Two spots of congestion on my way to work today--that was a rarity. Got a meeting with the big cheese tomorrow, hopefully it's good news, grad students can't get fired can they? Just another busy weekend for me. Worked a full day Saturday to keep my Sunday free with my son--Easter you know. Man, this skin problem of his is not letting up. I have to try to get him some good ointment. Reminds me, gotta head to the pharmacy. I re-edited some content on my blog, you probably won't notice the change as of yet. Added another newsfeed to the left side panel and will continue to edit the CSS file to get a more consistent look with the rest of my website.
When will this housing market die down? I'm too afraid to buy in at this price, even though I'm getting the spousal pressure to do so (if only she'd see how bad things will get). Some housing areas that my wife and tracked have seen their market value raise a whopping 50% in a matter of 3 years! This is crazy people! Don't you know that this is a bubble?!? Don't buy into the hype--my prediction is that when the Fed raises the interest rate (right now Greenspan's scared to touch it, since the economy right now is teeter tottering) things will at least start to plateau. Some of you who are lucky enough to buy in the right areas, won't get hit much at all, but for the rest of us average joes, we'll see our real estate value plummet! After the war is over, after North Korea is in check, and after Bin Laden is accounted for (well, that's a big if), defense spending will also slow down and the DC area job market will follow as well as the other half of the economy. Hard times to come with this real estate market my friends, can't count on a good thing for long, look at what happened to the stock market 3 years ago. Alas, just my luck, I will probably give into buying a place at these prices and will be hit hard.
Posted by johnvu at April 21, 2003 01:18 PMI feel your pain about the housing market. We're looking to buy in New Orleans, where 100k gets you a shack in the ghetto. I interested in how you tracked value over the past couple years. Did you do it manually, recording published prices for several years, or are there archives where you can get a history of housing prices?
Oh yeah, I just blogrolled you - we're both needing a boost in our blogshares. Getting linked by Derek Lowe certainly helps. I'll have an article up soon covering open access publishing and commenting because I think biologging is a great idea, especially for grad students like us. It speeds up the communication cycle when we don't just have to depend on a couple meetings a year.
I've been finishing up a semester and a lab rotation so if you visit my site, look past the last few political articles to get into the more science related content.
Posted by: Grady on May 10, 2003 06:38 PMGrady,
The estimate that I gave is purely anecdotal. Actually, we've had an account in at http://www.erealty.com for years now and it allows you to save listings that are of interest to us in a portfolio. These listings remained in the portfolio indefinitely. On the rare occassion, some houses were relisted! With the corresponding upgrade in price, of course. In the majority of cases, we were able to track house prices in specific neighborhoods (specific zip codes), and have seen the same increase in average price within these neighborhoods. And lastly, we have friends and family who were fortunate enough to buy new homes and have since sold those houses at a profit and have moved to new homes elsewhere. The problem with the Washington DC metro area is that with a Republican in the Oval office, traditionally more defense government contracts/jobs are available (who ever said Democrats liked to tax and spend? I think it's actually the other way around, in terms of spending). With more jobs, this has kept the housing market relatively stable. Making it more difficult for the buyer, this area has a higher demand than supply -- due to limitations of new home building, enacted in an effort to reduce urban sprawl and crawl. I'd imagine that New Orleans housing market is probably the same. Surprisingly, the Baltimore market is also seeing a boom (in certain areas). BTW, I go to grad school at the U of MD, Baltimore.
I have also added you to my blogroll. Hopefully this mutual blogroll addition will increase both our blogshares.
Posted by: John on May 12, 2003 11:40 PM