes, where its solidified that trend which
you'd see now all time. I mean, it's amazing how many you go
to an office and now somebody's always got the news on and it solidified that
or the trend that began in a few years before during the Gulf War and
the Gulf War the ft. That's true, That's what I was going to
say. That kind of created CNN. That's true. That's true, and
then everything else kind of. I mean, then I think the OJA sort
of created like the well, it was court TV, but it's also MSNBC.
Did you know before MSNBC was ideological, it was just twenty four to
seven OJ. So there you go. You imagine having it lapsing into a
coma at the end of the trial and then waking up twenty five thirty years
later and turning on the television and there's the Kardashians are the centerpiece of the
American culture. I got in trouble once when we were talking about that.
In La and I lived. I used to live around the corner from the
restaurant. When I was first moved out, A lived around the corner from
that restaurant. Metsaluna and that was the restaurant where Nicole Simpson went for dinner
and her She left her glasses and the waiter there, Fred Golden, and
walked the walk them. It was like a block and half. She lived
a block and a half away. It's hard to think about la but people
walking around. But she just walked her the restaurant and walked him and he
walked there, and that's when Ojay killed her and him and I made the
mistake of saying, well, I've I've eaten it Metsalunas, so you know,
I could see killing the waiter. Oh, but nobody, nobody liked
that. That was the joke that you weren't going to tell five minutes ago.
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's it's no longer too soon.
Somebody mentioned that, uh you know, yes, it did happen an awful
long time ago. But O Jays has been a recent Twitter presence. He's
actually been on Twitter for a while. They got a whole new generation of
people who sort of saw him as a sort of an outlaw figure who bucked
the trends and defied authority and the rest of it, which is insane.
But but yeah, I mean the oddest thing. Well, on the odd
the whole story is odd, but having to jail, having to go to
jail for shaking for for shaking down some sort of some guys who had defrauded
him in a collectibles uh in Vegas purchase some in Vegas in Vegas, I
mean, and then putting out a book called If I Did It, which
which not saying I did I did it, would have got a little something
like this, And then what you know, I read yesterday the reason that
the gloves did not fit was because he'd stopped taking his arthritis medicine, which
made his hand swell up. Never knew that really it makes it, And
that was one one was one of the stupidest things, of course, that
you possibly could have done, because you put on this glove, you know,
and the guy spends his time clenching his fists beforehand to get the blood
there, so it doesn't fit. You must if the glove doesn't fit,
you must have quit, which leads to, you know, the idea of
a of a rhyming passage like that, influencing one of the most consequential history
of the nineteen nineties, and subsequently, as Peter said, race relations Center
attit to addow the justice system. Now, wasn't my first experience with jury
nullification. My wife had about of that when she was on a journey in
DC. So it happens. But something this large, this naked, this
this flagrant, Yeah, it did do something. So the good news,
maybe, guys, is that our faith, our lack of faith, or
collapse of faith in institutions doesn't really come from COVID. We were at it
twenty five thirty years ago. That's the good thing to take away, wouldn't
you say, uh, what else we can I guess I'd say is that
the difference is that at that point, everyone's reaction sort of was comforting,
right because people were shocked and it was an unbelievable surprise, and everybody felt
perfectly legitimate, too perfectly entitled to say he did it. And he did
lose the civil trial later, so there was some version that wasn't justice really,
but there's some version of an understanding that the jury had made a terrible
mistake. The big surprise, of course, was that it seemed like black
people thought it was okay that he got That's what we should have paid attention
to in a way that there's a for whatever reason, was the beginning of
a real problem between the way that black Americans viewed the justice system of the
way the white Americans did, and that I think came well. In La
it was a little less it was a little less surprising because in La it
was after the Rodney King right right right, So people are already aware that
there was a big, big problem somehow, and there was no obvious way
to solve it. You know, I was only half half serious when I
said that our lack of faith and the institutions goes back farther than we think,
which you know, you see this great towering institution, like the law,
and then you get close to it and you realize it's been hauled up
by bugs for twenty thirty years, which happened to us, not the law,
but you know, in our front yard, the guy came and said,
this magnificent tree that you have is actually weighs about four ounces now when
you consider, because it's entirely hollow inside, and it's going to go over
with the first wind. So we had it taken down, but I had
to put something back in. What do you do? How do you know
what kind of tree to put in. You know what am I an arborist?
What am I? James Kilman? Fast growing trees, My friends,
That's what I did. And you know, if this podcast is around for
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and we do think fast Growing Trees responsoring. This the Ricochet Podcast,
and I'll bring you back to the state of the tree in a little while
because I'm sure it's going to grow, thrive and be a lovely, lovely
object. I've never seen anything as lovely as a tree. And now we
welcome to the show. Jack Ryan. Yes, that Jack Ryan, the
co founder and CEO of Rex Real Estate Quote, which is the digital alternative
to the realtor TM trademark. It's also the co author the soon to be
released Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home, a case again against home ownership.
Hmmm. You can pre order now to get your compy in April sixteenth.
Jack, Welcome to the show. Thanks James. I'm glad to be
here this title. I'm right now in the last probably twenty four hours,
and so my wife and I are looking at each other and saying, you
know what, we might want to downsize. Kids gone not coming back,
I mean for Christmas. But you know we have a lot of stuff here,
we should move interest rates behnd you. And it's all predicated on the
idea that, of course we're going to own our home. The idea that
we do anything else besides own our home to our generation is practically Bolshevism.
So you say, the case against home ownership, that's the American dream,
the pick of fence, the two point five to the dog. What's tell
us what sort of cultural Marxism you're spreading here, Jack James. That is
so funny. But you're the classic case of someone who's probably the Paladan told
for a long time that the eleventh commandment of life is that you're supposed to
own your own home. And there's really no truth to that. I mean,
it's really a by versus least decision like owning a car, or leasing
a car, or renting a car just for a few days, or just
ubering, and home ownership is no different. There's no should home ownership you
should look at maybe renting a home, you should maybe look at traveling around
and airbnb from place to place. It really is a question of, you
know, an economic decision, it's not an emotional decision that should be made
and Unfortunately, I think how I call it, the housing industrial complex has
been hectoring people for years, driven by the National Association of Realtors and others,
to say you must own a home. But that's just there's just no
logic to that. But Jack, so, Rob owned a nice house down
in Venice Beach for many years and then he sold it and now he's renting.
I own my own home, and this is the first moment I've really
been able to feel consistently superior to Rob Long in thirty years. But here's
why I feel superior, because it makes me a better American. Thomas Jefferson,
this notion of the small landholder, that ownership gives us a stake in
the in the society in our town. Peter, what crops do you raise?
I missed. I missed the moment where you were sorgum, Gary and
gentlemen. I attempt to raise grass, but it turns out I raised mostly
crab grass. So, so, Jack, what you're saying here, you've
got It's not just the National Association of Realtors who are after you or you're
after them, will come to them in a moment you're attacking Thomas Jefferson,
Well, I think Thomas Jefferson on his day, I think that, and
this is where he probably went wrong with Adam Smith. You know you probably
he probably raised some crops in the backyard, he was making his shirts on
the front porch. Maybe he was probably taking care of his own house.
And Adam Smith said, look, there should be a division of labor.
You should do it you do best. And Peter was kind of just a
amazing about thinking about you, is that not only are you tied owning a
home, so it makes you a mobile, so literally it's hard for you
to move to your highest and best use of all of a sudden someone says,
hey, forget the Hoover Institution, please come to the MIT Free Market
Institute or something. Furthermore, the home ownership is asking you be expert and
something I'm guessing, Peter, you're not expert about, like electrician work,
plumbing, carpentry. Any moment, Peter, that you're thinking about carpentry as
opposed to how to make the world more free is a misuse of your resources.
And I'm just saying that kind of as a broad sense that I think
Thomas Jefferson, if you had thought hard about this, would have said Hey,
if we really want people to be most productive that they can, they
should be able to move to the place that they can find their talents most
valued, which means you should be probably mobile. And second, Peter Robinson
should spend no time thinking about the plumbing in his house. Yeah, well,
touch a sore point, as it happens, because we're just going through
the initial stages of remodeling, and you're quite right, I have no idea
what I'm doing, all right, hepa. You know what's even worse about
that? What is that the plumber and electrician and the painters and the remodelers
also know you have known nothing about this topic. That's exactly right. So
they walk in the house and they size you up pretty quickly and not altim
are this way at all, But you're the mark Peter Okay, Jack from
Today's Wall Street Journal. I'm going to read you a paragraph or two from
the Wall Street Journal and ask you what's up, and then toss you to
rob who I can tell I can tell is gloating at this very moment.
Front page front page above the fold story and Today's Wall Street Journal Cost of
owning a home soores home ownership affordability fell to its lowest level since the nineteen
eighties last year, as mortgage rates reached a twenty three year high and home
prices set new records. Property taxes and home maintenance costs are climbing. In
much of the country, non mortgage costs, including property taxes, maintenance util
these insurance, make up more than half of home ownership's overall costs. On
and on and on, it goes, what the heck is going on?
Well, you know, one is because there's a lack of supply of electricians
and plumbers and things like that. And the second, of course, somebody
has nothing to do really with housing. It's just the inflation that the administration
keeps saying is solved. But then as you saw last month, they went
up again. So part of it is that. Part of it is the
insurance companies have to charge more for the insurance policies. But this kind of
goes to the same thing I was saying before is, you know, people
like you and me have to start thinking about all those things. And what
we were doing at REX is taking the brokerage feed is zero and then saying,
well, how do you make money at zero? We'll manage the house
for you, Like you can own the house if you want, Peter,
but you should not be the guy who's managing the house. And how can
you do that now in the twenty first century. We can put sensors in
the attic and say, hey, Peter, it seems like the humidity in
the attic is up like three standard deviations away from normal, and so we
should probably send someone over there now to fix it before it's a big problem.
The way that you probably find out about it and meet too, by
the way, is there's a growing yellow circle in my ceiling. Yes,
I have a leak. At that point, it's a ten thousand dollars fix.
But if you can pre identify it, and now you can do this
with AI and also with censers in the home. Or guess what, Peter,
the speed of the air moons your home has gone from one kilometer per
hour to three kilometers per hour. And you're traveling for a wedding or something.
I think there's a door open or window broken or something. We'll send
someone over there. So one thing that should happen, independible on them or
not, is outsourcing the magine the home to somebody else. And some of
these costs used to referred to get managed down because you have a professional managing
those costs as opposed to people like James and Peter and Robin Jack. So,
Jack, I just wanted to some You have founded Rex Realty. You've
not only written a book, but your company, Rex Reality is home management
for the middle class. Is that? What is that the aspiration here?
Well, the aspiration was to take these ridiculous brokerage fees down to zero.
And where that came from, of course Goldman Sachs. We took brokerage fees
for trading shares from twelve cents a share to almost zero, and the same
thing can be done with owning homes, and so we were taking the fees
down to zero. How do you take the fees down to the zero and
make money the same way that Schwab does. They manage your cash and invested
just like a bank would do. Well, when you buy a home,
everybody has to get title insurance and escrow policies, and they have to get
home insurance and usually have to get a mortgage. We can do all those
things for a market clearing rate that's you know, very competitive. And then
the six percent fee on a home around where you all live. Is you
know, that's a huge fee. It could be thirty forty fifty sixty thousand
dollars. By the way, Peter, this is the thing is so outrageous
about this whole. I call it a cartel because it is the fees in
the US are three or four times higher than they are in most other developed
countries, Like how do they manage that price levitation where the fees in the
US are so much higher than they are in the UK. And by the
way, just to shock you and all your fellow listeners, this is the
biggest cartel in the US and maybe in the history of the US. And
I have data to back this up. So the nash the realtor racket.
If well, I'll go ahead and concede your point by just calling it a
racket. This is one more cozy, interlocking set of political and special interests
that you think is about due to be disrupted by technology, and you're attempting
to do it fair summary, yes, yes, And let me give you
just a sense for why this is important to everybody or you know who listens
to your show and podcast. So to give you a sense, there's three
trillion dollars of homes traded per year three trillion, and the fee in the
UK is about one and a half percent the fee and the is five and
a half percent, So the monopolistic rent is four percent on three trillion dollars,
which is one hundred and twenty billion dollars per year. Now, to
put this in context, most economists think that Opak raised the price of gas
lean by fifty to seventy five cents per gallon one hundred and fifty billion gallons
of gas as sold in the US each year. So a O pack taking
middle class Americans is seventy five billion dollars fifty billion dollars. This is almost
double the size of Opeck. So what I called the cartel, and by
the way, the home seventy five out the last seventy seven years, the
amount of revenue that has come from to realtors has exceeded the inflation rates,
so the price never goes down. Why is it that only the realtor fees
of all the middle men in the country of the last fifteen years, they're
the only fees that haven't come down. Stockbroker fees have come down ninety percent,
taxi dispatcher fees. Some people might remember travel agents they used to exist.
They got taken out by the Internet. Of everyone's fees are down eighty
except for one. One is levitating above every other middleman's fees. And you
know there's strings attached. That doesn't happen in the free market. That's part
of letting Adam Smith. In the American home prices do not levitate normally like
that, or increase seventy five But I have seventy seven years, so James
and are still at you, Jack, But I have to let you know.
Rob just sent a text. He's in a hotel in West Palm and
there's a fire alarm that just went off in the hotel, So listeners.
Rob will return when he's permitted back into the building. So Jack, why
is it that realtors? I mean one argument. I've talked to people here
in Silicon Valley who share this basic feeling that the National Association of Realtors is,
in one way or another, a cartel. But it's very, very
hard to take on because when it comes to it goes the art argument.
Selling a house or buying a house is a very personal decision and be a
very rare event in the lives of most people, so they want someone who
knows the local market. Real estate agents tend to be extremely good with people.
They tend to be comforting. They tend to make a difficult, often
traumatic set of decisions easier to get through. Uh. And so in some
way they do provide value. Maybe what do you make of that argument?
Well, of course they provide value. The question is how much is that
value worth? Right? And that's selling for consumer to six percent, right,
right? So you know sometimes the roops, I say I deserve my
six percent? Why because you said so? You know, Peter, I
justserve one hundred thousand dollars to be on your show with you today. The
other thing, the other thing, Jack, this is amazing to me,
is that that six percent fee is totally unaffected by the emmergent urgents of online
sites such as realture dot com. It's a home people who were in the
market to buy or sell their houses educate themselves enormously now by going online,
learning different neighborhoods, learning the market prices. You know as not as much
perhaps as a real state eight, but you know an enormous amount that you
couldn't have known twenty years ago. And yet the real estate agents charged the
same James, share my outrage. Your outrage is shared by me. Yeah,
I wish the fees were lower, I really do. There's because we
are able to inform ourselves and make decisions into the things that realtors used to
be able to do only them. Now. My uncle in law is a
realtor, and I'm none of this, none of my stuff for him.
He's a good guy. But he's a good guy, and he found me
in my house. As a matter of fact, he found me in my
house because he just showed up one day and said, hey, I got
a client and wants to buy your house. And I said, well,
I live here, so what now? And we drove around for it,
drove around for a day, and he had in his head just this sort
of magic compendium of all the places, and he found the house where I
live now, and I was so struck by it that I made an offer
on the spot. My day was completely turned around in the course of two
or three hours, simply because a realtor decided to be proactive to use a
hated word and dynamite me out of my situation. That's irrelevant to what I'm
about to say, I'm just telling you where I'm coming from. One of
the reasons though, that I put the money down on the spot, was
when I looked at this place, I said, I want my family to
grow up here. I want to be carried down the stairs here when I'm
dead. This is my place I want. James lives in a beautiful old
house jack In with a beautiful suburb with a preposterous lawn that in that you
don't find in a city such as Minneapolis. And when I walk out of
my porch and I behold this place, I have a feeling of ownership.
I have a feeling of connection to it that would not be there if I
was renting it to somebody, I just wouldn't. And if I look around
at all the houses in my neighborhood and said, what if black Rock owned
all of these places, it would be a different place. Because everyone who's
come here is put down roots and is committed to where we are. And
yet, yes, we have to call in somebody every day. You know,
when something isn't done. I'll give you an example. This morning,
I had a guy come by and tune up my boiler or just give it
a just give it a look. Still, you know figured it out,
and that was that time that I spent getting him in the door and doing
all the rest of it. Yes, it was not time that I would
have spent doing anything else. But there's a series of there's an idiotic decision
that was made by the people who lived there previously when they chose a particular
fastener to close the doors. They're German made, They're quite precise, but
they have a plastic element that breaks a lot, and so I have to
install them a lot. Would it be easier for me to call out my
landlord and say, come, hey, come and fix this. Yes?
Do I have a sense of accomplishment I get every time by taking that out
fitting it in, working the screws, knowing exactly how it works. Yes.
Do I have a connection to this thing because I have done the plumbing,
because I have figured out the electricity. It makes me more of a
more of an American man to know and have these skill sets as opposed to
having to call somebody, could you please come over and do this, knowing
that at any moment if it struck them, I am out of there.
Because they want to sit, because they want to hire, they want to
rend it to somebody for somebody else. I am at my home because I
own it, and nobody's going to take it away, unless, of course,
I don't pay my property taxes, in which case I'm out. But
you know what I mean. Yeah, you're saying you get an emotional benefit
from owning the home because you've become a man's man by you know, fixing
things and all that, like a true dartmouth man. Peter, Yes,
exactly. But I see my father looking over my shoulder every time, every
time the gardner comes to mow our lawn. I hear my father saying,
what what you should be You're come on, it's your house. You should
be doing that. This is, this is, this is a well well
so so. So I'm not saying that no one should know in their own
home. I'm just saying, look at it objectively, look at like anything
else you do, rent versus by decision, and see if the you know,
on top of that, just beside the economics, see if the mind
share it takes from you as well as the services as you get. If
you get enjoyment from a terrific you know, by your home, If not,
you should probably not own the home. Jack what happened. Because I
didn't know that we would be interviewing you. I certainly didn't know you were
working on a book, but so I didn't pay too much attention to the
story. But the National Association of Realtors has lost a series of cases in
court, or they've gotten scared by some series of cases in court, and
they've made some kind of concession. Can you explain the state of play?
Yes, I can, so, I think mostly because I'm runn around to
well, who knows why. But anyway, you know, because of what
of our argument that these fees are ridiculous and make no sense. In the
twenty first century, a number of class action lawyers said that we're going to
stew on behalf of all these people bought homes in Missouri and sold homes because
the fee has been inflayed by four percent. Take theme of all the homes
that we sold, and that's what you owes cartel for just Missouri. And
anyway, they won the lawsuit. The jury is out for all of two
hours, which is really a short time. They basically went out for a
hot dog, came back and said guilty. And the return to Verk of
one point seven billion dollars, which is then tripled under antitrust law. So
that was just one state. So that put the fear of every reeltor out
there that oh boy, this deal is coming to an end. Now there's
another set of law. There's another loss at out there, which is ours,
because we were going around our MLS as a competitor. So there was
one set of lawsuits which are buyers and sellers at homes and paid way too
much because of what I call the cartel. And then the second is us,
the only firm went around the cartel to trade homes off the MLS,
which we did very successfully, and then Zillow joined the National Association of Realtors
and kicked us off all the websites. One of the rules of the many
rules that create this monopoly pricing is that if you are not a member of
the NO and the MLS's then they cannot put you on the same web pages
as those homes that are just a moment. NAAR stands for National Association of
Realtors and MLS is the multiple Listing services. All right, yeah, sorry,
yes, exactly right. I'm glad you said that. Anyway, So
the National Association of Realtors it's a trade group. It's a trade group that
set the rules of competition among its members. What other trade group in the
United States is able to set the terms of competition upon which its members can
compete. I'm not aware of any. I don't think anyone can. But
they have all these rules about how you're allowed to sell a home. They
make your head hurt. There's so many of them. I can go through
many of them with you if you want. But the kind of way to
cut that, Gordian knot like Alexander the Great, is just a No trade
group can set any rules that set the terms of competition. By the way,
one of the missions of the National Association of Realtors is to enhance the
profitability of its members, and you're putting that group in charge of setting competition.
Get that explains why the fees are four times higher in the US and
the UK. Right, So this is a it's a big deal. By
the way, Peterson's here at the Hoover Institute and Saint James, et cetera.
It doesn't stop with one hundred and twenty billion dollars of takings. You
know, as James, you are saying you do it yourself. Oftentimes,
but guests whose jobs cluster around the purchase and sale of homes, plumbers,
electricians, carpenters, painters, their jobs are being suppressed, the wages of
being suppressed because these high transaction fees reduce the number of transactions. By the
way, there's a big issue of housing affordability in California that I read about,
huge, huge, right, So there's this five percent fee on top
of the value of the house. Let's not go into the time being,
the inelasticity or elasticity of demand and who pays incidents of attacks. But on
top of that there's the not the normal margin for a home builder is seven
or eight percent on their revenues. If you took out the if you took
out that five percent fee, it goes to thirteen percent. All of a
sudden, now the margins the home builder are gone up by sixty seventy percent.
How many more homes get built when all of a sudden your return on
investment goes by fifty percent. So I really think if we take this cartel
and just reduce the fees to what we're trying to do with just zero,
then you probably have a ten percent reduction in the cost of housing. And
by the way, the next thing, Peter, is that forty percent of
CPI is rent and mortgage rents also go down by ten percent because someone's got
to buy that house to rent it out, or buy that town home with
the four units in it to rent it out. They're also trying to get
their ROI up, so they have to tack on their rental rates that five
percent fee, and plus there's less homes arounds that price is hired to buy
that home are also five to some pis percent higher. The knock kind of
effects from this cartel, as I said before, are huge, and they're
bigger than opek. Well, not to ask a question whose answer I can
presume based on the whole just the conversation here. But you got a point,
But what would would it be a greater effect to increase the stock of
housing if zoning, if laws, if environmental requirements and the rest of it
were dialed back a little bit. I mean, it's not either or we
can certainly do both. We're Americans walking chewing gum. But a lot of
the reasons that houses don't get built is not because of these fees. It's
maybe that's a consideration, but it seems to a lot of the people that
I've talked to it has to do with zoning, environmental regulations. That's what
keeps putting the cost up, and the fact that because it is so expensive
to build some of these things, they have to build something big that doesn't
qualify as affordable. I mean, all houses are affordable at some point,
but there's no incentive to build the small stuff like we used to. I
mean, like we had post war right now, what we need are potato
fields to be turned into hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those tiki
taking little boxes that all the little boomer children hated. But that's what we
need. If you had to wave a magic wand and say, either we
get what you want, or we get an economic climate that is more positive,
more averse to less averse to bowling the burdening them with regulation. Which
would you take, he said, to answer leading question to which you know
the answer, Well, I don't know if I know the answer. Like
in Texas, I'll take the reduction of the fee of the fees, because
aren't as made restrictions on building homes as they are in California right right right
now, in California, I don't know the questions. I don't know because
the restriction the building homes are so horrible. Why the price of home so
high, because you've made the supply almost unmovable and people, you know,
make more money and they move there, et cetera. So of course the
prop you know, I don't know. I don't. I don't about that
horse race. That's horrible horse race. But in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana,
Florida, I'll take the reduction in the fees because his main restrictions.
Let me ask you something else. When we talk about rental, for example,
a lot of people, especially those who are downsize on like my wife
myself, say well, maybe we don't need to buy a home, maybe
a condy, maybe leasing a town home is the way to go. And
I will never ever go live in a town home again, because for the
last thirty years I've lived with nobody upstairs. I've lived with nobody on the
other side of the world. I live in a self contained single family house,
which is an American archetype. The left hates the single family home,
that's true, and what we found here in Minneapolis, for example, they
banned single family housing and there was a attempt by the Minnesota state legislature to
force every town in Minnesota to change its zoning laws to accommodate more density,
because density is good. And they have a whole variety of reasons that they
love density. It has to do and mostly it's because the idea of the
atomized nuclear family unity in these rows of levittowns is antithetical to their esthetics,
their politics, and a whole bunch of stuff. So they want us all
in the hives and I hate that. That's one of the reasons that I
like to say that home ownership is good is because it keeps you out of
the clutches of these people who want to centralize and control and do the rest
of it. When people when the immigrants come to Minneapolis here, they spread
out it in the first ring suburbs and they buy up all those postwar ramblers
because that, for them is the good life paradise. Yes, so that's
all I'm saying. I'm not arguing. I'm not really arguing with you at
all, except to make the point that the title of your book offends me
to the core of my marrow. I'm kidding, but it doesn't say don't
buy home. It says a case against it. Consider the pros. We
don't want people to say, you're like, unilaterally, this isn't ultimotle good
man. They march robotically to buying a home. That's really Jack, Jack
act When does what's? When's? What's the publication date of the book and
not so? I think April sixteenth, although I think, okay, so
there's still time. There's still time. I'm going to rewrite your subtitle bringing
Adam Smith into the American Home. Everybody loves that. I mean everybody our
side, James and I love that. Rob, if he ever returns from
his fire alarm, would love that. Your subtitle a case against home ownership.
Really, i'm your editor, and I'm going to rewrite that slightly.
It's a case against the crazy, out of date, politically connected cartel that's
costing us all billions every year. That's really what your case is against.
Right, Yes, true, Peter, and it's it's true. That's a
long way of saying it. So if you if you've a way to stay
its shorter, you know, we're open to suggestions. But the other thing,
too, is the case against is getting ripped off by your realtor.
There, there's your there's your subtype. Okay, it's okay, Well is
that just the realtor. It's also like what I call the housing industrial complex.
And then the country I know that subsidizes housing well than America does is
China. Like we have this Fannie May, we have Freddie Mack, we
have all this hectoring to own your home. I just saw that the administration
lowered for Fanny Man and Freddie Mack them out. They're going to charge to
you know, ensure that mortgage. You know, we all know how it's
going to end. Fier sent me. Every twenty five years we have a
complete cataclysm. And it's all because the gnar and then the government is the
iron lobbyist, iron triangle, Have you better own a home? And all
these subsidies, and in every twenty five years, hundreds of billions of dollars
come due and like, oh my gosh, you know the currencies in jeopardy.
So it's a case in favor of a genuine market. Yeah, yes,
yeah, I guess we'll be Thank you for the editing help. I
really appreciate it. Yes, you're right about that. It's like, yes,
yes, I have nothing else to say about that. Yes, Peter,
you that was a better title. Unlike China, we don't have thirty
story ghost towns in Kansas, yeat and the cartel phrase me, you know,
concentrate minds. But we don't actually have Ms. Thirteen style running gun
battles between reeltors in my neighborhood, which would be interesting. And you know
they're you know, they're Blazers and their Lincoln Continentals and the rest of it.
But we'll see one exit question, Jack, and it's pretty simple.
Do you own a whom? Yes, I do. But there's no hypocrisy
there, James, because I just I'm just curious. I know, well
it sounds like, hey, mister smart, ally, just everybe look at
it more objectively. If it works for you, it works for you absolutely,
I know. Yeah, And I looked at it objectively. I had
the rent versus by decision and how much time I want to spend, and
you change really proud to know that I'm out there and you too, Peter,
out there more on my own lawn. I have my little thing,
and so this is a whole you know, I probably shouldn't be doing it,
but also derived ye, but Jack, you live in Texas. Your
front lawn is five acres. Well, you know what's so funny, We
do have buy akers about three acres of it. As you know, forest
land, that forest land, cedar trees. And during the summer nothing really
grows because one hundred degrees there for three months in a row, so turns
into a desert desert. But the fragrancy is wonderful, and we advise people
to go if they like cedar trees, fast growing trees. Who knows what
they have in their catalog, give them a look and use the promo code
ricochet. How about that? I just used an ad with a guest,
never done before, Jack. It's been it's been eye opening and fun and
really a pleasure to talk to you about these things. And never thought about
it, never thought I would sit here and say is it real toil?
Like Peter saying? Or realtor it's like that tembler trembler thing. What is
it? We'll just call it macartel. The book, the book again,
Ladies and Gentlemen, is bringing Adam Smith into the American home the Case against
Home Ownership, And then there's forty seven wards that Peter added. Thank you
Jack for joining US comes out on April fifteenth, and you know we'll talk
to you down a little the road when we have the next property collapse,
we'll call you up. Thanks for hitting the good good to hit the book
on the way out. But the website for the firm for for Rex real
Estate is rex Holmes dot com. Rex Holmes dot com. Okay, check,
take care, Give to Texas is so great talking to both of you.
Thank you so much. Take care all right? See it and you
know I've James, you can't leave that house. You're a beautiful it's a
beautiful home. It was built by craftsmen as you have a beautiful yard,
the gazebo, the old, the old growth. Old growth is the wrong
term, but the established, the old, the big old trees, it's
just beautiful. I know it's thirty thirty forty trees. I have you know
what it costs to mow that bleep in line. I mean, I'm gonna
I'm again, I'm gonna say to my wife, I want to mow the
lawn this year. I want to buy a lawnmower and do it. And
she'll look at me and say, no, you won't do it. Though,
that's the problem. But I will, I will, I absolutely,
and it's I had to. I have a you know, a corner lot,
and it's so damned big. When was your house built? Nineteen fifteen,
nineteen fifty one of the first houses in the neighborhood in Tangletown that was
all plotted out, it used to be as a matter of fact, it
was a local businessman and politician owned the area and he had British investors,
so he named the street after a British politician, which I find interesting.
Nobody really in the neighborhood knows that it filled it filled it how many square
feet. It's a big, beautiful I mean, it's it feels like an
is. It feels substantial. It feels like a certain vision of America,
the teams the twenties of the last century. We I mean, the man
who built it was a candy maker. Minneapolis was a was a locus of
American candy innovation in the nineteen fifteens and twenties. And he was a guy,
I mean, the man who invented the you know, the Mars bar.
You've heard of, the Mars candy company, the Milky Way. Yes,
yes, lived down the street around the corner really, and the guy
who built my house made a ca and he called the Walnetto, which would
later be popularized on the laugh In television show many decades later, when Artie
Johnson, the pervy old man, would offer it to Ruth Buzzy, you
know, on a wallet out. But for years it was famous and he
made so much money on it. Eventually moved away after ten fifteen years or
so and left the house too, and they had four owners, and there's
a lot of history in it. No, I don't want to leave it.
But at the other hand, you know, you downsize and you look
at the room the child grew up in and it's now sort of a museum
to their youth that they've cast off themselves. You look at all of this
territory that you have to maintain and the rest of it. And you look
at your utility bills which are extraordinary, and the property taxes which are absolutely
crushing in a stake ulter fashion. And you know, my wife's looking saying,
I'd like to retire. Do we want? You know, at some
point, at some point, at some point it's going to be arn't for
us to get up the stairs. Now I'm you know we're both vital first
with rough American spirits, but you know, best case scenario is I can't
get upstairs. So I mean it's something that we've just been we've been thinking,
never wanted to do this, but that keeps you from making decisions that
perhaps you want to make. You know what I'm saying, And you know,
the thing that happens sometimes is that you don't actually know what you should
do. I mean, you know, you're going out tonight with friends,
and you know you're going to have a good time, and nice know you
might be fact for my fire alarm for this. This is fantastic. Came
back to it came back to interrupt James's segue, but just in time to
hear him say, I mean, I don't know if I'm going to keep
being able to keep get moving up the stairs. That's all I needed to
hear. Well, what Rob so efficiently derailed was the idea that sometimes you
go out and you know you're going to have a great time, and you
maybe are thinking about what's going to be waiting for you the next morning.
I let's face it, after in a night with drinks, you don't bounce
back the next day like you do as you age. Perhaps, so you
gotta make a choice. You can either have a great night or a great
next day. I don't like that choice, and that's why I'm happy.
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Thanks Zibiotics for sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Well, Rob, how is
your fire drills? You stand around outside with your with your hands in your
pockets waiting for the teacher. Yeah, I have to say I was that
guy. I was sort of like, it is stupid. I was in
the room and then I heard they long and get to hear maybe even heard
on the track went on and on and then and then they get knock find
the knocked on my doors. It's sir, okay, But I was that
guy. I was like exactly every firefighter's nightmare, the guy who's like I
don't smell smoke that guy, which doesn't. But it turns out, of
course that it was, you know, just I don't know what it was.
But then we should have stood outside it for a while. And then
the fire truck came and I am I was. I was angry, Joe
taxpayer saying, you know, I took about fifteen minutes without fire truck tour.
They must know it's also not real. But there you go. So
I have my grumpy old man fixed for the day. I mixed it.
I missed it. What it would sound like a really very interesting conversation.
Really. The only thing I was going to add to it was that I
have had my my most of my life as a homeowner or even renter,
has been in places surrounded by hippies, elderly hippies who bought their home near
me in the old days for no money and are now multimillionaires. At All
they do is complain about it and the idea of the of the the the
home as a slow moving but sure fire lottery ticket. It's going to be
very hard to unlock from people's brains and buying patterns. But yeah, I'm
not that it shouldn't be, but I just think it's going to be very
hard to try to convince people that this thing isn't going to be worth ten
million dollars someday. Isn't you said, isn't going to be Well, it
depends where it is and wood condition and all the rest of it. I
had a homeowner's smoke situation this morning when a smoke alarm and we got about
fifteen of them, went off. And the first thing and the first thing
I did when I heard it was pretend that it didn't happen, And the
second thing was to sort of gauge how tired I was. Can I sleep
through this? Because the process of walking through the house doing my bat like
echo location to find out which one of these damned things is doing it is
impossible. And so I went back to sleep, and I was. I
slept through its periodic chirping of the ceiling bird, only to wake and find
that my wife was already downstairs having coffee and breakfast and was particularly pleased at
all. And she said that, you know, she was woken up very
early in the morning by the smoke alarm, and I said yeah, And
she said, well, why didn't you fix it? And I said,
because I was, because because you, as you saw, I slept right
through it. Why didn't you fix it? Well, that's your job,
yes, yes, yes, right, it is my job to do these
things. And so I had replaced the batteries on every single smoke detector in
the house before we left, because the house sitter. I didn't want her
to wake up at two o'clock in the morning and have this happened to her.
As it happens, the house sitter did send me a little text saying
one of the smoke alarms is cheap? What do I do? And so
I sent her to get a battery and tell her what it was. Consequently,
I discovered that all the batteries that I had put into the smoke detectors
expired in twenty twenty three. They'd never been used, but apparently at some
point between November twenty three and March of twenty four, they all swooned,
took to the couch, drained, you know, like a consumptive from the
nineteenth century, pale and dead. And so there's nothing I could have done
when I finally found this smoke alarm that my wife was complaining about, and
that, to be fair, so was I it was a non standard battery
ever ready that went into it that I did not have an abundance, so
I couldn't have done anything about it anyway. But it's like, just take
the battery out, for heaven's sakes. I mean, honey, I've been
doing that for months. There's probably only three of these things in the house
that work anyway. Oh, I shouldn't have said that. So no,
anyway, if I'd rented, would the landlord have come by at four o'clock
in the morning to take the well? That that I have to say is
the appealing part of Jack's business. I don't. I mean, I don't
know how widely available it is. Maybe it's the only available in parts of
Texas. But rex real Estate, Jack started it as an alternative listing service
so that you could care, you could get out from underpaying the realtor's fees.
I don't know how that piece is going. But he's clearly at war
with the National Association of Realtors. But now they're starting a kind of home
management business where they'll take care of that appeals to So here's my confession.
The last time, the last time the ceiling bird I love that term started
chirping in the middle of the night. Robinson's solution to the problem was,
I went around the house and removed the battery from every single spoke only house.
And we have that we have been living with totally disabled. I would
yank them out of the ceiling if I could figure out how to do it.
Wait a minute, This is not the correct solutions, not the correct
It is the top of my form. It's the best I can do,
not the worst solution. By the way, I've got co two detectors everywhere
in the house. The guy came to the guy who came today to look
at my boiler, my high efficiency firm. I had a great conversation,
by the way, with the Canadians in the bar about my high efficiency.
First I showed them a picture of it because I'm so proud of the thing.
And the pipes are so gorgeous and they're copper. It's like this,
you feel those Canadian well they were just hey, hey, look at this
guy. He's got the Honeywell zones. Look at that. You know.
It was just just fantastic. Another thing that was that was fun. And
I'm sure rob and Peter you find yourself in the situation too, is that
you can talk to any if you if you read about everything, if you
follow the news, if you read the Twitter, if you just pay attention
to the world, there's a fighting chance you can start a convert You can
have a conversation with anybody about what they do because you know one thing,
right, or because you've heard one thing. So a couple of these guys,
I'm talking and I you know, what do you do? And they
said, well, we work at this big steel mill. Wow. And
so me and my cups standing there, you know, in this tropical night,
eighty degrees, wonderful breezes, you know, Tan wearing my white shirt,
and the rest of them casually says, so, how much of your
output is is you know, how much of your mature that you get to
these days is recycled? And their eyes light up. It's like, we
got a guy who knows about steel and on the way, well it's about
one hundred. And you know, the thing is is that even though the
qualities lower, wee can mill it to one point for you. And so
on they go, and it's great, and I learned something as opposed to
just saying oh that's interesting, I you know, seen pictures of Bethlehem back
in the old days. Anyway. So the guy who came in and looked
at me this morning and my stuff said, you usually start to get worried
if you got two hundred ppm of carbon carbon monoxide, the you got six
or something like that, you know, And he's patting me on the back
like I personally did it. But you know, yes, Peter, you're
right. The idea of having somebody to combine with the censors and the rest
of it, that's all well, great and past list because you don't because
when you see when you a leak, when you find something's wrong, there
is a there's a sense of financial dread that grips your heart with its cold
hand. And I understand that, I really do. But there's something to
be said for knowing I'm responsible for this, not the landlord. The nation
of renterers is not a nation of people who have who have it are involved
and connected as much as they are as as a nation of people who feel
responsible for something. Rob How has renting changed your life? Do you feel
a lesser American? Well, and it was no, I don't. I
don't at all. In fact, I feel unburdened, like it's not my
problem. It not being my problem is important thing. Look, I think
I having house is a great idea, and maybe it works. Maybe he
doesn't. And I had a house for a long time. But just at
a certain point, I have no put it this way, I don't feel
the tug to buy or own anything. I'm just trying to get through Dick's
Thursday. At this point, when my parents retired to their little retirement home,
I found my father sitting out on the deck and at the worst possible
time, because there was a guy who worked for the complex mowing the lawn
and it was loud, and what are you out here? And oh no,
I just like watching somebody else do it. Yeah, it must be
I get that. I really do. This year, for the first I
got my snowblower working up again because I got tired of paying these guys to
come and do it. And it's great because if i'd paid them, I
would have paid them every month to come and shovel nothing because we had no
snow. But at the end of the season we get dumped. We get
dumped and it's warm too, so it's heavy. It's the worst kind.
So I go down there and I start up the snowblower, which works this
year thanks to the son of the crazy my friend, the crazy Yuke,
who can fix bring any engine back to life anything. I mean, my
God, say, do you give this guy a rusty model tee that's been
sitting in the forest for seventy years. He'll have that thing tuned up and
going in five minutes. He's amazing. So the snowblower starts, and I
go into this mass of sowd and snow, and I end up writing a
column about it, which point I said that putting the snowblower into this slushy
bank was like eating a sodden pillow with your dentures out. And so what
happens is that line, which is just a throwaway line in a column,
somebody liked it, sent it to the New York Times, and it ends
up in Frank Brunie's roundup of Sentences of the Week in the New York Times,
right under a compendium of pieces from that idiot who wrote the piece in
the Atlantic magazine about hating cruise ships. Rob and I are always awarding you
the sentence of the week. Why is it that you wait until Frank BRUNEI
to mention this. I guess I don't know why. I really I don't
understand that, James, because I am old enough that, even though they
have squandered every single jot iota of their institutional GRAVI toss, I still regard
being quoted in the New York Times as something of an accomplishment. That's how
old I am. I remember, Oja, I remember that. You remember
and the New York Times, and then you remember Thomas Jefferson. Well you
go back a little bit farther than I. Let us bring our affairs to
a close here and remind you this is brought to you by the Ricochet Audio
Network. Joined Ricochet, right, Rob joined Ricochet. You're out there,
you know, get I'm out here, hustling man. I mean, yeah,
we we would if you enjoy this podcast and you're interested in keeping this
I we would love to have you join. And I'm not saying that if
we had commercials for Jack Ryan's company in a couple of weeks, it would
make us look like total shells. But maybe wait three or four months before
pitching those. Listen, No, that was I was just talking to it
five minutes ago. Oh good, Always on the hustle speaking of hustling,
hustle yourself over to Apple Podcast give us five star review. And while you're
out, to check out The Diner, which is my new podcast, well
new in the sense that it started in nineteen ninety seven when memories of OJ
were still fresh, and it has been going low these many years, and
thanks to the brilliant production work of EJ. Hill, actually gives you an
audio experience that's that's just grant. So yeah, go check. We do
not thank EJ. Hill often enough, all between his audio skills and his
photoshop skills and the rest of it, just the man holding together some creative
genius of Ricochet. And speaking of Ricochet to come, there will be more
Ricochet to come in a different web form, but just figuring out the bugs.
In the meantime. What exists is the site we love and know.
And then if you haven't joined, you should because it's the place you've been
looking for the same mostly civil mostly sent her right place on the internet,
Ricochet dot com. It's been grand being back together with you guys again,
and we'll see you next week. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet
four point oh next week. Next week, boys, next week, Pellas
Ricochet join the conversation.