San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

Dear Piggs --

The site will be down for a while tomorrow afternoon so that I can move it to a new server. I'm not sure exactly when or for how long, so this warning is slightly useless, but better than nothing I guess.

Apologies for any unintended boost in productivity this may cause.

Rich

UPDATE

OK, the move is all complete. If anyone has any troubles with the site, please email me at rich @ pigg or PM me.

I wish to thank user afx114 for all the help on this. In addition to being a longtime loyal pigg, afx owns a hosting company called bit-box, which I am very happy to have as the new host for piggington and my other sites too. The guys at bit-box run a tight ship, their customer service is amazing, and the prices are very reasonable. If you are looking for a hosting provider, check them out.

My company, Pacific Capital Associates, has recently completed the third-party examination of our investment track record for 2011.  (For background on this, see my inaugural explanation of these annual performance updates).  Here it is, in chart form... you can click on the chart for more detail and loads of fun disclosures:

Scott Lewis of VoiceOfSanDiego.org just invited me to appear on the VOSD radio program this week. The show be recorded tomorrow but will air on AM 600 KOGO at the ungodly hour of 7:30AM this Saturday. Fortunately for people who don't want to think about housing and economics on an early weekend morning (most people, I can only assume), an archived version will eventually be uploaded here.

Jim Klinge has kindly invited me to join him on his new radio show this Monday, Jan 23 at 8PM PST.

The show will be live, so you can call in to ask questions. You can also ask a question or suggest a topic beforehand by posting here.

I'm not exactly sure how you tune in, but I expect that if you visit Jim's site shortly before 8PM on Monday, all will be made clear.

I will be chatting with my pal Scott Lewis today on KOGO AM 600 from 12:35-1:00PM. Join the fun if you can...

Pacific Capital Associates, the investment advisory firm of which I am co-owner, has just completed the independent verification of our investment performance through 2010.  The chart below indicates returns for our average discretionary managed portfolio since mid-2004, when we first got the ability to start tracking these numbers in a verifiable manner:


The thing that I am most pleased about with the 2010 performance is not the fact that we slightly outperformed the market (as measured by the S&P500) for the year, but that we did so while taking substantially less risk (notably, the average client account was down less than half as much as the market during the big Q2 correction).  More numbers and statistics, as well as loads of fun disclosures, can be found in our official investment track record.

More background on the above chart or the firm can be found in the post imaginatively titled My Day Job.

Things I am obliged to mention:
- Returns include reinvestment of all income. 
- Past performance is not indicative of future results.
- Investment advisory services and securities offered through Girard Securities, Inc., member SIPC/FINRA.

At the OC Register, Jon Lansner has put a brief Q&A with me and blogging and the housing market. Perhaps some Piggs will find it interesting:

Blogs keep real estate media honest

A while back, in reference to my personal move into the investment world, I wrote this:

Don't worry, I'm not going to start incessantly shilling for the new business. However, I may occasionally shill for the new business.

It's actually been 3 1/2 years since I put up that post, so I guess I didn't even live up to my threat to shill occasionally.  But now, on the occasion of our having recently completed a track record of our investment performance, I thought I'd take the opportunity to do so.

Real short notice for a short (10 minute) radio segment -- I will be on KOGO AM 600 tomorrow starting, they tell me, at 7:37AM. Whether I'm coherent at that hour is another question.

I upgraded the site software to get some security patches in. If anyone sees anything squirrely, please let me know at rich [at] piggington [dot] com.

I also took another swipe at installing private message functionality. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but as far as I can tell from my quick tests they finally got it working. As you might expect from the name, this module allows people to send private messages to other piggs without having to share email addresses or identities.

So feel free to give it a whirl and let me know if you run into any problems. You have to create a login, of course... after you log in the module can be accessed via the "Private messages" link in the left navigation.

I will be appearing on the voiceofsandiego.org radio show this Sunday, 12 noon, on AM 600 KOGO. Since we recorded the segment today, I already know that bagging on the CA Association of Realtors will be one of the topics du jour -- always a good time! An archive of the show should be put up here late Sunday or thereabouts.

The site is undergoing a migration to a new server and will be in "read only" mode while the process is underway to ensure no data is lost. The site may at some point go down altogether as I use the opportunity to make some software upgrades. Thanks for your patience.

Update: OK, we're back online... details after the jump for those interested.

This weekend I upgraded piggington.com to use the latest version of Drupal, an open source content management system that is very powerful but, unfortunately, not very easy to upgrade. (Which explains why I let myself get two major releases behind).

The performance of the site should be improved, but much more for authenticated users than anonymous users, as the prior version had only cached content for anonymous users. Additional performance improvements will be made later this week as a kindly expert pigg has offered to help me optimize my database and web server configuration. In the meantime, hopefully the Drupal upgrade is a good first step.

This upgrade comes with some new features -- I am probably forgetting some but here is at least a partial list:

I am going to be making some changes/upgrades to the site throughout the week as I try to improve site performance. I may also upgrade to the latest version of the Drupal, the content management system I use, so we may end up with some improved features as well. Thanks for your patience as I intermittently take the site offline.

Update: A couple quick things I tried didn't work. I'm going to have to dive deeper but unfortunately I will not have a chance to work on this until the weekend. I am aware that site performance has really gotten quite bad lately and I apologize -- thanks for your patience until I am able to hopefully deal with it this weekend.

This Wednesday I will be embarking on a two-week trip out of the country. (To Uruguay, for those curious, where my father grew up and where his extended family still resides). I am going to update some long-term charts before I go, and once down there I will try to put up the occasional article, but posting will likely be light for a while.