Real Estate Blog Housing Bubble Bust
Three years ago, plenty of folks considered Patrick Killelea to be a loony tune raving about real estate Armageddon.
While most Americans - and especially people in the Bay Area - swore by the gospel that investing in real estate was a sure road to riches, Killelea, a disenchanted house hunter, peddled a heretical counterview: The housing market was a gigantic bubble ready to burst. Through his blog, Reality Parser www.patrick.net, he expressed his view that home prices were grotesquely overinflated.
He practiced what he preached, refusing to buy a house. Instead he and his wife rent a Menlo Park bungalow for themselves and their two children. Today, the housing market has indeed slumped, giving his views some credence.
“Nobody calls me crazy now,” Killelea said. “I haven’t changed; it was just a matter of waiting for the fundamentals to catch up.”
Killelea’s blog attracts 14,000 readers a day, drawn to his sardonic take on the market and numerous links to news articles that bear out his premise. His site ranks high in Google searches of “housing market” or “housing crash.”
The site exemplifies a new real estate Web genre: “bubble bloggers.”
There are scores of bubble bloggers who passionately believe the housing market is so out of whack that it is destined to collapse. What Matt Drudge is to political gossip, housing bubble bloggers are to real estate doom and gloom. They range from acerbic to inflammatory but definitely don’t mince words. They rail against the real estate industry, sometimes spin conspiracy theories, and lately indulge in schadenfreude about the housing downturn. Bubble bloggers say they inject a healthy dose of skepticism to counterbalance excessive cheerleading from real estate industry professionals.
“Bubble bloggers weren’t taken seriously until six months ago, and now everyone’s taking them seriously, which is fantastic,” said Brad Inman, founder and publisher of Inman News, a wide-ranging real estate Web site. “They really served a purpose when they were a voice in the wilderness.”
But many real estate agents are less enthusiastic.
“I laugh at bubble bloggers,” said Matt Lanning, a Realtor with Zephyr Real Estate in San Francisco, whose sfhomeblog.com takes a considerably more upbeat view of the market. “I don’t claim the world is always going to be stable, but there is no way the San Francisco market will collapse. It’s a lot like the sensational journalism we’re seeing with subprime mortgages which are far less of an issue than the media is making them out to be.”
As for Killelea, Lanning said: “He has not been right about anything. Most of what he does is scour the Internet looking for anything to back up his position as someone who is forecasting the coming apocalypse of the real estate market.”
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