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Phil is just giving it to us straight. I got the impression from his words that he was fighting back from sounding too pessimistic. Here’s one particularly alarming excerpt from that article:

“Further, more than half of the 243,000 private payroll jobs added in California since 2003 are linked to real estate in one way or another from construction to mortgage processing.”

This worries me and does not speak of a “well-diversified” economy. I am worried because the more I read, the more I get the feeling that the housing bubble is what got us through the Dot Com bust, 911, and is the reason why our economy is where it is today. All the consumption that has pulled us through these events was driven largely by housing speculation and cheap money from the banks.

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Amen to that.

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I look forward to your input, Next in Line.

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I applaud Ms. Appleton-Young for admitting her previous mistakes…which is not easy to do. I think she is starting to get a real grip on the ever-growing concerns that everyday people like us are having with housing here in SoCal. As for the other bullish economists, it’s at the point now where I almost feel sorry for them. They remind me of the desperate tobacco executives who denied until the very end that cigarette smoking was bad for one’s health.

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I think you’ve found your calling for a career, Powayseller- freelance writer. I think that a reporter should play devil’s advocate a bit more and ask more pointed questions that require a well thought out answer. Softball questions such as, “how does the housing market look to you?” and then not following that question up, doesn’t cut it IMHO. Here’s what a typical phone call might look like:

Ms. Wedner: So, Joe Economist, what’s your outlook on the housing market so far this summer?

Joe Economist: Well, I think that all indicators point to a leveling off in median price, but it’s nothing to panic about…we are just getting back to more normal market prices.

Ms. Wedner: But isn’t the median price considered an infererior indicator because it tends to lag behind true market conditions? And don’t you see some potential concerns with the increasing inventory of homes and the latest population figures from the US Census that show San Diego is actually losing people?

This is just an example of how a reporter can actually put a little elbow grease into it and dig for the scoop on a story, rather than just lob softballs. Keep in mind, I was able to come up with these questions in about 5 minutes, and I am a ham-and-egger when it comes to this stuff! Ms. Wedner is a business analyst and it is her JOB to do this! Is the LA Times hiring?

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I don’t know how to interpret the comment about chemical and biological weapons being more effective than nukes. What are you going to recolonize? An adobe hut? Did you ever think of the slow, painful suffering that occurs with chem/bio weapons? I wouldn’t want to inflict that on my worst enemy.

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I understand that it can be hard to make money online and that ad revenues aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. But, if done right, a well-run website has a number of advantages. You have a worldwide customer base, you are open 24x7x365, you make your own hours, and you can work from anywhere there is an internet connection…you aren’t tied down to being in a specific place. Besides, it seems that you have a passion for working online judging by the quantity, quality, and frequency of your posts.

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There’s a program called Total Recorder that can be used to capture streaming audio.

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Start your own housing blog. You pretty much are the majority contributor to this site. Rich must love you for spending all of your time contributing to his website. Is he giving you any kickbacks, or are you satiated from the satisfaction you get from adding so much content. I am sure that Rich earns at least some revenue from this website, judging by the gooooogle ads to the left. I also don’t think he would continue with it if he was losing money on it.

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John,

I think an effort like creating a new housing database begins at the grassroots level, like what we are doing now. I also have GIS experience and could help in getting something started. We’d need a set of standard attributes that will be consistently measured (and comparable) over time. This venture would have to be quite involved and have support and input from a multitude of people from varying disciplines. At any rate, if the open-source software community can come up with a working model creating and updating applications (via CVS), there’s no reason why it can’t be done for this application.

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Honestly, where do these people come from? “The market requires buyers to be especially considerate when making offers.” Are you kidding me? Now we have to be considerate of the market lest we offend it. I didn’t know the market had feelings. Take a look at the large Prudential banner at the top of the page and that tells you all you need to know about the credibility of the website.

I recommend we flood the editors of that website with emails telling them just how little we are fooled by their propaganda.

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I propose a rebuilding of a new database that objectively tracks homes and is maintained by an unbiased party, or even the open-source community. As it stands right now, the MLS in my opinion is a far from perfect resource for objective, reliable data.

I propose creating a database that gives each home one and only one unique ID, whether it is relisted or not…and stores a standard set of measurable home attribute data that can be compared from one home to the next. I am not sure how the MLS is set up, but I believe it is a database for LISTINGS, not HOMES. So when a home is listed as ID #1 and doesn’t sell, it is pulled off and relisted as ID#5, with a new time clock. This is tantamount to fraud, IMHO, because it distorts the quality of the data which is used by homesellers to gain a more favorable price/position in the transaction.

Another issue with the MLS is that it is not uniform or universal from one realtor to the next. One person or group might have info on one set of homes in an area, while another might not. Since comparable home prices are a factor in determining price, why use a hand-picked sample set of data rather than on that is truly open to the market?

I am going to start a new thread devoted to replacing the MLS with a new database.

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I am glad that you, as a homeowner and stockholder, would love to see our economic system artificially buoyed so that you can continue to enjoy hefty profits. Who do you think will have to pay for our excess consumption? If you want to dance, you have to pay the band…eventually.

To tell PS to cool the rhetoric just shows how much you have become de-sensitized to the outlandish increases in home prices over the past decade. To recap, a 50% reduction in current prices would bring us back in line with the historical mean. I repeat, historical mean…not a rock-bottom, price-you-only-get-in-a-depression price. Are you telling realtors to cool their rhetoric when they say that a home is worth 300% more than it was just a few years ago! No, because you, along with the realtors and others, have a financial interest in home prices being so high. But you know what, middle class people like me aren’t buying it anymore…literally.

Compare a 300% markup to a 50% drop and then tell me who needs to cool their rhetoric.

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I think that finding an alternative to oil for automotive fuel will help to extend our ability to produce plastic and nylon from oil.

I agree that we should just let the markets be and hope that governments don’t muck it up. But that’s what always seems to happen. I think that the entrepreneurs of the world have already given us alternative energy in various forms. The problem that I see is that the barriers for entry into the energy business must be absolutely astounding. Another problem is that you have to have government contacts on your side, and you better hope that their campaigns aren’t being funded by anybody in the oil industry. For example, do some research on ultra narrow vehicles (UNVs) and you’ll see that the state of Washington (I think it was Washington) had to pass special legislation to enable 2 UNVs to travel side-by-side in one lane.

The point I am trying to make here is that often times the solution to the problem is already there, it just needs to be implemented. UNVs would solve our traffic problems for 20 years IMHO. Do you see any incentives for them? No, you get incentives for hybrids and more car pool lanes, which are a complete waste. Too many interest groups would lose out if we stopped building wide autos that ran on gasoline and are driven on roads that need to constantly be improved and widened to keep up with a growing population.

Never count out the environmental-architectural-engineering-construction complex!!! Collectively, they can be a very influential and powerful voting bloc!

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OK…that’s more like it. You could very well be correct in your prediction. I know my statements don’t carry as much weight as others because I just don’t have the time to do all the legwork necessary to get a true apples-apples comparison…which, technically speaking, is nearly impossible due to all the permutations that occur from one home to the next. Do appraisers take all these permutations into account when figuring their prices? Or do they simply rely on comps for the most part?

Now that we are on the subject of being technically sound in our analysis, I personally think that comps are a bunch of bunk. Yes, they might be able to factor in a majority of factors, but they do not account for all of them. I come across as a loose cannon sometimes because I am torn between the need to use data to substantiate claims, yet there seems to be no truly reliable way to model home prices over a given period of time. There are simply way too many variables to consider, not to mention the human variables. A lagging median price indicator, an obfuscated MLS database, a realty/mortgage banking industry with direct interest in higher prices, and a government/media complex that indirectly benefits from higher home prices does not equate to a reliable body of data.

In the immortal words of the priest from Coming to America, If being a conspiracy theorist is wrong, I don’t want to be right…or something like that.

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