Is there any way to add a “Last comment on ” to the “Add comment (#)” line? It’d be nice to see recent comments in older posts.

1.) Rethink the blue color scheme.

2.) Set up a space for us bubbleheads to turn in our badges and guns i.e. notify folks when we set aside all reason and become homebuyers.

RE may be local, but psychology and credit are responsible for local reality and are at least national.

generally, though, everyone wants more data more often because we are interested in what happens next.

so, if you could just put together a real-time measure of the local, national, and international emotional states and next month’s housing interest rates and available loan options, that would be great.

oh, and an indicator of how many people are going to default and when

I really enjoy your blog. It’s a voice of sanity in a crazy real estate market.

Seattle Bubble can help people navigate the paradigm shift in the next months with the occasional focused post contextualizing local market examples as they begin piling up. [Example: the local heavyweight Pine Street Group just let slip that they intend two tall towers on the edge of Belltown - towers of apartments, not condos. Shift.]

I’ve noticed housing blogs in SoCal filling with comments from sophisticated housing seekers who have bitten the bullet, acknowledged the shift, and are determined to make smart choices in renting. They need to learn how to structure a lease from a frustrated flipper to disallow having their place sold out from under them during the lease term; how to investigate the solvency of a potential landlord; how to write in enforceable upkeep and maintenance provisions to protect against an absentee investor/owner who won’t answer the phone.

Seattle Bubble will provide a real public service as our oversupply of real property becomes an oversupply of (possibly risky) investor-owned rental units.

I know that rentals bottomed about 10 years after housing in 1942 or so, but I don’t think there was such a huge building boom at that time, only in Florida, and that topped several years before the stock market. With all the overbuilding, and because it is likely that quite a few people will move in with family for a while to get back on their feet (this is what my sister-in-law and her husband did after they got burned in the RE bust of Sacramento in the early 90’s) I think that rentals will not be going up significantly very soon and housing will have to drop significantly, probably at least 30% but in my opinion we could see 50% because the economy will go into such a recession or depression. Do I need to state my reasons for believing that we will probably have a depression (a long and deep recession)? This has been discussed here before.

I.E.

A
– D
– G
B
– C
– — E
– F

If you go to http://www.slashdot.com, you can see a forum that allows for this type of posting. It would help organize the blog much better, especially when we get 100 comments on a single post.

They will be feeling hopeless and depressed soon and it would be the right thing to do even though they have been rude and unreasonable.

Too bad that the guy changed his name to Gene Dexter and didn’t stick with his original name. Nothing like finding out that he chose the name of a gay porn star!

the same could be used here so if you are a owner looking to sell, and say, “I think RE market is going up, bla bla bla, (then admit at the end “going long on RE”) BUT at the same time IF YOU ARE SITTING IN YOUR APARTMENT WAITING FOR THE RE MARKET TO DROP TO BUY LOW, you should ad a disclosure at the end- of a negative comment (going short on RE) to give full disclosure!

Just half serious here but somtin to tink about

- who are the current bagholders for those pricy serial flips on Naomi Place,
- the cheesemaker and his $400K crapcan in Shoreline,
- that marketing Boomer who bought the $600K condo in Eastlake with an IO loan,
- stats on the condo and condo-tel DISASTER we have brewing downtown,
- any other Schadenfreude-worthy spectacles to entertain us readers.

It’s all good! Congrats! Marriage and family first, homeownership only when it makes financial sense once again (and it will).

Also, whatever happened with your logo design? Your web page header could use some jazzing up.

Remember the saying, don’t sweat the small stuff, its all small stuff. Well, some blogging criticisms of other bloggers on this site are over things like:

criticizing bloggers with different computer applications (like whether they embed URLs or not)

criticizing bloggers who prefer capital letters for emphases

criticizing bloggers on ambiguous/unimportant technical abilities they lack, just because they’re technical [good gosh, who knows everything technical anyway and why would we want to?]

Most of the time Tim, this doesn’t happen on your site. But the trolls out there try to belittle folks on unimportant non-issues.

Emphasize this rule to bloggers:

“Try to be as nice as possible [sometimes the article we're attacking on the blog isn't nice at all, then we can attack the article, but be as civil as possible to bloggers with different opinions than our own] at all times”

Conversely though, if a blogger is attacked in an uncivil way by another blogger, its OK to defend yourself [believe me, these buffoons/trolls don't want our intelligence launched against them that way, its slam dunk, they'll lose and never come back, hopefully]. The exception.

yes, you have several really good topics.

Part of the ridiculous expense of buying real estate, is the cost of the transaction. I’ve seen posts about alternative real estate services like redfin, zIp realty, zillow, etc. More emphasis here would be good. How are they really working out for customers? Anecdotal evidence. Data.

As Redfin notes, the buyer is the only one who brings a checkbook to closing, so the idea that all the commissions are paid by the seller is fiction. Buyers and sellers are both interested in making this market more efficient.

This would be more work but would be cool:
Show a small graph with the trend over the past month or past 6 months. This graphs would also be updated at the same time as the numbers are gathered.

That, and a feature column by Ballard Bob.

Won’t you risk ending up having a lot of the worthless ones posting anonymously and recommending themselves?

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/10/12/oh-noez-mah-mortgage-dun-readjusted/

Seriously, I like the idea of showing real examples of houses selling at a loss too.

One thing that I think adds value to these discussions is having guests post in my opinion.

I have a question that I would like to ask (I know its been discussed but I am not satisfied):
As housing prices go down and rents go up it will become at some point profitable to buy rentals, which will then stop the declining housing market which then will reverse the mentality of buying into a declining market. So the question is – how far will the market have to come down for this to happen? Is it going to be significant?

Feel free to rip that logic to shreds =)

For example, if I ask the bot “will Seattle implode?” The bot will respond “Certainly.”

I think this would bring the site to a whole new level.

I suggest a Wall of Shame type of page, where we can post comments from reporters, realtors, over time:

Audrey Wassisface:
Jun 2007 – Return to normal appreciation, blah blah blah
Sep 2007 – Sellers should be realistic, etc, blah blah
Feb 2008 – I’m ruined. RUINED!!!!!

That sort of thing… It would be good to show people why you can’t believe “experts”.

We can start with national figures, and then bring in the local ones as time moves on.

I’d be in favor of a nice post to slam some of the others as it’s quite amazing what you can find when you start googling people…but I really don’t want any hired goons showing up at my doorstep.

-David