North County Times Article on Housing Bubble Blogs

Over at the North County Times newspaper (a newspaper serving northern San Diego county), journalist Andrew Kleske has a piece deriding the myriad of blogs out there that have been discussing the housing bubble: Housing Bubbles and the Websites that Love Them. Upon hearing about this article at The Housing Bubble Blog, I was expecting a good discussion on blogs, their role in reporting news since big media appears to be dropping the ball, and the different opinions and zeal among bloggers. (After all, for every housing bubble doom and gloom blog, there's a blog by a real estate "investor" who's more than happy to brag about his returns.) Sadly this article was a disappointing op-ed piece that basically attempts to equate the housing bubble blogs with doomsayers that want nothing more than to see you sell your home. Mr. Kleske's final statement reiterates his thesis: "When it comes down to it, folks have to make their own predictions, using sites like www.realtor.com or this paper's own www.ncthomes.com to check prices or inventory or sites such as www.domania.com to see recent comparable sales prices."

Are bubble sites doom and gloom? If you read the comments at various housing bubble blogs some sure do sound a bit over the top in their predictions of the dire consequences, but most, in my opinion, have very interesting, well-researched commentary and insight. Bubbles are not sustainable, and anyone who thinks that those who claim so are being overzealous in their doom and gloom needs to take an Econ101 class. And we are starting to see the slowdown, but even Mr. Kleske isn't worried: "Driving through my neighborhood one might get the notion that some Love Canal-style industrial accident or unearthly science fiction events had occurred in the vicinity due to the volume of "For Sale" signs popping up in the past few weeks. ... But if folks were to pay attention and look more closely, they might notice something else appearing atop all those For Sale signs, such as smaller plaques that read "In Escrow," "Sale Pending" or even "Sold." And all of the selling neighbors I talked to weren't fleeing in fright, they were moving up to a bigger home.No, the homes aren't selling as quickly as they have in the past, but they are selling, which implies that for every seller who believes there is a housing bubble, there are buyers who either disagree or don't care."

I did a bit of research on Andrew Kleske (courtesy of Google). If you read a bit about him, you'll see that he's a long-time journalist and business analyst and "is a lecturer in the University of California, San Diego Department of Communications, teaching basic and Internet journalism." For someone who's supposedly well-versed in "Internet journalism," he sure does not seem to understand the benefits and democratization of information and reporting that blogs afford. (Or maybe he does realize this and is fearful for his own job security?) His article also indicates that he isn't aware of basic blog issues (like how Google AdSense works), nor does it look like he did much research before authoring his article. For example, many of the blogs he references in his article haven't been updated in several months, and he seems to think that http://thehousingbubble.blogspot.com/ and http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/ are two separate sites, when in fact they are both Ben's sites, the http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/ coming about due to technical difficulties with the first one.