You bring up an interesting point, that isn’t discussed much. How much will blogs, online sites like ZipRealty and RealtyTimes,foreclosure.com, snooping on your neighbor’s tax payments on the County Assessor site, snooping on your neighbor’s property values in zillow, checking out what people paid for their homes on zillow, comments on blogs feeding back to journalists, ability to view homes (and see # of inventory), affect psychology? As Rich and Bugs wrote, psychology was what brought up prices, and what will bring it down. Rapid dissemination of information is accelerating this decline.
Without piggington, I would NEVER have found out this was a bubble. I would still be living in my house. I would not have met all these people who taught me about real estate, like my best friend SD Realtor (ok, there you are, in the limelight:)), and Bob Casagrand. I would not have learned from Bob C. that months inventory is the best way to track changes in home prices, that the median is lagging, etc. I would not have known this is a national housing problem, that foreclosures are rising, the problem with ARMs. I would be another sheeple.
A journalist should do a story on the influence of the internet on the housing bust.
