[anxvariety]

ConocoPhillips 2Q Profit Surges 65 Pct – ConocoPhillips Reports $5.1 Billion in Second-Quarter Income

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060726/earns_conocophillips.html?.v=6

[anxvariety]

Cardiff is probably the most disproportiately inexpensive for it’s location based on my non-scientific observations… Not many new houses so most have been owning for a long time so they can afford to rent stuff out at attractive rates.. It may have been an anomoly the few times I’ve looked and lived there, but it might be worth checking out…

On a side note, I felt that people were also abnormaly unfriendly in Cardiff! That might be a personal experience as well!

[anxvariety]

Just watch out for the dead cat bounce.. my understanding is that it’s better to wait for an obvious fundamentally strong correction before entering the market.. the % gain you miss out on is small compared to the risk you have to take trying to guess where the bottom is.

You can also do what powayseller and some others are doing.. that is sign a longer than normal rental agreement say 2 years or so.. by that you can sometimes lock in your price counting that the rental rate will go up.

For me, I always go month to month.. I prefer paying a premium for the flexibility of being able to move whenever I want.

For the people that haven’t heard the dead cat term before:
A dead cat bounce is a term used in market economics to describe a pattern wherein a moderate rise in the price of a stock follows a spectacular fall, with the connotation that the rise does not indicate improving circumstances. It is derived from the notion that “even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce

[anxvariety]

Won’t they keep raising prices until demand peters out? Then the cartels know they have a ‘market’ price.

Funny how most people feel as though they are being unfairly treated or as if emotion is going to change the prices… too bad they slept through economics. When I hear people complaining to gas station clerks, it scares me.. not sure why, I guess the level of ignorance or wondering what drugs theyre on?

[anxvariety]

Never??? What kind of ads? Bankruptcy ads? In that case, the newspaper would love to run the column! I tend to dance around in paranoia-land at times.. but I don’t see small newspapers(uniontrib, nctimes) as being really that clever and I often see plenty of stuff tucked away in the newspaper that don’t serve it’s interests… Plus newspapers have to be careful not to seem too dictator-like or they make lose their readers trust.. A little column like this would be fine.. since it would do little to sway the sheeple anyways, would just provide content satisfying an even more diverse audience.. I would think the only problem is, the real estate winds will blow for a year or two.. and then all will be quiet. There were sites alot like this back in the dot com days that just fizzled out when all the dust settled.

What Rich is doing with his brokerage license is great.. he probably doesn’t want to paint himself into a corner with this site.. when the mania is over he can take his brokerage license(is that what you recently got?) and experience he’s got from this site and move into whatever new or old markets sprout up..

[anxvariety]

I think any job would require more impartiality and objective point of view than I’ve seen on average in the forum.. and as Rich says ‘bring data!’.. Perhaps if you want to do strongly opinionated more speculative peices you can get a column in the paper. Try North County Times?

Rich, I’ve been using AdSense for about 2+ years now.. pretty much since it started – I was actually working at TEC and tried to tell Brett(your buddy who told me about this site) about AdSense, but he was too busy trying to brown nose the execs 🙂 There are people who reportedl make several million a year from AdSense, there are also people who make several pennies per month 🙂

The best site I’ve found for SEM and SEO was webmasterworld.com – I haven’t been reading up on it for a long time(expert now jk) so if the site is 404 sorry!

[anxvariety]

She’s got a lot of great skills that are pretty clear from her posts. I’m sure something good will come of it.

Yes she does.. it’s obvious this is something she’s passionate about.. I was just making sure we weren’t forgetting about Rich, he is obviously the pioneer here..

[anxvariety]

Rich is right it’s hard to make money.. I run a few sites of which have eclipsed my salary in earnings, but that’s a whole science and sometimes it involves specializing in niche subjects you may not be interested in.

I think the money is in what Zeal and Chris J do.. that’s writing newsletters.. Zeal doesn’t even push private connsulting because their time is better spent doing newsletters.. if you want some private consulting from Zeal though it’s like $500 an hour plus travel expenses(Adam Hamilton lists his prices on the site).

[anxvariety]

Powayseller, with all due respect.. most of us on this board are just parrots on Rich’s coattails..

I run a few message boards and there are users that are sorta like forum janitors that point people in the right direction when they are looking for information. I have helped a few of these people start their own sites, and none of them have worked out.. some of these people feel like stars because they are praised on boards for parroting or helping people find links..

Short version.. why not do what Piggy is doing, take a leap, take a position on something and publish a site.. Rich’s site is very popular for what it is and it has only been growing, but he’s put ALOT of time into this, and most of your reputation on this forum is from regurgitating information that he so brilliantly and creatively assimilated over a year ago. Even Rich has said he doesn’t want to use this site to build his business(I think he said that at least). I would think the classy thing to do is to give credit where credit is due, Rich for the massive amount of work he’s put into this site.. and look at him for inspiration or guidance. Isn’t Rich getting his stock brokers license? Maybe you’d be good with that, but it involves more than posting on a forum in your free time.

[anxvariety]

It’s not like these people have built any equity.. the whole reason they got into an ARM was to make the loan possible.. why would the loan companies now refinance them into a less profitable loan when it looks as though times are about to get rough/less collateral?

[anxvariety]

In response to my own question about how much land the Vessels own:

“Frank “Scoop” Vessels III established the original Vessels Stallion Farm in Orange County, and built the Los Alamitos Race Course, with Frank Jr. taking over the business when his father died. He sold the properties in 1984 to buy 2800 acres in Bonsall.”

If you look up the Vessels ranch, there’s a huge vacant area around it.

[anxvariety]

My friend has 2.5 acres he’s selling in Bonsall.. his property backs up to a HUGE lot.. I asked him who owned the lot and his repsonse was.. some kid(30) named Kash Vessels? and he’s supposedly the largest VACANT LAND owner in San Diego county.. I guess his dad, Frank “Scoop” Vessels, owned some LA racetrack, sold it, and bought most of the land in Bonsall making him the largest land holder in San Diego county(I haven’t confirmed this, and I’m not sure my friend has either).

Anyone know anything about this? How much land do they own?

[anxvariety]

People proably figure their debt delinquincies are semi-private, and in the past they could just re-fi if they couldn’t afford to pay off their debt.. at some point people are going have to swallow pride and file for bankruptcy… or cut their losses and move somewhere they can afford..surely people won’t take the pride swallowing in stride, so what is going to be the scapegoat? What is going to be the trendy thing to blame here? If everyone starts blaming the same things, it will seem like they are victims of an outside force rather than victims of irresponsibility and greed…

[anxvariety]

I didn’t take it that way. I just hired an appraisal company to do the appraisal… I don’t think they took the shopping center into consideration, because I don’t know that there was knowledge of it at that time.. they looked at comps mostly.

I guess there was a bidding war of sorts, mostly between two buyers.. they kept raising their offers and yeah it sold for a good chunk more than we listed it for.. I guestimated what that difference was in an earlier post so I don’t want to guess gain incorreclty. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell it.. I just wanted to list it and let the offers come in over 6 months and see what the market thought about the land, but after being on the market for about 20 days I decided to accept an offer because it sounded good to me.. especially since LA times started publishing real estate slowdow type stories.

There wasn’t a whole lot of skill invovled.. I was just posting this as a positive experience with buying and selling land, and a few of the techniques I used.. if it were a sure pattern I’d already have done it again by now. Lately I’ve been investing in energy options as reccomended by some of the newsletters I subscribe to.. it’s scarier than the buying land, but the gains have been smiliar so far… I’m going to lower my options positions a little bit tomorrow if they aren’t going up.. sure oil is up and everything, but I don’t like owning stuff at record levels or during the begginigns of a possible new world war 🙂

[anxvariety]

Bugs, it’s hard to say we had lots of offers and RE agent kept increasing price until there were only 2 bidders left… one outbid the other by a couple thousand on the last offer. Also, after I had bought they started building a Stater Brothers and shopping center in the area.. before that the nearest shopping center was like 15-20 miles away.

I wouldn’t buy land if I had no idea when the utitilities were going to be close.. if it were reasonable that they will be in within 1-2 years I will consider buying.. but who knows, every situation is diff and I still haven’t had a losing experience in that market yet – so I don’t consider myself experienced.

Powayseller, as you know the good investors can make money in any kind of market.. just because we’re in a recession doesn’t mean there won’t be any growth.. there just wont be enough for everyone to make a killing like California the last few years.. I predict some desert areas(don’t know much about Yuma) will explode upwards as some of the bubble cities are deflating… maybe these commercial lots that the financial advisor knows of will benefit.

[Author]

Posts