Are you more afraid of losing fifty thousand dollars in equity, or are you afraid of being told that your house isn’t actually worth what the app says it is?
Gary sat on a folding chair made of green nylon on his dock at . The chair was faded from the sun. He held a ceramic mug with a chipped rim. The coffee was black and very hot. Below him, the Banana River moved slightly. The tide was going out.
A blue heron stood on a cluster of oyster shells near the shoreline. The shells were sharp and gray. Gary opened an application on his phone. He looked at the number displayed in white text against a blue background.
The day before, the number had been $1,298,400. Gary did not know why the value had increased by $44,200 in twenty-four hours. He took a screenshot of the screen. He sent the image to his daughter in Orlando. He wrote, “Told you.”
The Anatomy of a Dock
The dock Gary sat on was sixty feet long. It was made of pressure-treated pine. The boards were roughly five inches wide. Some of the boards