Seattle Bubble

News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.

Seattle Bubble - News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.

Entries Tagged as 'forum'

Seattle Bubble Commenters: Thank You!

By The Tim on November 5th, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 69 Comments

Seattle Bubble hit a geeky milestone yesterday, with the posting of its 0×10000th comment! That’s hexadecimal—base 16—65,536 for you non-geeks out there. The 0×10000th comment was posted by Flying Ape.

In commemoration of this geeky occasion, here are a few statistics relating to the comments on Seattle Bubble.

As of the 0×10000th comment, 65,536 comments had been posted across a total of 1,852 posts, for an average of 35 comments per post. Seattle Bubble was launched on August 5, 2005, so that’s an average of 42 comments per day.

Stupid spam robots have attempted (and failed) to post 89,069 (0×15BED) spam comments, outnumbering comments by real people 1.4 to 1. And that’s just since Seattle Bubble’s move to its own domain in May 2007, meaning that the spambots (failed to) post an average of 99 comments per day. Yikes!

Top 10 most-commented posts:

  1. 2008.06 – May Reporting Roundup (330 comments)
  2. 2009.06 – May Foreclosures Up 69% from 2008 in King County (295 comments)
  3. 2008.08 – House Valuation Workshop (232 comments)
  4. 2009.01 – Official Word on Microsoft Layoffs: 1,400 Now, 5,000 Total (218 comments)
  5. 2009.07 – Are Home Price Drops Around Seattle Mostly Over? (218 comments)
  6. 2008.07 – June Reporting Roundup (206 comments)
  7. 2009.08 – Comment of the Week: Impulsive Behavior Disorder (198 comments)
  8. 2008.01 – Predictions: 2007 Revisited, 2008 Prognosticated (186 comments)
  9. 2008.09 – Breaking: House Votes Down $700B Bailout (179 comments)
  10. 2009.07 – NWMLS: Sales Edge Above ‘08, Median Up 5% MOM, Down 12% YOY (177 comments)

Top 10 12 most prolific commenters:

  1. Kary L. Krismer (2,548 comments)
  2. The Tim (2,085 comments)
  3. david losh (1,596 comments)
  4. deejayoh (1,504 comments)
  5. Scotsman (1,472 comments)
  6. patient (1,190 comments)
  7. Eleua (1,177 comments)
  8. softwarengineer (1,150 comments)
  9. meshugy (929 comments)
  10. Matthew (925 comments)
  11. Ray Pepper (869 comments)
  12. Jon (782 comments)

[Update: There was a glitch in the auto-generated top ten that caused some commenters' count to be split. I have updated the list to correct for this error.]

Technically, “Anonymous” was #1 with 2,651 comments (a throwback to Seattle Bubble’s old days at Blogger.com), but since that’s not really a single person, it doesn’t count. What’s really impressive about Kary’s spot at #1 is that he only just started commenting on Seattle Bubble in July of last year, so in less than 16 months he has managed to rack up nearly twice as many comments as the next-closest competitor (not counting myself), averaging 5.4 comments per day.

And let’s not leave out the forum!

Top 10 forum posters:

  1. rose-colored-coolaid (1,976 posts)
  2. deejayoh (1,154 posts)
  3. TJ_98370 (837 posts)
  4. The Tim (790 posts)
  5. Alan (780 posts)
  6. Robroy (681 posts)
  7. sniglet (679 posts)
  8. Markor (602 posts)
  9. biliruben (573 posts)
  10. WestSideBilly (550 posts)

A giant THANK YOU goes out to everyone that participates in the discussion here at Seattle Bubble. I have learned a lot from you, and I think on the whole we have made a positive contribution to the understanding and demystifying of real estate and related economic issues in the Seattle area. I hope that we can continue the conversation for many 0×1000s of comments to come. ;^)

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Need a Little Green? MS Paint to the Rescue!

By The Tim on July 29th, 2009 at 6:53 AM · 22 Comments

Okay this is just too funny not to post. Over in my favorite forum thread Detrimental Listing Photos Everett_Tom spotted this gem [update: the listing photo has since been changed—original screenshot here], where the (presumably) brown grass in the listing photo has been extremely poorly painted over in bright green in the only photo on the listing. Shortly thereafter, I spotted another similar example [original screenshot here], where the digital green spray paint is creeping all the way up the fence.

One thing led to another, somebody posted it to Reddit where it subsequently made the front page, and before you know it, guess which two homes are the most popular in all of Snohomish County on Redfin?

MS Paint to the Rescue!

Who knew MS Paint could be so effective?

[Update]
Everett_Tom strikes again, pointing out that the MS-Paint-ified photo was just grabbed from Snohomish County records!

Before MS Paint
Before MS Paint
After MS Paint
After MS Paint

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Foreclosures: Up, Up, and Away!

By The Tim on June 13th, 2007 at 11:04 AM · 23 Comments

Aubrey Cohen is on a roll, reporting the uncomfortable truth about the local housing market (granted, with a slight sugar-coating). The latest report is on the ever-increasing number of foreclosures in the Seattle area, another fact that is conveniently ignored by Elizabeth Rhodes at the Seattle Times.

The Seattle area continued to follow the national trend in May of more people facing foreclosure, but still stayed below the national rate, according to statistics released Tuesday.The Seattle area, defined as King and Snohomish counties, recorded 832 foreclosure filings in May, up 9.5 percent from April and 76.6 percent from May 2006, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif., company that tracks foreclosure filings.

The Seattle-area rate of one filing for every 1,176 households in May was well below the national rate of one per 656 households and good for 131st among U.S. metro areas, down from 128th in April.

The large year-to-year increase in May was mostly the result of an unusually low number of filings in King County in May 2006. Seattle-area filings are up 15.8 percent for the year through May from the same period last year.

Filings for the state in May were up 21 percent from April and 40 percent from May 2006. Its rate of one filing per 1,153 households put it 20th among states, up from 23rd in April.

Nationally, May’s foreclosure filings were up 19 percent from April and up nearly 90 percent from May 2006.

“After a barely perceptible dip in April, foreclosure activity roared back with a vengeance in May,” James Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s chief executive, said in a statement accompanying the numbers.

“Such strong activity in the midst of the typical spring buying season could foreshadow even higher foreclosure levels later in the year.”

It isn’t that difficult to do the math. Unaffordable mortgages + stagnating appreciation (or even *gasp* depreciation) = increasing foreclosures. For a graphical look at the recent spike in local foreclosures, I present this graph, derived from data harvested from foreclosure.com by the vigilant Bubble Markets Inventory Tracking blog. Credit for the idea for this graph goes to the statistical powerhouse Deejayoh, whose posts on the forum are not to be missed.

The green line represents the ratio of foreclosures to preforeclosures, which as you can see has shot up in the last few months from less than 10% to over 40%. Could this be the beginning of an unpleasant and rapid spike, or is there some reasonable, one-time explanation for the sudden jump?

I just keep going back to that simple equation above.

(Aubrey Cohen, Seattle P-I, 06.12.2007)

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To Open Thread or Not to Open Thread?

By The Tim on May 2nd, 2007 at 4:01 PM · 27 Comments

Thanks to the cessation of daily open thread posts during and after my recent vacation, participation in the forums has really taken off. However, when I announced on Monday that I would cease posting open threads for the foreseeable future, a number of you protested.

While I am certainly glad to see the forums well-utilized, I also don’t want to alienate those of you who have contributed some of the most interesting discussion to this site. When I post daily open threads, forum usage declines, but without open threads, some people don’t really participate as much. So I’m looking for some kind of middle ground.

Does anyone have suggestions for a way that we can facilitate open thread discussion without decreasing forum usage? I was thinking of reducing the open thread frequency, or placing it one click away from the front page (like the forums already are).

What do you think of either of those ideas, and what are some other things we might try?

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Vacation Link Roundup

By The Tim on April 30th, 2007 at 8:45 AM · 16 Comments

Looks like I didn’t miss too much Seattle housing news while I was gone. I’m looking forward to seeing the April numbers next week. Here’s a summary of what I noticed while clearing my inbox:

I’m also pleased to report that my nefarious scheme of going on vacation appears to have had the desired effect on the forums. Membership swelled by nearly 30%, and posting activity skyrocketed. Here are a few of the more popular and/or interesting threads:

Therefore, I believe it is time to say goodbye to the open threads. For the foreseeable future, all user-driven discussion will take place on the forums. Thanks for your participation. I really enjoy reading what everyone comes up with.

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Seattle Bubble Forum Highlights

By The Tim on February 23rd, 2007 at 9:14 AM · 5 Comments

There are lots of great conversations going on over at the Seattle Bubble Forums, why don’t you join in too? Here’s a sampling of what’s going on over there:

These are just a few of the conversations that are going on. So why don’t you head on over and add your voice to the discussion?

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