Company cites backlogs related to renovating homes, constraints for on-the-ground workers
Real-estate company Zillow Group Inc. ZG -8.52%▲ will stop buying and flipping new houses for the remainder of this year, the company said Monday.
The online home-listing platform, which got into the business of buying, refurbishing and quickly selling homes more than three years ago, said it would instead focus on closing existing purchase contracts and selling the homes it has on hand.
Zillow said it has stopped the practice because it was experiencing backlogs related to renovating the homes and that it faces constraints for on-the-ground workers.
“We’re operating within a labor- and supply-constrained economy inside a competitive real estate market, especially in the construction, renovation and closing spaces,” Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Wacksman said in a statement. “We have not been exempt from these market and capacity issues.”
Zillow stock plunged on the news Monday, falling more than 10% within the first hours of trading.
The American home-sales market has been on a historic rally during the pandemic, but sales volume has recently begun to cool. The premise of Zillow’s home-flipping business is the ability to leverage its vast platform to generate sales in volume and collect transaction fees on each sale.
Labor shortages have also hit several sectors of the economy as the workforce participation rate remains below pre-pandemic levels.
Zillow Offers, the company’s house-flipping outfit, accounted for more than half the company’s revenue last year. The unit produced $772 million in revenue in the second quarter of this year, a 70% increase over the same period in 2020, according to earnings reports. As of the end of the second quarter, the company still had 3,142 unsold homes on hand with a total value of $1.17 billion.
But Zillow may have purchased more homes than anticipated in the third quarter, leading the company to scale back for the remainder of 2021, wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Brad Erickson in a note on Monday. “We think that Zillow remains relatively under-staffed in many markets which have only ramped up in the past 12 months,” Mr. Erickson wrote.
One of Zillow’s top rivals, Opendoor Technologies Inc., OPEN 1.75%▲ bought nearly 8,500 homes in the second quarter and entered the third quarter with contracts to purchase another 8,200, Opendoor said.
The American republic depends on public confidence in election integrity, Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at the Federalist, a Fox News contributor, and the author of Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.
Hemingway remarked, “You cannot have a republic if you can’t have confidence in elections. If you don’t have free and fair and trusted and transparent elections, you don’t have a republic. This is an existential threat. Everybody needs to care about it and not make it a partisan issue. It needs to be something that everybody understands. Democracy depends, not just on the winner, but on the consent of the loser, and you’re not going to have that if you have corrupted elections.”
Pollak, author of Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, praised Hemingway’s research of the 2020 presidential election in her latest book. He described it as the definitive account of the election’s political corruption.
“You really go into the weeds here, and that’s why this book is so great,” he said of Rigged. “This is really going to be the reference, I think, going forward.”
Hemingway stated, “The mail-in ballot operation was about so much. It was about changing the laws governing how we vote, about flooding the elections with ballots that were going to addresses that maybe weren’t tied to the actual voter, and then also decreased scrutiny aligned with those mail-in ballots — [such as] not having voter ID or not having appropriate signature matches, or allowing ballot harvesting — all these other issues are brought in with this flood of mail-in balloting.”
She highlighted how changes to election laws in various states were implemented, ostensibly, as public health measures to reduce coronavirus transmission.
“I think chaos was the actual goal [of the mail-in ballot operation],” Hemingway stated. “The Democratic operation [is] about changing laws in every state that they can, and just making it difficult to know what the law is, expanding the fear of possible litigation, and then having different standards for the scrutiny applied to ballots.”
She emphasized, “The chaos was the design. That’s what Democrats wanted. They wanted a mess of election laws that they could litigate better or have more opportunities for litigation.”
She continued, “There are a lot of things that can go wrong without [the counting of a ballot] being fraud, but it can still be illegal. … Mail-in balloting [has] much less oversight than day-of-election in-person voting.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s funding of election operations amounted to a private corruption of what should be an exclusively public endeavor, Hemingway determined.
Mark Zuckerberg spent $419M on nonprofits ahead of 2020 election — and got out the Dem vote https://t.co/XqdjA3oCQm via @nypost
“We had a private takeover of government election offices, funded to the tune of $419 million by Mark Zuckerberg, which brings in an army of left-wing activists to handle everything from voter registration to ballot design, to ballot translation, to get-out-the-vote operations, to ballot counting,” she said.
She concluded, “All of these issues then become very important and systematically corrupt the election process.”
Hemingway assessed that state governments allowing Zuckerberg to fund election operations under the guise of a philanthropic public health endeavor was the product of a failure of imagination on the part of Republicans to envision such corruption.
She said, “[Wisconsin] was one of the states that was hit hard with the Zuckerberg funding that meant that there was a takeover of government election offices by private money, and these people [in Wisconsin] said, ‘We had no idea it was even happening. We never even thought it could happen that one tech oligarch could take over the election administration in our state,’ so they didn’t make it illegal because they didn’t even have the imagination to think it could happen.”
“There was no bar — unbelievably — on private funding of government election offices, by one party or another,” she explained.
Hemingway concluded that Zuckerberg’s partisan objectives seem to have failed in purchasing goodwill with Democrats.`
She stated, “If [Zuckerberg] wanted Biden to win, and clearly he did, it was a good use of money to achieve that outcome, but why he wanted Biden to win was presumably to further entrench power and knowing that Republicans were getting very angry at the meddling and the election interference of Big Tech, the censorship that they’re engaged in, the war on freedom of information, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, [and] all these things that the tech oligarchs are going against.”
“It seems to have bought them nothing, because [Zuckerberg] is completely reviled by many people on the right,” she concluded, “but then also, the left is hankering for more censorship of their political opponents, and they don’t think that Facebook did enough, even after half a billion dollars [and] all of the censorship and the disinformation. All of the meddling wasn’t enough for the Democrats.”
Project Veritas on Monday released a video interview of a DHS insider who exposed the ‘reasonable fear’ migrant asylum loophole.
Aaron Stevenson, DHS Insider and Intelligence Research Specialist for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told James O’Keefe the new rule is “going to shift the adjudicative authority of defensive asylum away from immigration judges and giving it to asylum officers, which are USCIS.”
“This is going to be the biggest change to immigration policy in my lifetime. It’s being done without anybody knowing what’s going on about it and there’s been no coverage for the American people to know what’s going on,” he said.
Project Veritas released a new video today featuring an interview with current U.S. Department of Homeland Security [DHS] insider Aaron Stevenson, who serves as an Intelligence Research Specialist for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS].
Stevenson decided to go public with information about a “reasonable fear” loophole that exists in the federal government’s immigration policy, which could allow potentially dangerous migrants to stay in the United States under false pretenses. He had previously sat down with Project Veritas for an interview in the shadows.
“An email sent out by the Director of USCIS, which notified us about a rule change coming forward, is going to shift the adjudicative authority of defensive asylum away from immigration judges and giving it to asylum officers, which are USCIS,” Stevenson said.
“If the asylum officers get this ability, I will say it’s going to be a rubber stamp of immediately getting ‘credible fear’ or ‘reasonable fear’ [asylum seekers] to be able to stay in the country if they’re going to be deported…also their path to citizenship,” he said.
VIDEO:
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China Just Got More Control Over Our Food And Pharma Supply
A union leader exposed the role that “foreign-owned shipping companies” play in the cargo backup at the Port of Los Angeles, which is causing supply chain shortages in the United States. The union leader said that “foreign-owned shipping companies” that own the terminals at the Port of Los Angeles have not been requesting union labor at a high enough rate for quite some time, thus slowing down the process of hauling and transporting goods off ships. The biggest foreign-owned company running the biggest cargo terminal at the Port of Los Angeles is Maersk, which has many Chinese offices and does massive business in China. Just weeks ago, Maersk sold its refrigerated container business for over $1 billion to a Chinese company that counts multiple Chinese Communist government state-owned enterprises as its major shareholders, giving China more control over our food and pharma supply.
In response to the supply chain crisis, U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo recently stated, “the reality is that the only way we get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everywhere around the world gets vaccinated.” Clearly, this has led to speculation that the supply chain shortages are being manipulated in order to push the vaccine agenda. The Biden administration has touted a supposed deal it negotiated to help the Port of Los Angeles to operate 24/7 to offload the backed-up cargo. But one union leader said that union workers are already capable of working 24/7. The problem, in his view, is that “foreign-owned shipping companies” are not requesting labor.
Frank Ponce De Leon, who serves as an International Longshore & Warehouse Union coast committeeman in Los Angeles, said the following:
“Well, I think it’s important to let people know that our workforce and our contracts allow the employers and the terminal operators to work 24 hours a day. We have that capability, I mean, since the day I got registered and started working on the docks some 40 years ago. So it’s not something that’s brand-new. So the push by the ports and the push by Biden’s administration is actually a push in the direction, trying to get others who are involved in the supply chain moving so that we can hopefully ease up some of this congestion…You have to understand that these terminals are owned by foreign-owned shipping companies. And a lot of times, they dictate or control what we do on the docks. We don’t just show up, you know, unannounced and say, we’re ready to go to work. What normally happens is that orders are placed within our joint dispatch halls for labor at a specific terminal or terminals. And we fill that labor and go to work. Without the employer and without the terminal operators ordering us, we don’t show up. So a lot of this is out of our control. And we’ve been facing this for a long, long time now.”
So who are these “foreign-owned shipping companies” exactly? According to the Port of Los Angeles:
“The Port of Los Angeles is managed and operated by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners, established in 1907. A five-member Board of Harbor Commissioners is appointed by the Mayor and sanctioned by the Los Angeles City Council. The west basin container terminal is operated by West Basin Container Terminal LLC. The container terminal at berths 135 through 139 is operated by TransPacific Container Service Corporation (TraPac). The seaside terminal at berths 226 through 236 is operated by Seaside Transportation Services. APL Terminals operates global gateway south terminal and pier 400 is operated by APM Terminals. Some of the other operators of the port facilities include Stevedoring Services of America, Pasha Group, Kinder Morgan, ConocoPhillips, Nustar Energy, ExxonMobil and Shell.”
“The Management of APM Terminals Liberia, in partnership with the Ministry of Health, set up a dedicated team to have terminal employees, subcontractors and all Port users in the Freeport of Monrovia who have not taken the COVID-19 vaccine yet to get vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine.”
“As the leading container shipping company in China (including Hong Kong), we have connected Chinese businesses to the world for nearly a century. We are present at 36 ports, and provide you with a seamless connection to our unrivalled global fleet.”
In late September of this year, Maersk signed a carbon-cutting partnership in Beijing with China Classification Society, an organization officially approved by the Chinese Communist government to survey ships that display the flag of China. Also in late September of this year, Maersk announced that it is selling its refrigerated container business for over $1 billion to China International Marine Containers (CIMC), which states that its “main shareholders are China Merchants Group, China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company, Hony Capital, etc.” Among its top shareholders listed on its website, the first two are Chinese state-owned companies: China Merchants Group is a Chinese Communist government state-owned company that is run by the Chinese Ministry of Transport. China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company was a Chinese state-owned company that now operates as COSCO, which is a Chinese state-owned company. What could that potentially mean for Chinese influence on our food supply? Just to be clear, according to the Port of Los Angeles, “Any imported perishable goods that come through the Port arrive in refrigerated containers, which are easily identifiable and expedited for unloading.”
Not surprisingly, Maersk is saying that the supply chain problems are going to continue throughout the rest of 2021. A Maersk market update stated: “China’s October Golden Week, Christmas and Chinese New Year will bolster strong demand for container shipping for the last quarter of 2021. But port congestion, especially in the US and Europe, and service delays are expected to create headwinds for service schedules…Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach congestion levels continue to deteriorate as we move further into peak season with 70+ vessels waiting at anchorage recently. Labour restrictions coupled with high throughput volumes remain the primary constraint.” Maersk has previously engaged in battles against International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers at the Port of Los Angeles because workers did not want robotic automation replacing their jobs, but Maersk was determined to push automation into practice.
“Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation is a marine transport company that operates the West Basin Container Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles. Yang Ming has been a Port of Los Angeles tenant since 1996. Headquartered in Taiwan, Yang Ming operates a fleet of nearly 100 vessels with locations all over the world. Transliterated from its two Chinese characters 陽明, Yang Ming refers to the sun and lightness. Yang is the sun, and Ming is the combination of the sun and the moon and often denotes brightness, clarity, or enlightenment.”
Meanwhile, TransPacific Container Service Corporation (TraPac) is owned by Mitsui OSK Lines in Japan, which founded TraPac in 1985 as a “wholly owned subsidiary” and signed a 30-year contract extension for its Port of Los Angeles container terminal in 2009.
The Port of Los Angeles lists “WHERE CAN I GET VACCINATED?” on its pandemic “FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS” page.
Jussie Smollett, the actor who allegedly falsely claimed he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime, will stand trial beginning next month, after a Chicago judge denied his request to dismiss the case over his false police report.
Smollett’s attorney argued that forcing the 39-year-old former “Empire” actor into court would be a violation of his rights, as he has already completed community service and given up a $10,000 bond under a previous deal to drop charges in Cook County.
“A deal is a deal. That’s ancient principle,” attorney Nenye Uche said.
However, Judge James Linn said he would not intervene in the case which is being led by a special prosecutor appointed by another judge. Jury selection will begin on November 29.
Smollett was charged with felony disorderly conduct in February of 2019 for allegedly making a false report to Chicago police in January 2019, claiming he had been attacked by two men who shouted racial and homophobic slurs at him and wrapped a rope around his neck. He told police the assault occurred in the middle of a frigid Chicago night while he was out picking up a Subway sandwich.
Police investigated the alleged incident, which Smollett claimed happened in the upscale neighborhood of Streeterville, but could not find any video evidence of the assault. Officers ultimately began investigating whether Smollett paid brothers Ola and Abel Osundairo to stage an attack after first investigating the brothers as persons of interest.
Smollett allegedly orchestrated the fake hate crime to “promote his career” and paid the two men $3,500 to help him, former Chicago police Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson said.
Smollett’s felony disorderly conduct charge was dropped by Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx’s office. However, a judge later assigned a special prosecutor to the case who, in February 2020, charged the disgraced actor with six new counts of disorderly conduct.
The law, known as House Bill 25, would require students to participate on sports teams that correspond with the gender on their birth certificate at the time of birth. Modified birth certificates would not be honored.
The bill was approved by state lawmakers over the weekend, and it makes Texas poised to become the latest red state to pass legislation aimed at curtailing transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
LGBTQ groups would likely challenge the law in court.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation has challenged a Florida ban on transgender athletes earlier this year and vowed to also sue at least three other states.
HRC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Texas legislation.
LGBTQ activists have called the Texas bill “cruel,” saying it would put a target on transgender students in the state.
“The ‘debate’ over this anti-transgender bill is already exacerbating intolerance, fueling discrimination, and solidifying Texas’ reputation as the leading state for violence against trans people,” said Ricardo Martinez, chief executive Officer of Equality Texas. “Lawmakers who supported this bill will have to live with its legacy and future impact on our communities.”
The owner of a New York City supermarket chain predicted the food prices will increase sharply in the coming months, with some increasing 10 percent in the next two months.
John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino Foods, warned that food giants such as Nabisco, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola will prioritize raising prices on products.
“I see over 10 percent [price increase] in the next 60 days,” he said in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, adding that the trend will not drop “anytime soon.” Catsimatidis cited rising inflation and supply chain bottlenecks that are currently plaguing supermarkets and other retailers around the United States.
Catsimatidis then cautioned: “I see food prices going up tremendously” because food company CEOs “want to be ahead of the curve and the way they’re doing it is they’re dropping all promotions. They are dropping low-moving items.”
“Why give away something when you don’t have to give it away and you make more margin?” Catsimatidis asked. “So I think that now these companies are going to have record profits in the third quarter.”
Experts have said that a significant backlog of shipping containers is currently being processed at two major California ports is snarling delivery of food and other goods. Energy shortages in the Asia-Pacific and Europe, as well as COVID-19-related concerns, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates have also been blamed for the supply crunch.
Earlier this month, the White House announced that it was able to push Walmart, FedEx, and UPS into committing to adding more shifts to alleviate shipping issues. The Port of Los Angeles also committed to 24/7 shifts, the Biden administration also said.
Compared with one year ago, consumers are paying significantly more for goods and services, according to recent data released by the Department of Labor. It came as the agency reported that the consumer price index, a key inflation gauge that measures how much Americans pay for goods and services, rose approximately 0.4 percent in September, up 5.4 percent year-over-year.
For example, Americans are paying about 42 percent more on average for a gallon of gas than a year before, the data shows. They’re also paying 10.5 percent more for eggs, meat, poultry, and fish; 4 percent more for coffee; 19 percent more for bacon; 6 percent more for peanut butter; 27 percent more for propane, kerosene, and firewood; 5.2 percent more for electricity; 24.4 percent more for used vehicles; and 7.1 percent more for appliances.
The Biden administration is asking the Supreme Court to block the Texas law banning most abortions, while the fight over the measure’s constitutionality plays out in the courts.
The administration also took the unusual step of telling the justices they could grant the Texas law full review and decide its fate this term, which already includes a major case about the future of abortion rights in the U.S.
No court has yet reached a decision on the constitutionality of the Texas law, and the Supreme Court rarely grants such requests.
The law has been in effect since September, aside from a district court-ordered pause that lasted just 48 hours, and bans abortions once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks and before some women know they are pregnant.
The Justice Department asked the high court Monday to lift an order imposed by a conservative federal appeals court that has allowed Texas to continue enforcing the nation’s strictest curbs on abortion through a novel law that was written to make it hard to challenge in the federal court system. The department had announced its intentions last Friday.
The Texas law defies the Supreme Court’s major decisions on abortion rights “by banning abortion long before viability — indeed, before many women even realize they are pregnant,” the Justice Department wrote in its plea to the court.
“The question now is whether Texas’ nullification of this Court’s precedents should be allowed to continue while the courts consider the United States’ suit. As the district court recognized, it should not,” the Justice Department wrote.
The administration also said the court could short-circuit the usual process and rule on the law’s constitutionality this term, even though lower courts have yet to do so. The justices have done this only a handful of times in recent decades, the last occasion being a 2019 dispute over the Trump administration’s ultimately failed effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. In that case, a deadline for finalizing the census was fast approaching.
In this case, the administration said, Texas’ attempt to evade federal court review of its law and the possibility that other states could adopt similar measures justify the court’s early involvement.
The high court ordered Texas to respond by midday Thursday.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at Monday’s news briefing that President Joe Biden would protect abortion rights, and that the Justice Department would lead efforts to ensure that women have “access to fundamental rights that they have to protect their own health.”
It’s not clear whether the administration will prevail at a Supreme Court with a conservative majority that has been fortified by three appointees of former President Donald Trump and already has agreed to hear a major challenge to abortion rights in a case from Mississippi.
The Trump appointees, joined by two other conservatives, have once before rejected a plea to keep the law on hold, in a separate lawsuit filed by abortion providers. There was no immediate timetable for Supreme Court action on this latest motion.
While courts have blocked other state laws effectively banning abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb, roughly around 24 weeks, the Texas law has so far avoided a similar fate because of its unique structure that leaves enforcement up to private citizens, rather than state officials. Anyone who brings a successful lawsuit against an abortion provider for violating the law is entitled to claim at least $10,000 in damages.
In the 5-4 vote last month to allow the law to remain in effect, the high court acknowledged in an unsigned order that there were “serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law” but also “complex and novel” procedural questions about whom to sue and whether federal courts had the power to stop the law from being enforced.
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that he would have put the “unprecedented” law on hold so that court could consider “whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws” by handing off enforcement. The court’s three liberal justices also dissented.
The question now is whether the administration’s presence in the new lawsuit will make a difference. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals provided its answer late Thursday, extending its earlier order that allows the law to remain in effect. In a 2-1 vote, the court said it was siding with Texas for the same reasons the Supreme Court and a different 5th Circuit panel cited in the providers’ lawsuit — questioning whether anyone could march into federal court to challenge the law.
Texas sought help from the appeals court after U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the Justice Department did have the ability to sue and that he had the authority to stop the law from being enforced, writing that “women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.”
The judge conceded, however, that “other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion.”
U.S. TV network ratings have crashed since President Trump has left the spotlight as audiences have deserted Big Media groups in droves.
Financial Times(FT) reports primetime ratings for left-wing cable television news networks CNN and MSNBC have fallen “more than 50 per cent in the third quarter compared with a year ago.”
THE STATS:
“Primetime ratings for AT&T-owned CNN dropped 52 per cent in the third quarter for viewers aged 25 to 54, a key demographic for advertisers, according to Nielsen figures,” according to FT.
“MSNBC, the left-leaning network owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, suffered a 51 per cent fall.”
“The New York Times in the first half of this year added 443,000 digital subscribers, a steep slowdown from the 1.2m added in the first half of 2020.”
“Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing Fox News faired comparatively better, with primetime ratings falling 37 per cent during the quarter for this demographic.”
MAINSTREAM NEWS TAKES A FINANCIAL HIT:
“This year’s smaller audience holds financial consequences for these groups. Kagan, part of S&P Market Intelligence, estimates that MSNBC net operating revenue will fall from $1.1bn last year to $940m this year, while Fox News will drop from $3.1bn to $2.8bn,” reports FT.
GRIM OUTLOOK FOR MAINSTREAM NEWS:
President of business intelligence at the ad agency GroupM Brian Wieser expects that “[TV] viewing will continue to decline at a pretty rapid clip [due to cord-cutting]. So four years from now, total [TV] viewers will be 15-20 per cent lower.”
Newly released Jan 6 footage directly contradicts government and mainstream media narrative.
QUICK FACTS:
The footage captured activity by two security cameras—facing opposite directions—in a small hallway on the upper west side terrace from 2:25 pm to around 3:00 pm, InfoWars reports.
The footage shows “a slice of the 14,000 hours of surveillance video that the Justice Department and Capitol Police want kept under strict protective orders,” according to American Greatness.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
Newly released video from inside the Capitol on Jan 6 shows police let peaceful pro-Trump protesters into the building without incident. pic.twitter.com/UWulBnpv23
Texas Gov. Abbott set to ban transgender athletes from school sports
The law, known as House Bill 25, would require students to participate on sports teams that correspond with the gender on their birth certificate at the time of birth. Modified birth certificates would not be honored.
The bill was approved by state lawmakers over the weekend, and it makes Texas poised to become the latest red state to pass legislation aimed at curtailing transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
LGBTQ groups would likely challenge the law in court.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation has challenged a Florida ban on transgender athletes earlier this year and vowed to also sue at least three other states.
HRC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Texas legislation.
LGBTQ activists have called the Texas bill “cruel,” saying it would put a target on transgender students in the state.
“The ‘debate’ over this anti-transgender bill is already exacerbating intolerance, fueling discrimination, and solidifying Texas’ reputation as the leading state for violence against trans people,” said Ricardo Martinez, chief executive Officer of Equality Texas. “Lawmakers who supported this bill will have to live with its legacy and future impact on our communities.”