That’s not the problem – the problem is that we are poisoning the minds of innocent potential commission-payers, who might not understand that It’s Always A Great Time To Buy!

For a preview of what we will soon be seeing in Seattle as an antidote to Seattle Bubble, there is a great new Clark County webpage:

http://www.buynowclarkcounty.com/

From the site:

It’s a Great Time to Buy
Today, buyers have greater opportunities than they have had in years.
Prices have leveled off, or even declined in some areas, making this the best time to buy.
Houses are staying on the market longer, creating a wider variety of choice for home shoppers.
Mortgage interest rates are still very affordable and remain near historic lows at around 5.8 percent.
Many builders are offering discounted financing packages and value-added incentives to purchase a new home.
A wide range of financing options is available for consumers in all price ranges.
The economy is solid and job creation is strong, which bodes well for future house price appreciation.

Your significant other probably says the same thing about you!

Nostra"golly"U, that’s easy, just don’t come here any more. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the website will no longer exist for you. Websites aren’t like TV commercials you know – you can just stop coming here. It’s quite simple.

Good luck with your flip, BTW.

GIDDY UP!

Censorship of Ray Pepper”

I second that……..

The ads now make it pretty clear it is a for profit venture (donations were the start, though it can be argued they are used only for costs) as a result your legal liability / risk of being sued has increased on a couple of fronts and you need a good frank lawyer to get going and make sure you are protected and ready.

Posting individual listings with comentary is going to make it hard to work with the NWMLS or other realtors who are members of the NWMLS.

I don’t know what pricing you should pick, but it sure seems like these guys get a lot of free advertising and it’s not unreasonable for them to pay a small fee.

Ideally, you and perhaps another bubble-head would take one side, and you would enlist a couple real estate cheerleaders on the other side. Every month or so, you could have a sequence of posts, which are essentially responses to each other. The posts should have a general topic like “Will there be a spring bounce, and what will it look like”. Both sides can then argue it out.

A couple of keys though. First, predictions should generally be limited to the short-term verifiable kind. This way, in June you can point back to a sequence in March and declare a winner (if there is one). Second, it would be great if these posts were coalesced together somehow. Perhaps a new debate section, and each debate (even if it spans a couple weeks) will get a single link, but each debate post would get its own page. Third, you’d probably want to set up some debate ground rules. No name calling and such. Since you’ll be hand picking the experts, this should be easy to enforce (as opposed to hundreds of random people posting).

Post pictures of a run-down ugly house. Then we can try to come up with listing descriptions using our most creative realtoresque euphemisms.

Of course you might want to consult a lawyer first. ;)

I don’t know how this would make money, but maybe herein lies the problem of why the “real” media doesn’t do genuine investigative reporting anymore.

Losh should have his own column (suggested title: RE Notes from the alien spaceship)

Pepper’s self-promotion needs to end. Unless he wants to become a paid advertiser.

The hard choice is whether to change the editorial tone to seem less snarky and more objective. Snarky is much more fun. But it does tend to lower the credibility of the site to a broader audience, in my opinion. But lots of snarky commenters, no problem….

Or I should say, that’s what I want out of seattlebubble. I don’t want it to be a negative gloatfest either. I want true objectivity.

My experiences with Realtors has been terrible. They just want the transaction to happen and aren’t interested in whether I’m getting the best deal or not. One time in Queen Anne I offered $850,000 on a house. The realtor at Windermere was pushing me to meet an $890,000 counteroffer, telling me it was a solid deal. I chose not to, because I had done thorough research and comps and thought I knew better.

Four weeks later and the list price was reduced to $839,000. It’s still for sale today, 6 months later, at that price. That realtor would have cost me at least $50,000 in value.

Anyway, that’s why I need good, objective information. Because I’m not going to get it from a realtor, and being poorly informed can be very costly.

I don’t have a problem with your message normally. Leaving your company website link in your sig is OK. But your defensiveness is starting to look like noise.

My advice is to look like the bigger man and just ignore people who dig at you, and to make sure that you don’t appear too gaudy when you spread your message. If you want to publicize your company, start your own blog. But please don’t use defense against trolls as an opportunity to advertise yourself here. I for one am starting to get sick of it.

Let me clarify my point: In the past, the RE agents held all the cards. We also paid them a lot in commission.

Now that we have access to data we don’t have to rely solely on the word of our agent (who may or may not be a scheister, and may or may not be well-educated). I don’t think this eliminates the need for RE agents. I hope that the result will be that agents will have more incentive to work in the best interest of their clients.

Why is it reprehensible to make the real estate business into an Amazon or Expedia? I’m perfectly capable of shopping for books and flights without a store clerk or travel agent. Am I too stupid to shop for a house? What type of degree do you need to become an agent? Oh yeah, no degree.

For somebody who has “been on the internet since 1995″, you should know that one of the greatest virtues of the web is the ability to put information in everyone’s hands. The MLS is now available to all of us. Why would I trust a business school dropout to help me with the biggest purchase of my life. If I need help, I’ll go to an agent like Ira, not some deluded protectionist.

You are right that business is a war. You just happen to be losing.

Censorship of Ray Pepper. Our message will be heard and it will only get louder my friend. You will be happy to know our advertisers have elected to restart our commercials on CNBC centering around mad Money with Jim Kramer and the Closing Bell of Wall Street each day.

It will appear everyday in Tacoma Zone and Seattle Zone of over 160,000 homes. Go ahead and Censor me, but never the ability for the consumer to hear there is an alternative to the Real Estate Agency Madness.

See you at the Home Show!

http://www.500Realty.net

We wannabe just like the big boys in Sno, King and Pierce.

- consider a few topics that could be revisited weekly; this type of structure would get me more excited to check the blog (hooray, it’s Mortgage Monday!). The site should still be spontaneous, but these would be fun. I love the weekly press wrapup.

- How about a “Dear Tim” column? You could have a separate email address for people to ask questions. I’ve had a few questions, but felt a little intimidated.

- How about some sort of rent vs buy calculator that takes into account varying appreciation rates. I haven’t ever been satisfied with existing calculators because they make you choose an interest rate for 30 years. What if it’s expected to go down for a few years and then back up to a normal rate?

Keep it up Tim.

I think that providing tools and information for people who decide that they want to buy would be helpful. Knowing that prices are bubbly, and using data from this site, somebody who is convinced that they want to buy a place would be armed with the data to do so, as well as making contacts in the industry. Reading this blog for a year, I now know of people in the industry who I feel like I could go to for a purchase.

The name of the blog is great because it keeps people who are curious about the bubble in this area coming to the blog. The discussion once they get here does not have to be a renter fueled homehowner hatefest though – I see enough of that on Ben Jones’s blog, and it gets old after a while. The data analysis and local context of this blog keep me coming back.

What I do think would be useful is analysis of actual properties (similar to the irvinehousingblog.com). Here are a few reasons:

A. It is the right time to begin tracking specific properties in Seattle. We are starting to see rollbacks, and properties staying on the market for a long time. Rental listings vs. sale listings are very interesting.

B. It provides new information that is not available elsewhere. That is, no one is featuring/tracking specific properties and how they sell (or don’t) over time. In some sense, this ‘gut level’ feel for recent deals is what you hope to get from a realtor, but in a declining market realtors are going to soft sell the numbers. The work that the irvinebubbleblog cite does to dig up the sales and financing history (I don’t even know how they get that data) is a real value add. You won’t see it in the newspaper, and I wouldn’t know how to find it myself.

C. It is specific to Seattle. Coverage of national news, trends, etc is already done by other blogs.

D. It is useful and constructive. People who watch a stream of properties go buy get a sense of the direction of the market, what is out there, and how demand for it is changing. If someone eventually goes to buy, they will be more informed for having watched properties sell over time.

E. It is more analytical. The more you focus on factual specifics (this is how much a house is listed for, its cost per square foot, this is what comparable rentals are, this is what it sold for in 2004, this is the income/downpayment requirement at the listed price) the more informative and less snarky the blog, and its comments, are likely to be. More informative and less snarky would be useful.

We don’t need another Rain City Guide. We don’t need “constructive” commentary. We don’t need nicey-nice, plays-well-with-others, milquetoast pseudo-analysis of the local market.

I started reading your site because it was honest, and it had an edge. If the professionals take over, I won’t have much incentive to keep reading.

Is Your Blog Exposing You to Legal Liability?

CYA!

Words of wisdom – leave your Blackberry home when going to dinner with your wife and NEVER take your laptop to bed! ;)

I also have to praise you for having a pretty specific field of analysis as well. I find it pretty interesting when looking at the overall Seattle Rain Real Estate blog main page, and find subjects such as who has the best pizza delivery, the weather, or professional sports team rants….and that relates how exactly?

On the humor side of things I would love to see some crazy listings specifically pointed or called out in a “What Were They Thinking?” side bar or landing page. I still get a kick out of the Pacific Northwest Living insert in the Seattle Times with the RE listings and the home review they often have; its a completely different world from where I live. I do enjoy the “great investment potential”, “ground-level opportunity”, and “great starter home” ads; I really think calling such properties out would really help send a message to the agent and owner that they need a reality check ;-)

The word bubble could mean lots of things. The domain name is relevant.

Go ahead with the ads; they don’t bother me.

As for content, I would like to see more reporting from the trenches: What is really going on out there in the real estate offices, the builder plats, the mortgage companies…I try to add to this on the forum when relevant, S-Crow helps. I’d love to see more anonymous (or not) reporting from those that can tell us what the heck is going on at a hyperlocal level.

I also like it when you summarize and link to stories from other MSM reporters in newspapers that I don’t always read, and I love the stats.

The conundrum is that the bad guys have the money and the good guys…don’t. And how long can you devote all the time and resources to keeping this site going essentially “for free”? I hope that some well off benefactor recognizes the merit of what you are doing and provides you with a steady income/contract independent of any money from the very industries that would turn your stie into a big RE/Mortgage advertisement and hence, muzzle “opposition”.

Aren’t there any MS millionaires out there who want to do some public good?

If protecting people from the biggest financial disaster of their lives is not a worthy cause…. then I don’t know what is.

Your blog has saved a lot of people from making the biggest financial mistake of their lives.

You are truly an unsung hero.

Bottom line…. stay the course.

A lot of your articles are way too long, sometimes creating confusion in how to respond to the convoluted nature of some them [unless they're just too long, with the same idea repeating itself unnecessarily, but could have been shortened anyway]. Remember the basic graphic artist’s rule for website management: “if we don’t need to read it, cut it out”.

I caught some distrust from some of the bloggers on your “advertised and paid website nature”; although I have noticed you encourage both sides of a debate, yet you still make it clear, you still fight for the little guy, in my opinion.

A lot of your blog centers on the fall of real estate in Seattle and keep that up as it worsens. Add some solutions though in the mean time, like buying foreclosures cheap or better ways to save money renting or buying cheap. Here’s an example: I’ve noticed a lot of restaurants thinning out lately with the housing recession, yet sites like fishbowl at Mitzels, Black Angus, Country Buffet, Dukes Chowder House, Red Robin, RAM, etc, etc all offer buy one dinner get one free on the web…a great way to save on entertainment costs, yet help keep the struggling service economy going too. Perhaps an article or two on the merits of shopping for food at places like WINCO and COSTCO? The best place to get a cheap laptop? Etc, etc, etc….

2) I’d love to see features on Seattle houses, just like on bubbletracking.blogspot.com; this will make the slump real, and provide hands-on evidence of the indulgences of the past as well as current realities.

Thanks for all the hard work, and good luck in the world of self-employment.

I fully respect your move to go self employed. I really think you’re onto something here. There is an unsatiated need for ‘real / non-influenced’ information in this market and people are looking for a place where this can be found. (you can’t even search ‘housing bubble’ on google without the results being influenced by page rank or alike… which can be purchased… therefore the results are somewhat biased by the big spenders). That said, a solid collection of anecdotal data points sure would help real people find real information while they try to piece together this seemingly random puzzle of economic data.

People who are reading this are not your average pineapple sellers. They are reading about realestate (and the economy) and trying to figure out what the ^^%) is going on. You’ve collected a motley crew of readers who as a group, may be able to piece together what to do here.

I don’t think the Seattebubble’s answer should be, “don’t buy anything until 2010″. With all due respect, this post would be last time I’d look at this page if that were the case. I think there are builders out there that on the verge of bankruptcy that ‘must sell’, there are a properties out there that got lumped in with the rest that are now getting ‘too cheap’ and there are buyers out there who are very well qualified to capitalize on a market that is beaten down.

America always finds a way to make a comeback. If you believe we are going to see the Great Depression II, then yes, don’t buy a house now, otherwise, we’re likely going to be looking back at the next couple of months as a missed opportunity to buy at a discount. I guess the low risk option would be to rent, but then again, who here thinks that the government is going to let the homeowners hang out to dry on this one? … there are a lot of tailwinds and support nets before the great deppression II hits… any of which could prevent it from happening. Go ahead and bet again America… good luck with that.

Lots of folks here feel pretty good about themselves everytime they find an article that confirms ‘they were right… there IS a housing bubble’. woopty doo… old news people.

I agree with Patient:

“- What areas fit my requirements?
- What areas or overvalued vs. undervalued?
- What builders are good values? What are the common issues to look for?( For example is a Buchan or Chaffey worth the premium of a Centex )?
- Are there any good incentives or price reductions out there?
- Is anyone having any luck with lowballing builders?
etc, etc

Keep it a mix of hard data and reader input as the current Seattle Bubble operates. Let readers participate with ratings and comments.
”

To me, this blog brings the opportunity to collect ‘real people’s experiences’ not just a bunch of horny renters that didn’t get laid in the last housing bubble.

Pierce County has some interesting properties. And they’re easy to research at the county website. Searching recorded documents for trustee sales and then related mortgage documents and sales history, turns up interesting stuff.

Last week I happened to walk by 3637 Ainsworth Ave in Tacoma. It’s a boarded-up, run down place. Out of curiosity, I searched the public documents, and it appears the place was a rental property that was refinanced about a year ago with a 40 year mortgage at 10% interest from a subprime lender. Now it’s in foreclosure. I Googled the lender and they had declared bankrupty in August.

It’s interesting to see specific examples of irrational exuberance, or perhaps just greed and stupidity.