Housing Bubble Blogs

Posted on July 18, 2005

The L.A. Times has an article about housing bubble blogs. Blogs mentioned in the article include Professor Piggington's Econo-Almanac for the Landed Poor and Ben Jones' blog at thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com. The Times article says many bloggers are getting concerned that the housing market is out of control.

The fever may be most intense at Jones' free site, created after his first bubble blog crashed in May from trying to handle its 20,000 daily hits. His latest site doesn't run advertising and therefore he derives no revenue from it.
A self-described "economic activist," Jones, 41, sees his mission as chronicling a seminal financial event, something future scholars can turn to just as historians today would read an anthology of letters written by Dutch tulip traders in the 1630s.
"In 100 years, economists may be studying the comments of this blog because this was a real-time skeptics' log in the middle of a financial mania," said Jones, who rents a house with his wife in Sedona, Ariz., and doesn't own any real estate.
Jones' fervor stems largely from his status as a casualty of the dot-com meltdown, when he was the controller at an Austin, Texas, Internet firm that he declined to name. He resigned in 1999 before the company went bankrupt, after he spent a stressful final year trying to convince his entrepreneur bosses that "companies really do need to make money."
The housing market today "is just like the tech bubble," said Jones, who holds economics and business degrees from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. "That's why it's a mania � because people have forgotten the fundamentals."

There are many other blogs discussing the housing market as well. The Blog Post recently posted that 43% of new jobs were derived from the housing bubble. Dan Gillmor frequently posts on the housing bubble issue on his blog. Dan Gillmor's citizen journalism website, called Bayosphere, discusses the Bay Area, which is one of the regions suspected of having a housing bubble. More blogs can be found by searching for "housing bubble" on the blog search engines like Technorati.