It’s been nearly three and a half years since I put up Doom’s first, rather uninspiring post. [In my defense, it was only a test.] We were joining the ranks of a number of "bubble bloggers".
Bubble bloggers were for the most part, regular folks who saw an insane real estate market and said, "It’s going to crash, and someone should say something". Some, like HousingPanic, Ben Jones and Patrick had inspired a national audience, others were smaller and more local. There was a lot of comradery in those days. We’d check each others posts, and add each other to the blogroll. We had fun taking potshots at the likes of Lereah and Mozillo and watched the data in our local markets.
This morning I read Chuck Ponzi’s Top 10 signs you’ve been following the housing bubble too long. Chuck, we’re you writing about me?
10. You kinda miss the days when everyone was still on blogspot. Uh… except for that Ritholtz guy.
9. Everything looks like a bubble now. Even bubbles.
8. Oompa Loompas and “The Tan Man” evoke feelings of intense disgust.
7. You know who Tanta and the Mortgage Pig are and you miss them.
6. You KNOW Neil has got popcorn.
5. The inflation vs. deflation argument was sooo 2007.
4. You wonder if Schiller has a time machine.
3. You know the rental multiplier for your neighborhood.
2. You think the Flying Monkey Warriors vs. Greg Swann battle was epic and you totally know who won.
1. Hoodoodanode?
I can add another to Chuck’s list- you realize that nearly half your blogroll has disappeared. Bloggers have logged off, cease to post, or have sold their name to RE interests or online casinos.
I told John that sadly, I think it’s time to do some housekeeping. These are the names that I’m about to purge from the list. If anyone has any suggestions as to who should or shouldn’t be on our roll- please speak up and let us know: [Links are still live on the left sidebar if you want to check these out.] We are also open to adding goodies if you know of any out there.
Blown Mortgage
Bakersfield Blog
Bubbletracking
Bull not Bull
Hawaii Blog
House Bubble
Housing Fear
HousingPanic
Lawrence Yun watch
Marin real estate
NAR Wisdom
OC Fliptrack
Real Estate Realist
San Diego Predatory Lending
Southern Florida
As for John and myself, I don’t think of us as "bubble bloggers" these days. Housing bubble is nearly an outdated term now. Real estate and economic commentators? Nah, that sounds like talking heads from CNBC. I guess we’re just bloggers- and for some amazing reason we’re still here.
twist, I would stick around if you can. I’m still visiting this blog as well as CRisk each morning even though I recently went into contract for a place. In my view you are US economy bloggers, and we obviously have many, many unanswered questions and interesting events ahead of us within that broader landscape. As the investment mentality in our society becomes more and more casino-like, the systemic risks become greater and greater…and somebody has to be around to report on and journal about it.
Thankyou for all of your efforts. You have taught me many things and I hope you continue to do so for a long time. If you went from the housing bubble to say the economic bubble we would have an endless supply of subject matter. We all know something is really wrong in the economy and its going to effect us and our children for many years.
DC, Rich-
Thanks guys for the kind words. I suspect we’ll be around for awhile. I heard from Keith of HousingPanic yesterday. He basically said “Hey- you got the message out. Why don’t you quit?”
The problem is that the “message” isn’t out. Real estate- both commercial and residential remains insane. The average American still doesn’t understand the housing market or our economic condition.
I believe our track record has been much better over the past few years than the talking heads on the financial networks. [And it's easy enough to check- every post we've ever done is still available online.] You’d think it would get us a little more credibility, but I guess not. Our “quest” remains a bit quixotic.
As M and I often reflect, our biggest mistake over the years has been a failure to be bearish enough.
It’s hard to know how much of a difference we’ve made, but so far, we’ve heard enough positive comments to stop me from writing my final post- although I’ll confess I’ve started it more than once. : )
I don’t think that this rollercoaster is over. That nebulous shadow inventory is still out there, lurking, waiting to pounce. We need to see this through to the end! Please stick around at least until the economy recovers. OK, that may be a few years, but the real estate market still has some more Twists and turns.
The comments on this blog are much more sensible and thought out than many other blogs which have become flameboards for the disillusioned.
Tobby-
I give Igor the credit [Along with the superior intellect of our posters, of course!]of keeping our comments to a higher caliber in general.
I know it can be a bit of a pain to get by him, but it discourages those posters who want to make scintillating comments like “First!” Our posters take the time to actually add to the conversation.
It does mean fewer comments, but I’d rather that what we have is more worthwhile.
Not sure what you mean “purge from the list”
YOu own these domains?
I would hate to see this site go,…
BUT I understand.
CPGone-
By purge from the list, I mean remove them from our blogroll.
I always liked the quality of these sites, but with the exception of just a couple, they are all no longer active as we knew and loved them. There are a couple that are still active, but the owners are only putting up a post every couple of months.
They will still be out there- I don’t own the domains. You would just have to type in the names directly.
Igor is gloomy- so am I. I miss a lot of these guys. Blogging is time consuming though, with only nominal monetary reward.
I’ve been able to last this long only because I have John to share a LOT of the work- otherwise I’m sure I’d have been overwhelmed a long time ago. I also have the luxury of having our admin, Mr. Twist, L, M and other regular contributors to help. In other words- I get by with a little help from my friends. : )
I think the remaining bloggers provide a valuable service.. if not the original one.
The message is likely as “out” as it’s going to get, at least until/unless things -really- crash – the Backhand of Reality always wins. It’s going to be awhile before the average person pays attention to whats happening. Now, I think of this more as a safety net for those of us who want to try and understand what’s going on. It’s not like the mainstream media is going to give us useful information. They’re either going to parrot what the gov’t/NAR tells them, or turn to scare tactics for better ratings. Collecting random facts and putting them together (you know, reporting) is still something we need.
And hey.. when there’s nothing new to say, it’s always fun to sit back with some popcorn and some friends and say “I told you so”. Sometimes all you can do is laugh, and we might as well do it here!
Twist,
When I first discovered housing blog I was thrilled. You were still based in AZ, and the blog had solid, GROUND LEVEL, high quality content that any inquiring buyer, seller, renter, investor could use. There was nothing to compare…, in my opinion.
I still visit the site every day to see if there are any posts that talk about the housing market in the same vein as the “old days.” Sadly, I find the site is fast becoming way TOO WONKY for me.
It’s not that I’m retarded. I have degrees in engineering, science and health care. I’m a savvy internet guy. But you folks are just too far into the deep economic end of the pool.
Many of the current posts leave me struggling to understand just what the heck (you know who you are) is trying to say, what do all the acronyms mean, and why should I be interested. After all, it is a “housing” site, isn’t it?
Obviously, the the appeal is narrowing down to the economics crowd, and of course, people who actually work in the business, speaking to each other…and not the general public.
In short, a shrinking fan base when compared to the millions of surfers searching for honest housing info and sound guidance.
My advice (for starters) is:
1. Get back on topic. There is a REAL NEED for the “old” Housing Doom, and your only real competitor is patrick.net, which is little more than a RE news aggregation site.
Housing Doom has incredible potential to become a national (or, gulp, INTERnational authority site. You have barely scratched the surface. Stop waxing on about the bubble and get invigorated!
2. Cultivate input from housing professionals ON THE FRONT LINES who can be relied upon for straight talk about current conditions, including LOCAL content.
3. Let readers know, you don’t need a phd to participate. Your internet market is Joe and Mary Surfer…not Professor Wonk.
3. Consider starting a forum as part of the site. That’s a no-brainer. You are ready for it. Incredibly easy to set up.
4. The site itself (the theme and layout) could use some attention. Get rid of the muted parchment look. Get a more modern theme. As Dylan has said: “things have changed.”
Give users a control panel, like the other blogs do; so they can include an avatar, contact info, profile, and backlink if they wish.
Find out why sites SHOULD HAVE a favicon and get one of your own (it takes maybe, 5 minutes.)
5. I sense some degree of regret that the site does not have as high a profile on the internet as it deserves (forgive me if my sensors are wrong.) I agree, but hey, internet popularity is not about content. It’s about SEO.
Spend a few hours on the Warrior Forum and you’ll realize that getting attention is all about making Google happy; and making Big G happy is all about SEO. That’s a clue. Know it. Embrace it.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten myself banned from Housing Doom, I think I’ll mosey over to automaticearth and see whats new.
Regards to all, Catcher.
I agree with DCBeacon et al, in that I eventually found myself increasingly coming to this site in search of commentary on the economy in general (which, of course, is hopelessly intertwined with the housing bubble). Often, when I have a few minutes I come here only to look at the links on the sidebar, which I have come to know and trust as always being interesting and timely.
Thanks always, Twist and John, and also supporting cast!
Twist,
I was writing about all bubble bloggers, you included
I have somewhat tired of blogging about the bubble. I have still not bought a house. The economics of the area I live in sadly still do not justify it. I don’t know if or when I ever will. I’m resigned that this means “possibly never”.
As Schiller has put it, the recent activity has been “unprecedented”. Never in the history of the world has a government been able to prevent a bubble from bursting. But, the level of intervention has been unprecedented, so it’s anyone’s guess now what happens, we have no historical corollary to pull from.
Sadly, that intervention will only manifest itself somewhere else, and likely with a larger macro impact than just letting nature take its course. Currency debasement/destruction? Debt Slaves? Onerous tax burdens? Japan-style deflation? Weakened banking system? None of the outcomes I can imagine are as good as just letting housing and banks take their lumps, but I never imagined the course we took when I started blogging. I have really lost faith in our elected officials, government, and country. We are a country of fat, lazy, ignorant, and self-serving trolls. Indeed, I should have been more like Keith of Housing Panic and spoken out more. I can handle the defeat of the housing market; I don’t handle the defeat of the American character as easily. I vividly recall the anger, disgust, and frustration of seeing the TARP pass; we have real financial terrorists running our 2-party system. Hank Paulson and Timmy Geithner are the Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri of our financial terrorist war. Trouble is, most don’t even know we were attacked.
Blogging is about subversion. The mass media is the “circus” portion of our late-stage Roman Empire. I would have liked to save the republic, but it will sadly go out with a whimper, not with a bang.
Sadly, so has the bubble blogging community. Caring just takes too much energy; energy that is better conserved with protecting our own families from the onslaught to come.
I guess this best sums up my disappointment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X_nnGuOdKA
Chuck Ponzi
Twist,
Great observations. I think plenty of writers have given up because everything is the same now1 day in and day out. I know I started my site about 2 years ago hoping to influence the credit bubble and bring more attention to it. Of course everything went as many of us thought, until the government stepped in.
Instead of reform we get bailouts. Instead of a banking system overhaul we get permanent support for failed management. Instead of economic security we get the FED leveraging the entire country to keep Citi in business.
I have a hard time finding things to write about now that any notion of moral hazard was thrown away. Of course the next collapse should be the final one, so there will not be anything to blog about then either.
I appreciate the work this site does and check every day.
LOL, my verification word is “downcast”!
——-
[1]: please forgive the small adjustment, jm
Catcher-
You have a number of valid observations- thank you. I’m sure our admin will second your opinion about our format- he’s been trying to get me to change our look for a long time now. I however have been trying to get our admin to get a favicon up- maybe he’ll cut me a deal. : )
I do hope that folks don’t feel they need a PhD to join in the conversation. [That would leave me out, for one thing!] Horse sense is more valued than a sheepskin around here- although we don’t hold it against you if you’ve got one.
There are some reasons that I’ve changed a lot of our emphasis though. One is that when we first started, I emphasized data analysis of Phoenix, LV, Tucson and national markets. I would see my charts and graphs posted all over the place. People loved them. All you could get from the mainstream media was month-to-month or year-over-year numbers- not long term trends. I did articles on the fine print of homebuilder ads [The danger of teaser rates.] and on various housing projects around Phoenix. John wrote about potential problems with GSEs and mortgages, but I worried more about real estate sales.
Over time though I discovered that those posts became less popular. I suspect it’s that most people felt like I did. I originally started tracking the trends for myself so I could figure out when to buy. Now, like Chuck, I don’t see it happening any time in the immediate future. I started worrying more about the greater economy. After last year’s banking crisis and constant government intervention, I think you can’t count on past trends to tell you much about real estate’s future anyway. In many ways we are just in uncharted territory- “past performance is no guarantee of future results”.
The other reason for shifting to less data intensive posts was the time factor. When we started I would put in 8+ hours every day, seven days a week. Gathering statistics and making sense of them was very time consuming. My daughters loved rubbing it in that they could make more in a couple of days babysitting than Mom took in blogging. This was never about the money, but I just couldn’t justify the time any more.
Then we had a change in our readership. When we started almost all of our readers were from the Phoenix SE Valley- now less than 14% of our readers are from AZ.
The main reason that I pay more attention to the greater economy now though is the same reason that I started Doom in the first place. I’d like to buy a house again at some point, and I believe that a stable economy is the key to a stable housing market. I also think that if our government succeeds in demolishing our financial system, housing is REALLY going to crash. Until that gets sorted out, I’m personally too chicken to even think about it.
That said, your comments are well noted. I think that Mish, CR and Big Picture do a better job at dealing with the general economy- we’ll try and not forget where we came from.
You’re comments are valued- you don’t have to worry about getting banned. We’ll try and make sure stopping by is worthwhile.
Chuck-
By far the worst part of this gig has been discovering for myself the level of greed, corruption, incompetence and stupidity in our government and financial system. I miss the good old days when I was smugly grateful that for the most part we had an honest, transparent government and a well regulated banking system. My feelings can often be summed up by a Toby Keith song called I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
Two party system? Twin sons of different mothers, if you ask me. It seems to be more about which special interests control which party, rather than anything to do with ideology.
For the American people at least I do have some hope. Those wonderful, hardworking people that I’ve known who survived the Great Depression must have been the same ding-dongs that caused the financial problems of the 1920s the first place. Maybe we need another Depression to make us get up off of our complacent, lazy backsides and do something.
Liked your last comment Twist. In defense of what Catcher said, I believe that some bloggers may have wore themselves out trying to keep up with the latest technology everything.
Maybe everything and something has already been done, what was in yesterday is not in tomorrow. Like simplicity, yesterday, complexity today. The media eventually contributed fairly heavily to the housing crisis news event, sharing, or stealing the limelight with bloggers. Now, those same newsites are creating their own forums and blogs. Even going so far as to employ people who keep an eye on what the internet happens to be buzzing about today.
twist, you clearly hit a nerve with this post, given the quality and range of the reponses. I think most of us who visit here are concerned about the fundamental state of our society. And while we come at it from different perspectives, you and all of us manage a very respectful dialogue here.
I for one would be verry happy with transformative change in the US, meaning a high tolerance for disruptive innovation. I agree that the Depression, as well as other traumatic times like the Civil War and the civil rights movement, are necessary and positive in the long run.
How we bold revolutionaries became an entitled and frightened culture has many root causes, and therefore an array of general remedies. Sorting through these and determining what to do about them takes among other things a degree of selflessness and open-mindedness that a blog environment just might provide.
I for one am definitely in.
DC-
I am worried that as this great speculative bubble collapses, we could end up with an economy where 30% of workers are superfluous. The potential for severe social disruption is enormous.
I like your term “disruptive innovation”. We don’t need a violent revolution but some serious revolutionary thinking. How do we get this country back to the basics- providing our own goods, working to feed ourselves, saving up for retirement without collapsing into a banana republic? It’s answering those questions that will stabilize housing, not bailouts, loan mods and easy credit.
We don’t have the program up and running any more, but I used to be able to see where many of our readers came in from. An amazing number of government offices, lending institutions and media outlets do stop by. With luck, our concerns will be noted and maybe even taken into consideration in the great public debate.
It’s easy to see why no one bothers with you anymore, and I never will again:
YOU DON’T HAVE ANY NEW POLITICAL IDEAS.
All your research shows is that you have extremely undeveloped, common-as-dirt, useless petit bourgeois notions. You learn nothing, you don’t become more sophisticated. Your research teaches you nothing. You simply come back with a ragbag of useless rather right-wing ideas. Who needs you?
In fact, the more you go on, the more narrow-minded you reveal yourselves to be.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO CONTRIBUTE IN THE WAY OF NEW IDEAS.
So just shut down this nonsense.
JR -
Actually, I’m mostly occupied with trying to recycle old ideas these days. For example, Tawney, in his 1922 book, has some amazing stuff to say towards the end about the late 17th century in England. Some of the Poor Laws debates that started back with Elizabeth I sound like they’re right out of me and Old Mike. Igor may be “depressed,” but I get some comfort out of realizing these debates go back a long way in the anglo world.
JR-
I’m with John. Financial “innovation” is what got us into this mess. Too often we ignore the experience of hundreds of years thinking that the human experience has changed.
We used to have Churchill’s quote Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, on our masthead. Old is not necessarily outdated.
JR, that’s a funny comment coming from someone whose every post for the last few years has been about the same policy and legal position. Yes, we know you wrote a book about it.
I think your tone of frustration comes from being a bit ignored here at times, but what can we say about the very same ideas posted over and over, in a manner that does not inspire engagement from others, I might add.
I agree that the type of “innovation” we need is not so much a brand new thing as it is a return to fundamental things.
john, twist, and dc,
don’t worry…he’ll be back to mention the SAME book within a week. he’ll cite the SAME quotes (from himself) that he has been for the past year. i’m just goin to note the date that i posted this so when he visits again i can cite this post and say “remember when….i told you all so!!!”
AZ (#22) -
The devil of it is, I rather think there’s probably some pretty good stuff in JR’s book, although to appreciate it would take more time than I have
I’m even more worried that he’s got something important to say about the Gödel incompleteness theorems, but me and thee will have long since squared the circle on international bank regulation before we even come close to getting the joke there. My family was close to that of the late Doug Ross of Softech, and I was privileged once to see a draft copy of his thoughts on non-standard set theory. It wouldn’t strike me as odd if 100 years from now it turns out JR was an early straw-in-the-wind of something important in that area.
Friends,
Never doubt the value you have added with Doom’s moderate, fact based and historically grounded approach. As the abandoned sites on your blog role(which deserves a clean up) evince, not all had your staying power. There is a reason. In real life, you have undoubtedly saved some of your readers from major financial mistakes and also have, at all times, attempted to honestly inform, not just lecture or persuade, your readership. You built a forum where folks of good will could actually learn more about a complex developing economic and social situation together, perhaps to the chagrin of some who, with Chavez-like unjustificable arrogance, believe they have all the answers, and have at least provided your other readers with some comic relief. While there are thousands of sites for the over-opinionated, feckless young (even those who think they will be taken seriously while actually using the term “petit bourgeois”, what a hoot!), the solid, approachable foundation you built this blog on, from day one, make this long time reader hope you continue with your evolving mission. In that regard, I recommend Norman Cantor’s “In The Wake Of The Plague”, now available in the bargain bin in paperback. It will be especially helpful for those who are actually interested in how unexpected external factors, not silly theories,conspiracies,dogma or government action, drive real economic and social evolution. And of course, John, we still have to see what those “implicit guarantees” turn out to mean in extremis.
Old Mike-
Thank you for the kind words. We know your high standards and expectations, so praise from you is especially appreciated. We’ll try not to let you down. : )
Great post, Old Mike!!!
Old Mike -
Good to hear from you again. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found some devastating comebacks to your arguments from late ‘06