The blustery game of Bay Area real estate marketing has an important new player -- Adam Koval.A good read.
His SocketSite.com -- one of a number of increasingly influential housing blogs -- is focused squarely on those real estate-obsessed folks who love reading about $100,000 price reductions, lawsuits against developers and open houses where the sellers not only forgot (gasp!) to stage the home, but also left it a mess.
Underneath the tart posts, however, is bona fide analysis developed by Koval, a former investment banker who has loved real estate since poring over housing flyers when he was a 12-year-old growing up in Oregon.
One of his more shocking assertions is that the real inventory of homes on the market in San Francisco is far above what is listed on the traditional clearinghouse for that information, the Multiple Listing Service. In addition to the roughly 1,100 official listings, Koval insists that there are more than 4,000 additional finished units marketed through sales offices, being presold in midconstruction, and coming online by this time next year.
"The idea is to counter some of the industry rhetoric -- like, 'it's always a good time to buy,' 'the real estate market always goes up' and 'they're not making more land,' " said Koval, a renter.
"I love San Francisco, and that's why I live here," he said. "But that's not to say that every house in San Francisco is a good investment."
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY ON HOUSING
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
