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Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 12:13 PM

First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of this blog!

Let’s recap where we’ve been over the last year:

1. The daily inventory of houses for sale has grown from approximately 1,200 to 1,750. The inventory usually shrinks in the fourth quarter, we’ll see about this year.  On December 24, 2005 there were a total of 1,092 active listings.

2.  Closed sales have dropped sharply.

Monthly closed escrows:

Sept. ’04      Sept. ’05       Sept. ’06

      302              330                87  (so far)

We’ll add about 100 this week, but that’s still a big drop-off, considering the size of the inventory.

Year-to-date closings (Jan. 1 to Sept. 24):

      2004             2005            2006

     2,741            2,659            1,922    (27.7% fewer than ’05)

3.  Sellers are slow in getting the message.  The real estate industry has been particularly inept in recognizing the changes in the marketplace.   They rather put a spin on the bubble, than assist people with dealing with it.  I think it’s due to inexperience and ignorance, more than intentional deceit.  If you ask me it’s inexcusable, but at least it helps illuminate the competance of individual agents.  Want to know if an agent is any good?  Just ask him about the bubble, and listen to what comes out of their mouth – their answer will be a great indicator as to how much they can help you.

The #1 goal of this blog is to disseminate accurate data and suggest ways to work with it.

Obviously, looking at these numbers above, I’m doing a lousy job at saving the world of real estate.  But hopefully more individual agents will join in and help educate the clients, especially sellers.

Here how this blog has done over the last year:

Unique users                 27,696

Raw hits                        177,483

Search Engine Hits     50,363

Google PageRank          4/10

I’m not sure what those number mean exactly, but it sounds like a lot of people have been by for a visit.  I am grateful for your attendance and participation – thank you!

 

Posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 12:13 PM in How did we get here?, Thesis, Thinking of Buying?, Thinking of Selling? | 2 Comments » | Print Print You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Reader Comments: 2 Responses

  1. Regarding finding a realtor…

    "Just ask him about the bubble, and listen to what comes out of their mouth – their answer will be a great indicator as to how much they can help you."

    I can’t agree more. I looked pretty intensively for a house earlier this year before deciding to "wait things out a bit". The realtor I was working with refused to acknowledge that prices might come down a bit. Every house we were interested in ended up selling for significantly less than what she thought we should offer. Our ideas about the housing bubble were so disparate that we parted ways.

    I appreciate all of your efforts into this blog. I’m sure it represents a significant amount of work for you but I suspect that it will pay off in the long term.

    dp | September 24th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

  2. hello from germany

    up to next years.

    there will be a lot of work to be done in the cleanup…..

    great site

    jan-martin | September 26th, 2006 at 3:59 pm

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