Blown Mortgage

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The Carnival of Real Estate is a weekly celebration of the best writing in the real estate “blogosphere”. And this week the contest was held over at one of our favorite blogs, The Orange County Register’s Mortgage Insider blog. Out of 30 entries this week yours truly was one of the 3 winning entries with my post A Bail Out is Still a Bail Out by Any Other Name.

Thanks to Matt at the OC Register for recognizing Blown Mortgage and the work we do here. Here are the other two winners as well:

Spicing Up the Neighborhood
What really gets Web hits on Zillow.com? A house that’s a brothel, writes Diane Tuman on the Zillow Blog. I chose her post to start with a lighter note, and because it’s a titillating read. Also, Tuman gets right to the point, something essential in blogging:

The New Rochelle police routinely monitor Internet sites and saw an ad on Craigslist for “Grand Opening Special! Hot models, soft sensual touch…New Rochelle has Westchester’s first and only member’s only club for men and women…We offer role play, fetishes, light body rubs, body rejuvenation and dominatrix.”

When the police showed up, they busted a couple who are allegedly mortgage brokers. They were into house flipping (among other things, evidently) and were underwater with a few houses, including this one.

6 Reasons Why Downtown isn’t Over Built
Real estate blogs have become best known for one thing: the debate over a housing bubble. Although there is no disputing a slump in housing sales, the debate rages on over how long and deep the correction will go. As a journalist myself, I decided to highlight a contrarian view on how journalists are allegedly portraying the housing market – the charge is we overstate it to sell newspapers.

I found a somewhat local example among the submissions to the Carnival of Real Estate. Sales agent Denny Oh argues that despite press coverage downtown San Diego is not overbuilt with condos. Here’s three of his examples (let the debate roll on):

1) July of 2007 had 492 active resale listings Downtown – July of 2006 had 613. That’s almost a 20% reduction in active listings.

2) In early 2006, there were about 100 condos for sale at The Grande at Santa Fe – today there are only 38 for sale(out of 440).

* Of the homes currently for sale the average size is 1,521 square feet and the average asking price is $1,134,886 – $731/square foot.

3) The average waterfront condo in Downtown San Diego is priced around $750/square foot, but is closer to $1,000/square foot in other West Coast cities like Seattle, Vancouver and San Francisco.

A humble thanks to all of the readers of Blown Mortgage who help support the growth of this blog and amazing community of participants. The winning post was actually an email commentary to our list subscribers; if you want to receive in-depth Blown Mortgage commentary simply click here subscribe to our email list.  Remember, if you receive blog posts via email you may not be on our email distribution list (because technology is not so agreeable always).

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