project du jour

I've been over on my website on the book reviews pages, adding indices for the reviews here in the blog. I started with 2009 and am working my way backwards. It's a slow process; I'm not quite halfway through 2008. I expect it to take about a week to complete, but this might be optimistic.

intuition

R. and I had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation. I had a question about why I am so impatient -- specifically, where most people sometimes think things happen too quickly or too slowly, I almost universally think things happen too slowly. After a lot of discussion about decision making processes, he made a statement about how I decide things analytically, whereas most people do things intuitively. I've been told this kind of thing before, and it drives me nuts -- my _explanations_ are analytical, but the process is not.

It took me a couple hours, but I eventually figured out what the problem was. While the popular current understanding of intuition is "instinctive" and "not rational", the older idea of intuition is "looking over" or "knowing". I tend to think a lot about a lot of things, but particularly I tend to do a lot of "game-tree" thinking. I imagine in a lot of detail what might happen, and how I might respond. Then, when things happen, usually they are not exactly like what I imagined, but there are similarities, so I know quickly how I want to respond. Think of it as establishing a lot of domain knowledge. But it isn't a matter of, something happens, then I analyze it, weigh it, whatever. All that thinking happened ahead of time, when the moment comes, I just know.

Sometimes, the just knowing is utterly incomprehensible to me at the time. For example, my mother-in-law was really concerned about the lack of sidewalks at the house we are buying. I _knew_ it did not matter. It turned out that there _were_ sidewalks under all the snow. But I realized eventually that I _knew_ that if you buy in walking distance of shops and stuff like that, then things like sidewalks will work out. But if you buy a long distance from desirable things to walk to, all the sidewalks in the world will not get you out and about on them. Sidewalks are not the correct thing to make a decision on; distance from the shops (library, work, etc.) is the relevant consideration. But I just _knew_ -- it took me days to realize _why_ I knew.

The answer to the why-am-I-impatient question is considerably more complicated. It involves both the prepackaged domain knowledge/intuition thing (instead of waiting until the situation arrives, and then needing time to adapt), and a personal quirk in that I feel a very strong sense of agency and control over my environment. If I don't like the way things are around me, I very aggressively try to change them and in general, I'm fairly successful. Both these traits result in me tolerating a very rapid pace of change -- unless I'm surprised. When I'm surprised, all hell breaks lose. ;-)

checking in on the Boston Real Estate Now blog

I quit reading, because I just couldn't stand one of the people who posted regularly, and the commenters got kinda repetitive.

The usual debate continues: are prices too high? Are they going to drop? How much and when and how much does where matter. Blah, blah, bleeping blah.

This comment, by someone who wants to sell her house, caught my eye:

http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/blogs/renow/2009/02/inventory_is_do.html

She says her house is valued at 600K, asking 400K. In the house for about twenty years, here's the work they did on it during that time:

"We've put in 40k in a new kitchen 10 years ago and 15k in the last two years for new roof, outside painting & septic system."

Got news for ya: a 10 year old kitchen remodel is done. You don't get anything for it. Particularly in a 45 year old house. She didn't mention a bathroom redo -- who knows how old those are. If _only_ 15K has gone into a new roof, painting and a septic system, I gotta be worried about this place. Assuming there are at least 2 bathrooms, I would expect to have to shell out for a new kitchen within five years (60K+), both bathrooms possibly before moving in (probably 50K+ between the two, and that's assuming there are no horrifying surprises). It'll need new paint within ten, whether you did it or not, and it sounds like they cheaped it up. Hopefully they didn't cheap out on the septic. So, _yeah_ the buyers want a discount. Have you _heard_ of depreciation? That's what property _does_.

Everyone expects this shit gets more valuable over time. Got news for you: only if you maintain it. And I don't mean sweeping and mopping.

home inspection

We hired a home inspector. We picked ours based on R.'s friends who were buying -- we picked the pickiest guy we could locate. Surprise! Turns out a lot of deals that might have gone through during the boom with no inspection contingency are dying these days because the inspection turns up a problem that the seller and buyer cannot negotiate around.

_That_ slows a market right down. In a good way.