Real Estate Bubble Debate

Homebuyer survey: Graph prices thru 2010

During 2005, The Real Estate Cafe tried to keep its clients as well as the general public informed about the real estate bubble through our blog. Now we'd like to invite our blog readers in Greater Boston to give us YOUR opinion on the housing market and homebuying plans for 2006.

The survey takes just a few minutes and we need *** FIVE *** more respondents to reach our goal of 100. Your feedback will help us provide better services to consumers.

Privacy Policy: Survey responses will be tablulated as a group without attribution to individual respondents. Your identify is so confidential we don't even ask for your name or your email address, so there's no way we can share or, God forbid, sell them to anyone who might send you junk mail or spam.

Real estate bubble: Top news story of 2005?

For the past month, two Boston Globe real estate articles, one on falling prices and the other on rising foreclosures, have topped their list of "Most Popular Stories" (click on image for larger view).  Now, guess what their cross-town rival, the Boston Herald, has listed as #1 on their "top business and economics highlights of 2005"?

1. Pop goes the bubble — The state’s housing bubble finally sprang a leak this year, with a noticeable slowdown in sales, a falling off in prices and long waits to sell homes. Partly brought about by rising interest rates, the slowdown was evident by May, when housing sales fell by 11 percent over the prior year. The market hasn’t shown much improvement since.

The rest of the Herald's list includes factors that have contributed to the end of the real estate bubble and will continue to pull down housing prices in coming months and years: slow job growth in the state, rising gas and energy prices, and loss of major Massachusetts employers through mergers, acquisitions, and relocations. 

TEST MARKETING AN IDEA

The Real Estate Cafe has been tracking factors underlying the housing market in Boston since 2000, the peak of the dot.com boom, and we are eager to share our knowledge and get your insight, too.  Would you be interested in participating in a monthly or bi-weekly real estate round table, or since we'll probably host the conversation in a restaurant or bar, an occasional "Bubble Hour" or "Boston Realty Party" in 2006? If so, we'd like to hear from you particularly if you want to be a featured guest. 

We know that our clients tend to be part of the "do-it-yourself" movement, but this is one of the ideas we're exploring to increase peer-to-peer interaction in 2006.  Please let us know if you have ideas about how we can help you learn from each other to make more informed decisions, avoid making mistakes, and ultimately, save money.