Owning a home has no influence whatsoever on how I view things. The data is the data, and my home ownership status is completely irrelevant — it was when I was renting, and it is now that I’m an owner.
I’m sorry to be prickly about this. But I’ve put a ton of work into trying to objectively figure out the housing market and trying to help people understand what’s going on. I haven’t always been right but my efforts have always been honest and my mistakes were honest ones.
I know you didn’t mean anything by it Jazzman, so no worries — but since you mentioned it, I am just explaining why I push back so hard on the idea that whether I personally own or rent has anything to do with my analysis of the data.
Anyway, onto your question. There was definitely a point where any time I posted anything positive, I would get all kinds of pushback. It was more obvious when I posted about the economy. I used to do a monthly update on jobs for Voice of SD, and at one point, any time I posted on positive job growth, people would give me all kinds of crap. One time, someone actually posted a comment stating with complete certainty that someone had bribed me to write something positive about the economy. (Who would do such a thing — bribe someone to write a positive article about the job market in a small local nonprofit news site? Nice business model). This was probably 2009, maybe 2010. You couldn’t point out a single positive data point without getting jumped all over by the peanut gallery (even though it was not opinion, but actual data that anyone could look up).
As far as housing I don’t remember it being as obvious a shift, but it definitely got ridiculous. For instance, when I posted about how I bought my house, one commenter pointed out the flaw in my math as he saw it: I had failed to factor in a permanent 6% per year DECLINE in home prices for the foreseeable future! But generally, the over-bearishness on housing wasn’t as bad as with the economy in general.
