That may sound like a contrarian view, but it’s really not. It’s born out by the fundamentals of the local market. The Woodlands and surrounding areas in north Houston, north Harris County, and south Montgomery County are all currently holding value extremely well, for well-maintained, updated conventional homes, move-in ready. These same homes should continue to hold their value with a recovering credit market buttressing mortgage availability and a push with big new businesses continuing to head our way, including the new Exxon campus in north Spring.

But fundamentally it’s important to remember how the Houston Metro area housing economics work: when demand rises, supply rises. Because of our geography with no barriers to sprawl, and with growing infrastructure such as improving highways and the third loop under construction to support that outer growth, we can expect this phenomenon to continue.

And that means sellers should not expect a significant bump in future pricing other than what we would normally see consistent with past cycles. The Woodlands and surrounding Spring, Magnolia, Montgomery, and Conroe markets are subject to the rising demand, rising supply effect.

I wouldn’t expect any area and any home to see even a 10% rise in value in the coming 5 to 7 years. Considering the costs of not moving, effect on quality of living, and carrying costs associated with the delay (including passing up on opportunities in today’s market), there’s just not a compelling chance to take in our view. So we see no reason for sellers to hesitate in the current (relatively strong) market.

The demand-supply effect is markedly different here in Houston and The Woodlands Greater areas than on the east and west coasts, for example, where the coastal geography and older infrastructure limits sprawl, and therefore rising demand leads to rising prices, not rising supply.

So in five years here, existing housing stock will be five years older, and brand new homes and subdivisions will continue to be under development to meet demand, and existing housing stock will continue to compete with the new developments of the day.

There are ample reasons why existing homes are a better value than brand new homes, so new homes aren’t always a threat in general to existing homes, but that’s a separate post for another day…

Phone: (281)288-0500

Email: staff@windvalepethospital.com

The following is a video of two Corvettes drag racing on The Woodlands Pkwy on Thanksgiving Day. The outcome is, well, nothing to be thankful for…

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The Waterway in the Woodlands. A great place to grab a bite to eat, enjoy an adult beverage, see a movie, do a little shopping, or take a relaxing walk.

In other words, it’s time to have a larger discussion about the relationship of the kind of economy we want and how we want to live as a society, the kind of conversation that was so animated by the threat of communism in the 20th century. From the professors:

Another downside to the “dentistry” approach to economics is that important pieces of human experience can easily fall from sight. The government does not cut an abstract entity called “government spending” but numerous spending programs, from veterans’ benefits and homeland security to Medicare and Medicaid. To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.

Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.

Wherever one may come out in such a discussion is not the point. The point is that we live in sufficiently complex times that the question of “government spending” and “debt” are too general to address the point Americans might rather be having, namely, the kind of society we want to live in, and how best to structure our system of capitalism to achieve those ends.

To that end, I have to plug a fantastic book 20 years in the making by the pioneering economist and Harvard Business School professor (emeritus), and my favorite professor from my time there, Professor Bruce Scott. His new book is entitled, Capitalism: Its Origins and Evolution as a System of Governance. Professor Scott’s book is a good place to start for just such thinking and discussion called for above. Professor Scott emailed me the prologue, but the book is now available on Amazon (I’m waiting on my copy). Here’s a tiny part of the prologue:

Today Wal-Mart is truly an icon of successful US capitalism. At the same time, with its vast purchasing budget and influence as an employer, Wal-Mart also represents the power of the private sector to potentially abuse the system. As in this case, Wal-Mart, like other firms even a fraction of its size, can hire a platoon of lawyers and thereby outspend and overwhelm local zoning boards made up of elected officials who typically depend upon outside legal counsel. The latter must ask their electorates to pay for legal counsel in order to defend their interests, a request that potentially pits the short-term interests of a mobile fraction of the population against the long-term interests of other fractions, some with histories dating back two or even three hundred years. How adequate is it, then, for these towns to retain nominal authority over zoning when, given their small size, they cannot practically exercise it? Potential new arrivals can simply circumvent the rules these towns set by developing their stores just across the town line. Radical decentralization may have been a stroke of genius in 1787, when the local governments were of similar scope as the entrepreneurs who served the town, but today no such balance of power exists. US capitalism has vested great economic power in its large firms to achieve great results, not least in terms of increased selection and lower prices, but it has done so in a context where the firms’ corresponding charters of incorporation do not require them to take into consideration how their actions affect the welfare of the communities that they affect. Since the Civil War, and still more since 1980, this lack of explicit responsibility to the community at large has implicitly oriented the mandate of US firms towards enhancing shareholder wealth. In turn, this focus on enriching a small minority of the population has become a distinctive aspect of American capitalism and is, in fact, an attribute that I will consider in some detail in this book.

… The author is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and has done extensive research and teaching in the field of economic strategies of nations.

But I can’t stop the leaf blowers. Second only to the ice cream truck, leaf blowers are the most sound-intrusive and annoying sounds of modern life. Sure they’ve been around since the 80′s and some before, but their ubiquitous use by lawn services and others has become an issue some communities are now addressing. It’s not the gas motors driving pollution claims; rather it’s the noise and potential of blowing up allergens into the air. Come on. They’re great to use, but the loud persistent scream can be unnerving to say the least. Hopefully battery-powered blowers will help.

Meanwhile, as this Brookline, MA community struggles with the ban, so are other communities across the country.

His goal, he explained at a previous meeting on the subject, was noise reduction. Contractors will often use gas-powered leaf blowers year-round, which cause a lot of noise, and are likely in violation of an existing town bylaw about noise.

On Sunday’s CBS Sunday Morning this past Sunday, they did an entire segment on the issue and I was glad to see it.

I think the noise aspect is the primary driver of attention to this issue, and I know I’m planning to raise it with my HOA Board. How is this different than lawn mowers? Mowers aren’t as loud, the pitch is lower (growls are easier to hear than screams), and they’re most loud only in the front yard. In the fall especially, moving leaves takes more power, more time, and the leaf blowing is almost always in common areas such as driveways, front yards, and streets. But frankly I don’t like the noise of gas lawn mowers either; but there’s no easy substitute for mowing like there is for leaf blowing: rakes and brooms.

This industry has changed and is still in the midst of changing, nobody needs to tell you that. But what’s unique right now in this industry is that nobody’s quite figured out where the industry goes from here or how. Well, we’ve figured it out. And it wasn’t hard. Because it’s who we are and who we’ve been – and how we’ve weathered this historic period with the persistent loyalty of clients we served in the years before the crisis started. We didn’t take easy options, and we didn’t go chasing rainbows. We dismissed the never-ending succession of shiny objects trying to distract us. We kept our heads down. We tried to stay disciplined. We knew our survival was vested in our clients and nothing else. And we knew our integrity was the most valuable asset we could ever have.

Now we’re embarking on the new era. With new confidence in our down-to-basics approach and systems we’ve developed to support agents based on that approach, we embark on a new era in the industry and for our company. In a time when brokerages are having an ever harder time justifying their value and with their brands eroding, we know how it should be. And with us, this is how it should be. Industry-leading training, mentoring programs, unparalleled broker support and leveraging of new technology that’s remaking not just our industry, but businesses worldwide – it all adds up and is put together – not for “the next big thing” – but for the next era of companies in this business that are built-to-last.

We’re ready. Are you? If so, talk to us. Together let’s create more value for clients than this industry has ever seen. Let’s lead the way into the next era. Join us.

As Matthew Herper wrote in Forbes about Jobs’ decision:

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking,” Isaacson told 60 Minutes. “We talked about this a lot. He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn’t always produce one.

There’s more here than just the simple lesson that people with cancer should listen to their doctors about getting their tumor cut out, or that you can’t cure cancer with diet or acupuncture, as Jobs apparently hoped he could. The kind of innovation Steve Jobs practiced, probably the type of innovation we mythologize and lionize most since personal computers started changing the fabric of society three decades ago, does not and has not translated to medicine in the same way.

I find this analysis both revealing and fascinating. This is not a case of lazy journalism, but thoughtful and provocative analysis and reporting.

Contrast that with a story I caught this morning about Green Tea extract and its effect on Alzheimers. The article itself to the general reader and no-doubt forthcoming headlines promulgated in other media will probably lead people to drink more green tea in the belief new proof confirms it helps prevent Alzheimer’s. That may be true in the end, but that’s not at all what this article suggests.

IT MAY sound like a strange brew, but green tea and red light could provide a novel treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Together, the two can destroy the rogue “plaques” that crowd the brains of people with the disease. The light makes it easier for the green-tea extract to get to work on the plaques.

In journalism and news, it is common practice to put the most important information in the first paragraph and work down from there. I’m not sure I would have started there, but okay. Here’s the trickier part and harder for the lay person to make sense of:

The team bathed brain cells containing beta-amyloid in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) – a green-tea extract known to have beta-amyloid inhibiting properties – at the same time as stimulating the cells with red light.

The most hilarious and insightful response I could find to this article was from Mark Sumner at the snarky liberal blog DailyKos.com:

That’s right, soaking your brain in green tea and, um, shining a red laser inside your skull, can clear up the plaques related to Alzheimer’s, but needless to say, getting this to an actual treatment is still a ways off.

So by all means enjoy your green tea, but please don’t stop seeing your doctor. And now you can be wary of follow-on headlines sure to come.

Finally, and more importantly to me, if media distort perceptions and try to simplify complicated scientific matters to the point of utter dissemination of the original underlying complex facts, just imagine what the media are doing with regard to economics… and the housing market.

Thank you for your understanding as we continue to tweak and build out content in the first couple of weeks of the new launch!

Colleagues that have been in commercial real estate as long are often surprised at just how complicated brokering residential deals has truly become. Residential brokering has become as complex as commercial used to be. It’s a funny thing, but my commercial deals in some ways are more simple in process than our residential deals.

Today simple “feasibility periods” common to commercial real estate contracts are more simple than the “Option Period” process under residential contracts. Years ago, the State of Texas decided that instead of an inspection “pass/fail” process, rather we would use an “Option right,” or rather, a contractual option to a “Right to Terminate” that is unrestricted, usually used for Buyers to conduct inspections and negotiate for repairs. It’s like buying an option right on a commodities exchange. (That’s actually a derivative!) The Buyer pays the Seller usually $100 in exchange for the unrestricted right to terminate the contract – meaning for any reason or no reason at all – within a time window, usually the first 10 days. During that time, referred to as “the Option Period,” usually Buyers conduct inspections of the property they have under contract, and if the Buyer concludes the property needs any repairs or treatments, the Buyers may request those of the Seller, but the Seller is not obligated to do anything requested of them. So these Buyer requests are done with the implicit threat of exercising their option to terminate the deal if the Seller doesn’t accommodate the Buyer. Neither side necessarily has more power; the negotiations are usually a normal process with a reasonable compromise between the parties to move forward.

Get this: due to contract law/theory, if the Buyer doesn’t pay the Seller for the Option Period, then the Option Period is invalid. That is a mistake an agent and their broker never want to face. If an agent forgets to advise their Buyer to fill in the amount or doesn’t fill it in for them when the documents are drawn up, an agent could technically forfeit the option right for their client. Yikes.

That’s actually one of the far less complicated aspects of current residential purchase processes. If an agent is “old school” in their practice and haven’t kept up, there are new dangers in a very competitive market that could cost their clients thousands if not handled with utmost skill and knowledge of their agent and broker. That’s why consumers must take utmost care when choosing an agent and brokerage to represent them in these very complicated times with fast-moving, highly consequential changes.