Once upon a time, houses were for living in. Now they’re a form of currency and if you have several of them you’re a right smug bastard. If you don’t have any, you’re fucked.
We don’t own our house because I refuse to pay an extra thirty grand over what its worth just because the present owner knocked down the wall between the shitter and the shower. It used to be the only reason you did that was because you liked the smell of shit whilst you showered, or it turned you on to watch your sister shower. Now you can actually make money out of your perversion and what’s more, a homosexual man with an uncanny sense of colour coordination and a black belt in Fung Shui will appear on a TV show telling you to do so.
The housing market really blew its load a few years back when the rampant consumerism the experts refer to today as ‘status anxiety’, reached its zenith and there was no more money to be made from ramming bling, home entertainment systems, cars or having children up peoples arses. The only thing left to fleece was folk’s houses. Oh sure, children still rank high on the ‘must have’ list though. These days it’s important that one owns an orphan, preferably an African with some sort of disease, but an Eastern European or Asian one will suffice. Best not to refer to ‘owning’ it though, ‘rescue’ or ‘liberate’ is a far better way of admitting you paid ten grand to a corrupt gun running drug lord for the privilege.
At this point, some very important folk like those that make TV shows, publish magazines and write newspapers collectively put their heads together and decided that property was the new black (Or Eastern European or Asian) and started a saturation campaign of DIY home improvement shit. Now it’s all over the fucken place. You can’t even turn on TV without some home improvement program hosted by some washed up celebrity ramming his or her big ideas down your throat. And if it’s not DIY, then it’s a weight loss program. Why not combine the two and have the fatty fatty boom booms lose weight by renovating houses? That’s one less hour of shit on TV anyway.
I love how these shows suggest things like hiring furniture and artwork to make your place more appealing to potential buyers. They do so because a) it’s their way of saying you have no fucking taste and b) they are paid by or have supply contracts with the pricks who rent out furniture! If I was selling my house I would tell them to lick my ring – if somebody wants to see what their furniture looks like in my house then they better pile it all onto a trailer and bring it with them to the open home. And TV shows make it all look so easy don’t they, with their big budgets and endless experts who in real life charge $500 an hour to tell you that your taste in furniture sucks.
Owning a home now is no longer about owning a home at all, it’s all about renovation and flogging it off to some daft cunt for far more than it is worth. Not surprisingly when this actually happens, the vendor cracks an almighty chubby over an overpriced sale and the extra cash they just made. But this hard on lasts only until they have to buy their new house and a small thing called karma whacks it back down to a flaccid state when they have to shell out far more for a house than it was worth. It sure is a vicious cycle this housing biz.
Stay at home Mums and dole bludging bums fucken loved the housing boom too because they’ve now all got jobs as Realtors. Whereas they used to have clean schools after hours or do paper runs to pay to make ends meet, they now need only do a two day course on how to use MS Office, the photocopier and booya, they’re facilitating 6 figured cash transactions. All of which makes the person selling your house, or selling you the house, about as knowledgeable as the deadbeat at Farmers when you ask him to point out the benefits of one stereo over another. Honestly, you’ll get more info off the box then you ever will by asking the guy in the purple polo shirt. Don’t even bother trying to ask the same question at The Warehouse.
Which is fair enough, they’re discount stores and they save money by employing morons, but I think you would be justified in expecting a little more know how from someone employed to sell houses. But then you don’t have to be qualified to sell houses, par se. The guy who owns the real estate company and takes most of the money you pay Sheryl to market the house does, but Sheryl herself doesn’t. He drives a big fuckoff shiny, four wheeled drive, top of the line Beemer too, if you hadn’t noticed. It has a personalised plate that says something like ‘REALTR’ when it should read something like ‘TITWNK’. And does this guy take a pay cut if your house doesn’t sell for as much as Sheryl promised you it would? Not likely.
What ever happened to the notion of owing a home that had a decent yard for the kids to play in too? I grew up with a full size trampoline, decent size pool and a small creek in my back yard, but that was just Naenae for you. Now when you buy a house in a newly developed part of town you’re lucky if there’s enough lawn for the cat to cack on. Even then the wanker who owns it is trying to sell that bit separate to the 64 members of the same Sri Lankan family who all live in the one town house over the back fence. They can't wait to build that extension that will mean you can't even open your back door fully!
Yep, the housing market these days is a lot like Monopoly really. Only Monopoly is a board game and the housing market is real life and the only actual thing they have in common is whether you’re playing Monopoly or playing the housing market, there’s always a fat bastard in the middle with a chubby fist full of cash – yours!
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