Ask CandysDirt: Shall We Put Our Home on the Market BEFORE or AFTER the November Elections?

Candy: We have a lovely home to sell in a hot area — Park Cities — “blue chip” as you call it, but is now a good time to sell or shall we wait until after the election?”

If that isn’t the million dollar question, and the reason why we may be seeing a slight pulling back in the market. Financial markets hate uncertainty. Real estate investors like to buy when they are “going up the stairs”, not down. So I decided to run this because I think a lot of people out there are wondering the very same thing: if you want to sell by year’s end, should you do it NOW or AFTER the election?

My take: Try NOW. Who knows what will happen after November 1. This is, without doubt, the wackiest election in our nation’s history. While we are all amazed that Donald Trump has made it thus far — I have to give top Dallas political consultant Carol Reed credit, she called it last fall! — the best entertainment is waking up each day to see what the bejesus he has said now. Odds are Hillary Clinton will win the election, and so maybe we can look to the policies of her husband’s administration to see what happened. There are those who claim the Housing Crisis of 2008 took root during the Clinton years:

Simply put, the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by a lot of banks making a lot of loans to a lot of people who either could not or would not pay the money back. But this explanation raises two key questions. Why did private lenders, whose job it was to assess credit risk, make those loans? And why did the army of financial regulators, with massive enforcement powers, allow 28 million high-risk loans to be made?

There’s a strong case that the answers can be traced to Sept. 12, 1992. On that day presidential candidate Bill Clinton proposed, in his campaign book “Putting People First,” using private pension funds to “invest” in government priorities, such as affordable housing, to “generate long-term, broad based economic benefits.” Seldom has such a radical proposal been so ignored during a campaign only to later lead to such devastating consequences.

This was penned by former Republican Senator Phil Gramm and Mike Solon, a Republican economic advisor, so who knows.

Ye gads, had we used pension funds to back mortgages…

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros assured participants that “pension investments in affordable housing are as safe as pension investments in stocks and bonds. Six pension funds ultimately agreed to invest in public housing that was backed by $100 million in federal grants and guarantees, but the program never took off. In the end, even unions and their pension funds rejected the effort to direct any part of their retirement savings toward someone else’s welfare.”

I don’t know, our market is very strong in the under $500K realm. A little softer $2m and above, but well priced homes are selling. Of course they could tinker with it all in the name of creating government-backed affordable-housing goals. Again. As the authors said, “conflicted laws created conflicted regulations and conflicted regulators. Safety and soundness considerations required that regulators step on the brake. Affordable-housing goals required them to step on the gas. Government policy tried to make private wealth serve both government and private purposes. But wealth cannot serve two masters, and in the end the government was the dominant master.”

But that would take at least three years for repercussions from any policies started in 2017.

I say, get it listed now, make it as pretty as possible, and get it sold. What do you say?