Real Estate Bubble Debate

Add properties to bubble map before "Un-conference"

Exactly one year ago today, the Real Estate Cafe participated in a radio broadcast entitled, "The Beginning of the End of the Bubble" which featured some of our recorded interviews. Today, we celebrated that anniversary with more good news:  the leading real estate technology news service featured our real estate bubble maps as an example of "Real Estate 2.0." Our interactive maps are getting attention because they allow users to post their own examples of a falling prices, particularly homes selling for below assessed value in Greater Boston. We created the bubble maps because news reports, including one this evening, continue to point to modest declines in median prices as evidence of a "soft landing for the housing market.

If you share our belief that median prices are masking deep discounts on many properties, we invite you to add properties to document what's really happening at the street level.  Here's an example of what one homeowner has already done, plus a description of our "Tipping Policy": commission credits for paying clients who post properties to our map.

RealEstateBubbleMap.com, an experimental wiki authorized users can edit, will be presented as a case study Monday at an Un-Conference on Citizen Journalism at Harvard.  Before then, we invite you to post additional properties to the Boston bubble map if you live locally, or create your own local bubble map if you live in one of the 71 "extremely overvalued" housing markets nationwide. If there is interest, we'll host a Bubble Hour chat or conference call before, during, or after the presentation Monday for local clients, or real estate bubble bloggers and their readers nationwide.  Email us at [email protected] if you would like to participate.

Consumers track the housing bubble: From Wikipedia to local "Bubble Hours"

Following up on the recent post about The Real Estate Cafe's yet to be released "Menu of Wikis," here are two powerful examples of wiki collaboration documenting the real estate bubble in the US and worldwide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_property_bubble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_bubble

Don’t know who contributed to either wiki or how our bubble blog was included in the source list, but The Real Estate Cafe is most grateful.  Local residents know that making sense of contradictory statements about the housing market in Massachusetts is an ongoing challenge, which is why a number of leading bloggers in Boston are collaborating on an ongoing series of "Bubble Hours" (see posts for January & February 2006).  If you'd like to participate in the next Bubble Hour, online or in person, or would like to receive a transcript of past chats, please email us at [email protected].  As always, your comments are welcome below or on our reader line at 617-876-2117.