I've been sitting on this blog for a few weeks. I guess it's fine to post it now. I didn't want to upset the murky waters of unethical business practices that I've been wading through for the past few months. I just want to establish myself in my new house and let the dust settle around me. I'm in it now, so things written below in the present tense were actually written some time ago. In short, our realtor and the seller's realtor collaborated to put us into a position where we had to use a certain lender, and that lender frequently made "mistakes" on our loan estimates, in favor of the lender and realtors. If it weren't for Chowon's tedious attention to detail, we'd be suckers. If I didn't have so many other issues to attend to, I might consider getting a consultation with a lawyer. The rest of the rant is about various superfluous and wasteful details of the buying process.

We're buying a house, and I'm convinced that the real-estate system is broken. To advertise that you wish to sell a house, you put it on MLS. In order to buy a house on MLS, you have to engage with a realtor. Realtors have to pay for certification, "qualifying" them to look at MLS, and when you use them you have to pay them a percentage of the purchase price of your house. The law and MLS seem to have been established by realtors for the sole purpose of perpetuating the realtor profession, by limiting the options of sellers and buyers.

Also, I feel like I'm in a war of attrition with my loan officer (not telling who, but they surely weren't very fair in their way of handling things). My agent, without my consent, had a loan officer from a local lender contact the seller's agent and promise to close the deal quickly if we went with him. So the seller wrote that lender's name into a counter offer. Now, I'm stuck with this lender who never returns my calls, in spite of the grand claims to great customer service that he initially gave us when he was trying to woo us away from Wells Fargo. (We had a nice, responsive, clear-communicating, wonderful loan officer at Wells Fargo). He says he'll match Wells Fargo's interest rate, but when we get the estimate he does it by making us pay for points. Well, the closing cost still isn't that bad, so we're willing to eat the points, but the APR is way higher than Wells Fargo's for lower cost to close. We run the numbers, and the APR we calculate using his figures is way lower than what's on the quote -- what does that mean? Hidden/undisclosed fees! So we tell him we want him to match APR. He says "ok", and then sends us back a loan estimate which has no changes except that it doesn't list the APR, and has no points, but the cost of the points was moved into the "documentation fee". What kind of game is he playing? I don't get it! It's driving me crazy. I can't wait for this process to be over.

The U.S. real estate system is a racket. I hate it. Real estate agents are a non-necessary component in society; they're professional middle-men. They are not motivated for the best interest of either seller or buyer, but simply to make the deal happen so that they can get paid. To that end, they limit communication between buyer and seller by imposing themselves as the only legal channel for communication, they pressure both buyer and seller to limit due diligence and utilize unscrupulous local-lenders. Their added-value is outweighed by their uncheckable pursuit of self-interest. It's so bad, we recently yelled at our agent for telling us (for like the 100th time) that we had to try to submit our BINSR before the last day of our due diligence period in order to make the seller more comfortable, after he went on vacation for 5 days of our due diligence and there was nobody to let us into the house during that time, and every time he did let us into the house he complained about the distance he had to travel to help us. "I live like an hour away from here, guys." The only responsible thing to do is keep working at due diligence for the full ten days! What kind of seller would be uncomfortable with that? It's in black and white on the contract! In truth, the reason we went with this agent was because he lead into the deal with some talk about his experiences at church -- we thought, "he's Christian, he'll act with integrity". Christians, we've got to act in a way that matches Christ's teachings.

And what's the point of Escrow anyway? We have to pay them to let us put our money into an account, so that they can move our money into another account on our behalf. They're professional middle-men; it's a waste, a hindrance, a burden on society. Not only that, but we also have to buy insurance from them, to protect us in case they make a mistake on our title -- a mistake which may very well be in their own favor! We're paying the fox to protect the chickens.

Last gripe in this rant: we're about to start paying property taxes. If we don't pay them, the government takes our land. You know what that means? It means we don't own the land. We're just leasing it from the government. That being the case, why does purchase of land have to be put in public record? That practice is an artifact from a time when land ownership mattered, because a land owner had an immovable vested interest in the country's well-being. Nowadays, land-ownership is a financial tool and nothing more. Property taxes are theft; it's unconstitutional, not to mention un-Biblical.

Here's the system I propose: Evenly redistribute ownership of land permanently to every citizen, and allow those citizens to rent the land out to others (including businesses) at will, for contract periods not exceeding 7 years before renewal, but do not allow any permanent transfer of land-ownership. Permanent sale of land should only be allowed to freely happen inside fixed-sized ("walled") cities, which land was excluded from the redistribution. The ability to permanently sell land inside walled cities guarantees their commercial value, and so the cities can theoretically be placed anywhere at all, regardless of natural-resource availability. Land outside of a walled city is only transferable from that land's permanent owner to his or her spouse, children, or next-of-kin (in that order) by a Last Will and Testament (at time of his/her death). Let's implement that system, and all the other Biblical laws along with it.

"Over production, waiting time, transportation, motion, over processing, inventory, and defects."