The number one topic of conversation in emails to Hewn & Hammered is house prices – how divorced they’ve become from reality in the bubble markets, and how a corrupt real estate industry and regulatory agencies completely disconnected from actual consumer experience have fueled folks’ unreasonable expectations of continued growth just to quick-sell mediocre property.
Here’s a rundown of some great real estate weblogs devoted to bubble-related issues – there’s lots of great data being aggregated by the folks who take time to track things like asking prices, sales prices and loan amounts, median income vs. home prices, bankruptcy clusters (in the few cases where personal bankruptcies are still even possible to declare) and more – much, much more.
- Housing Panic: The Housing Bubble Blog With Attitude
- Bubble Meter
- Sacramento Land(ing): Is Sacramento Experiencing a Hard or Soft Landing?
- Sacramento Area Flippers In Trouble: a gallery of losses & mistakes
- The Housing Bubble: examining the home price boom & its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole
- Bubble Tracking: bubble markets inventory tracking
- Patrick.net: rental statistics & a Bay Area-centric "crash page" with lots of useful information. Patrick also has a Bubble Blog.
- Orange County Flip Track: "another housing bubble blog," but with lots and lots of good data
- also in Orange County, Flip This is dedicated to "really stupid (or grossly optimistic) real estate flips"
- Irvine Housing Blog
- Southern California Real Estate Bubble Crash: Southern California is experiencing a bubble like never seen before
- a good and very meaty (but overloaded and sometimes unfocused) thread on Fatwallet devoted to bubbles all over the US
- Sacramento Housing Bubble is an inventory tracker for the greater Sacramento area, and compares inventory to job numbers and population growth
I hope that the do-it-yourself cable networks stop lionizing flippers soon and start realizing what most of them are: greedy folks who will stop at nothing – not the destruction of homes and neighborhoods and the pricing-out of working people – to make a buck. They don’t care if they are hurting the market in the long run, they just want their piece of the pie right now, and damn everyone else. I live in a neighborhood that has been hurt by flipping, and it’s really sad – not only has the neighborhood been hurt overall, but you should see what most of these folks do to the guts of beautiful old Mission Revival bungalows!