Real Estate Bubble Debate

Boston bubble bloggers begin meeting OFFLINE

Fellow Boston bubble bloggers,

Over the past few months, a number of us have corresponded about getting together OFFLINE with other bubble bloggers in Boston / New England.  If getting together for one or both of the proposed events below make sense to you and your blog readers, feel free to pass this on or link to it.

1st Boston bubble blogger meeting:  Exploratory meeting for "citizen journalists"

Several Boston bubble bloggers have confirmed their participation in the following.  If your schedule permits, join us for any of these three:

1.  Starbucks (Mass. Ave & Wendell St. in Cambridge) from 6:30-6:55pm;
2.  Berkman Center (see link for location) from 7:00pm to 8:00 or 8:30pm.
3. Optional discussion over coffee / dinner afterwards, (Maybe Darwin's, JohnnyDs, or another location.  Call cell phone 617-388-5818 to confirm.)

Berkman's guest speaker from Newsvine should help all of us get more visibility for our individual blogs and enhance our mutual goal, as independent citizen journalists, of informing consumers about real estate market trends in Greater Boston / Massachusetts.

2nd Bubble Blogger meeting:  Reviewing & analyzing MAR stats

The Mass. Association of Realtors (MAR) will be releasing their data on January sales on Tuesday, Febuary 28th.  Should we get together the same day or the day after to review and analyze their statement and what some are now commonly calling their "spin"?

I think we should invite the public to participate in this meeting, and even extend an open invitation to MAR, real estate professionals, and sellers who do NOT think there is a real estate bubble.  (FYI - MAR released a statement yesterday entitled, "Bay State housing market shows signs of returning to normal."

Ideally, we could meet somewhere with a wifi connection for laptops.  Better still would be a venue with a wall-sized projection screen.  I have a projector and screen, any suggestions for venues?

1.  Cambridge:  Darwin's, wifi but no projection screen room;
2. A hotel near MAR, easily accessible from Route 128 & Mass Pike (would require fee of about $150, but we might be able to get a sponsor or ask participants to share the cost);
3.  Other possible locations?  Please post in comments below, or send to [email protected].

As always, you can call our reader line at 617-876-2117 to record a comment for potential use in a future podcast. 

Will mobloggers pop the real estate bubble?

Yesterday's conference on Grassroots use of Technology at MIT has reenergized my interest in moblogging in real estate.  Will the prevalence of iPods, smartphones, and digital video recorders create a new generation of house hunters turned citizen journalists?  Not if the decade-long, lemming-like rush continues to cause home buyers to view each other as competitors, is my guess.

But if the housing market begins to slide as real estate bubble watchers caution, buyers may look to each other for information about what is really happening in the marketplace rather than traditional real esate agents / listing agents who are obligated to get the highest price for sellers and continue to fan the flames of "irrational exuberance."

How will those peer-to-peer exchanges occur?  Will those amatuer roving real estate reporters begin to post their own comments in writing, audio clips, or video clips to the web?  Those are the kinds of questions I would like to explore in this discussion of "Moblogging in Real Estate."

In addition, I'd like to use the forum to experiment with my own attempts to learn each of the means of communicating above.  I am particularly interested in experimenting with Podcasts and Videoblogging, and seeing how VR images can be incorporated into blog posts to give real estate consumers richer information than otherwise possible from look-alike listing sites published by over a million real estate agents nationwide.

Here's one attempt at posting a VR movie in Quicktime.  Does it load on your site and are you able to rotate the VR image with left or right with your mouse?  Need to learn how to make my videos load online... anyone else in the real estate community -- or any home buyers or sellers -- experimenting with moblogging?

Download top2_030205.mov (296.4K)