The latest shenanigans from Bill Pulte and Zohran Mamdani, Russian renters eyeballing Armenian apartments, and a “Partridge Family” star focusing on Catskills housing. From the wild and wooly world of real estate, here are our Hits and Misses for the week of July 27-31.
Miss: Get Back to Where You Once Belonged. President Trump shocked and displeased too many people when he appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to the role of interim director of national intelligence. But now that the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton to fill the vacant directorship, Pulte is reportedly unwilling to vacate the office. According to a Politico report sourced from an unnamed “White House official,” Pulte is lobbying President Trump “to delay Clayton’s swearing-in, or at least trying to stay in the job longer.” Pulte has taken to social media highlighting his work as interim director – which included declassifying material and orchestrating widescale layoffs — purportedly to show he is in the midst of carrying out Trump’s instructions. And most telling, Pulte conspicuously avoided offering public congratulations to Clayton on his Senate confirmation. Pulte needs to put his ego on the back burner and leave the national intelligence duties to the experts.
Miss: Mamdani Runs Amok. It is not every day that the mayor of a city doxes his most affluent residents, but this week the administration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani uploaded a searchable database of the addresses and names of property owners with homes valued at over $1 million. This was supposed to be part of Mamdani’s a so-called pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes, except that the new database encompasses over 960,000 residences and individuals, which is far greater than the 31,000 homes were supposed to be subjected to the new tax. It appears that the overwhelming majority of these listings are primary residences that are not supposed to be impacted by the new tax, and at least one retail center is included in the database. Mamdani has only been the mayor for seven months, and in that short period he has created more ill will and chaos than any person who ever ran New York City.
Miss: Michigan’s Wealthiest Socialist. One of the current poster boys for the socialist movement is Abdul El-Sayed, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to become a senator from Michigan. For all of his big talk about pushing progressive economic policies, El-Sayed delayed releasing his personal financial records until his stalling tactics became too difficult to ignore. This week, we learned this alleged champion of the Michigan working class owns a rental property in Dubai – and it is not an affordable housing project, either! The Washington Free Beacon reports that El-Sayed’s property has “an outstanding debt of as much as $100,000 to the luxury developer behind a ‘resort-style’ community located in ‘the heart of New Dubai,’ complete with a ‘stunning lagoon and white sandy beaches.’” He also owns income-generating property in Bangalore, India, and Ann Arbor, Michigan – and his real estate-generated wealth puts him in the top 1% of Michigan earners. Obviously, capitalism-based real estate investing has been very good for this socialist politician.
Hit and Miss: From Russia With Lease. The Armenian capital of Yerevan is seeing a surge of Russians seeking out rental housing. According to the Kyiv Post, this spike in Russian renters comes amid rumors that Vladimir Putin’s government is planning to declare martial law and force have sharply increased demand for rental apartments in Armenia’s capital Yerevan amid rumors of a new mobilization wave that will conscript Russians into military service as the nation’s war in Ukraine drags on. While this is certainly good news for Armenian real estate agents and landlords – and even better news for the Russians who can escape their country’s deteriorating political environment – it is having a negative impact for the local population because prices in Yerevan have risen about 30% over the past three months.
Miss: Watch That First Step. You never what you might find while doing a house tour, but few realtors ever face the situation that befell Victoria D. Kelderman. She was showing a property in Lewisville, Texas, when one of the prospective buyers asked if the garage could accommodate two cars, Kelderman sought to answer the question by going to the door that connected the house to the garage. Kelderman opened the door, walked inside, and fell into a five-foot-deep hole. “There wasn’t anything on the garage door warning me about a hazard, and before I knew it, I had completely disappeared into a hole in the floor. I didn’t even fully process what happened until I heard my client’s scream.” Mercifully, Kelderman was not seriously injured, but it does beg the question: What kind of a homeowner leaves a five-foot-deep hole in his garage that people can fall into?
Hit: Come On, Get Happy. Do you remember actress Susan Dey, the winsome teen from “The Partridge Family” who grew up to be the Golden Globe-winning star of “L.A. Law”? She retired from acting two decades ago and has mostly been out of the public eye, but this week Parade.com noted she has a new role as a member of the board of directors of the MARK Project, an organization that works to “build resilient rural communities” in the small towns across the Catskills region of New York State. According to the organization’s website, it seeks to “extend across housing and economic development to food, tourism, farming, civic planning and downtown revitalization.” As for the 73-year-old Dey, she stated on the website that she was “grateful to serve with other committed residents of our interconnected communities.” It is wonderful to see that Dey is still making the world a happier place.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
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