Is An Hour of Your Life Worth More or Less Than 25 Cents?
More Details on Parking Meter Changes This Month
And Another New Year's Eve Party Debacle
What is the HushGalleria Mansion?
Morning Roundup: Smoke and Mirrors Edition
The news today is as cheery as the weather is dreadful. These Zephyrian blasts that are pushing you and me around as we try to cross the District's long avenues? They are blowing in resumes, signing bonuses, and real estate speculators!
The Washington Post reports that Deloitte, which has a new headquarters in the old (current?) Corporative Executive Board in Rosslyn, has issued a quarterly survey of U.S. employers. Their findings are upbeat. A huge boom in federal hiring is predicted for the New Year. Deloitte also says that the timing may be right to leave your job, if you've got one. Better still, more than one-fourth of surveyed employers plan to increase pay this year, and employers are discussing bonuses -- signing bonuses, referral bonuses, performance bonuses -- without sneering in sarcasm.
Is the Great Recession over? The Washington Business Journal asked some prominent area business leaders, and many of them indicated that the District had good reason to be optimistic: "“I think it’s going to be probably late this year." "The recovery has already begun." "The panic is already subsiding." "In D.C., we’ve basically already hit that point."
And count among the 10,000 residents who came to the District in 2009 those investors making all-cash offers on the supply-heavy housing market. The Washington Post reports that their arrival may signal that the housing market has finally hit bottom, at least in this region:
Investors have reemerged with brute force in the Washington region's real estate market over the past few months, triggering bidding wars in some neighborhoods teeming with foreclosed properties and hindering traditional home buyers. . . .
Is this a healthy market? It seems like the answer is yes. If houses are being sold increasingly to investors who buy with all-cash offers, that increases the strain on buyers who must compete with one another for credit and homes. So investors frustrate would-be homeowners. That said, they are investing with all-cash offers and not credit, meaning that the market seems to have arrived at an actual value for homes in the areas and that the market has learned the lesson of the credit-enabled home flipper. Better jobs will better suit homeowners to buy these investment properties and from new homeowners flow all sorts of economic benefits into a community.
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I doubt the housing market has hit bottom. Let's see what happens when the government subsidies go away.
Well, I won't feel secure until they start giving $800k mortgages to unemployed people who can't speak a word of English.
CEB is happily in the Waterview building in Rosslyn.
All I know that homes in my neighborhood are going under contract in weeks instead of months, with prices around 2004 levels...and fewer hobos.
I wonder how much they want for that patch of leaves in the picture.
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Sign me up!
At last, the Nation's long, painful nightmare of thrift is over and we can resume blowing money we don't got on $h!t we don't need. This is the birthright of every American who speaks with the tongue that Foghorn Leghorn and Huey Long gave him. FYI, that's me throwing money off the back of the train. It's an old hobo lure. Them's good eatin. Now, hobo's a might greasy, but you'd be downright suprised at how subtle the flavor is, particularly when you're starving to death.
Whoo hoo!! Time to get that fur sink, electric dog polisher and gasoline powered turtleneck sweater!!
I want a pooper-scooper, H Street model.
You're the reason why we have global warming. I urge you to reconsider your carbon footprint and its impact on future generations and purchase a fake fur sink, solar dog polisher, and biodiesel turtleneck sweater. You should also be conserving water and toiletpaper by only flushing once a week and using corncobs, respectively.
Psh. Water toilets are so aughties. In the teens, everyone will use The Incinolet, the world's finest electric incinerating toilet.
The problem with incinerating feces, or even using an Intrinsic Field Subtractor, is that while you may be able to atomize your waste, it inevitably re-integrates to form a ghostly blue Dr. Manhattan-style Superturd.
a ghostly blue Dr. Manhattan-style Superturd
Or, as we call it in official Washington, Rep. John Linder (R-GA).
I'll use this influx of cash to buy BumperNuts for all police K-9 vehicles.
Perhaps I'm just not that hip or cool (anymore), but reading the tea leaves here I'm not so certain that a bunch of investors outbidding others and paying cash for homes is a good thing. What is this--lather, rinse, repeat?
You are right. Reading tea leaves is not hip.
I thought they read tea leaves every Tuesday at the Looking Glass Lounge. Have they moved on to something else?
Agreed. For divination purposes, you just can't beat extispicy. Just ask the Hittites. Too bad they couldn't predict their own downfall. Next time I'm carving up a pidgeon, I'll be sure to check out its gall bladder and get back to you.
I was talking socially the other day with someone who works for the OPM. Up to 40% of the Federal Government will be retiring in the next few years as the Baby Boomers call it quits.
That means a lot of new people coming into the area to fill the jobs left vacant by the retirees.
That also means more businesses coming into the area and hiring people to cater to the spending of the younger generation of government workers.
Just because they're eligible for retirement doesn't mean they're going to take it. For those oldsters who lost a big chunk of their 401ks, it isn't an option anymore.
rAmen. I know several older Feds who are eligible to retire who haven't yet done so because of the economy and what it did to their TSP and other investments.
There's no Piece of Mind for the Boomers.
If you're gonna die, die with your boots on.
The same person told me that among this generation of government retirees they were given a choice ( decades ago ) between an older system of a government pension or a new system of a 401k/Social Security.
About half stuck with the pension and are in great shape to retire.
Again, this is about 40% of the Federal Government getting ready to retire. Assuming 1/2 of that group chose the safe retirement plan, that the bulk of them live in the DC Area, that the bulk of them will want to move out of the area upon retirement and you have a big spike in real estate activity coming...
what if they don't want to move?
Thats their first career, the consultant career is next so that's another 10-15years. Out of all the people in my office that retired in the last 5 years I say less than 20% actually moved out of the area, the other 80% are working for someone else.