OSG's Boomerang Blog

Skyline - Retail Deposit Tracking

2007-08-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since a news update on Boomerang - in the past month we have been working on several new ideas. The most compelling is solving a long standing mystery in the banking industry. One significant business for a bank is supporting a retail customer - such as your local grocery store or the Home Depot. These customers need to deposit large amounts of cash and checks during the

2 Million Single Family Homes... And Counting

2007-07-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

Well it was bound to happen. Hardtack passed 2 million single family homes on the market this afternoon pacific time. For a while we were certain it would happen towards the end of June, but there was a significant and broad based reduction in MLS inventory at the end of June. For a while we figured it was another of our disappointing "data anomalies" (see posting about Washington DC), but it

More Plugs for Hardtack

2007-07-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

We've received a couple great plugs for Hardtack recently. Make sure and check out these sites:Housing IntelligenceCalifornia Housing ForecastThis site is also good for some laughs: Housing-Crash. It is especially interesting to us since it is focused on our hometown area of San Diego.

Foreclosures Surge – Hardtack Relation

2007-06-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

May saw a record number of foreclosures in the US, up nearly 90% from the same month in 2006. There were 176,137 notices of default, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions last month, led by California, Florida and Ohio, the Irvine ..."Such strong activity in the midst of the typical spring buying season could foreshadow even higher foreclosure levels later in the year," [James Saccacio,

Washington DC - Bucking The Trend Or Just Bucked Up?

2007-06-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

So if you are watching Hardtack, you can't help but notice something odd in Washington DC. Specifically we suddenly had about 7,000 single family homes disappear from the MLS. This has made for a huge dip in the inventory numbers and a skew in all other statistics that depend on it. What is going on?First of all, the chances that this is an actual sale of that many properties in a single week

Flash 9 installation on Mac OS X

2007-06-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

In my one year of using a Mac I have never had any problems doing an installation, or doing anything for that matter. Nothing, that is, until I tried to upgrade to version 9 of Adobe's Flash player.I finally found a workaround here.

Pending Home Sales Number - Inventory Correlation

2007-06-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

The National Association of Realtors reported pending home resales today.The index of signed purchase agreements, or pending home resales, fell 3.2 percent to 101.4, the lowest since February 2003, after a revised 4.5 percent decline in March, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington.Rising mortgage defaults are putting more houses back on the market and prompting banks to

Real Estate Inventory - How High Will It Go?

2007-05-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

February 23rd, 2007: 1,609,000 Single Family HomesMay 30th, 2007: 1,924,110 Single Family HomesInventory Increase: 315,000 Housesor about 100,000 per monthor 1,400 houses every dayI am overwhelmed by the continuing climb of real estate inventory. For people looking for evidence of the tail end of a housing bubble market, this should provide definitive evidence.In late February when we

Boomerang History - Project Redstone

2007-05-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

When we first started our efforts under Boomerang, we created an example for one of our early customers. This customer runs a series of very successful resort, casino and other hospitality destinations across the United States. They ran components of their IT on IBM iSeries mainframes, Java components connected with message oriented middleware, and a large data warehouse. In spite of the hard

What is Content Based Integration?

2007-05-29T16:03:00.001-07:00

Boomerang is a system for enabling enterprise use of "Content Based Integration". Content is the name for what makes the World Wide Web tick - information in human and machine readable form. For the most part one can think of content as a coherent set of written or illustrative information on a specific subject. When you look at a web site like Amazon.com, you see a wide set of small frames of

Hardtack Birthday Data - 1 Year Trends and Comparisons

2007-05-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning creating spreadsheet compares data from Hardtack a year ago and today. There are some interesting trends and information revealed, which I will probably write about more in the future on various weblogs. Anyhow, on the the juicy bits.Across the 40 metro areas we have year over year data, the trend is: Prices down, inventory up. In some cases way up. Some leaders for

Good review of Hardtack

2007-05-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

Jay, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, has given Hardtack a very good review and named Hardtack his Cool Web Site of the Week. Of interest in his review is the comparison of numbers produced by Hardtack, Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow, and ZipRealty.

Project Hardtack - One Year Anniversary

2007-05-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

One year ago, on Memorial Day weekend, it was finally time to put some of the ideas we had selling to another test. Since early April of that year, I had had the notion of using Boomerang's pattern of scavenging data, refining and distilling it into information, and directly publishing it to tackle a dark corner of the economy: Real Estate metrics.True you see a lot of information published

More recognition for Hardtack

2007-05-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

The folks running the Maine Bubble Blog recently found Hardtack and posted about it. Hopefully they find the site useful and eye-opening.

San Francisco feeling the pain

2007-05-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Folks up in San Francisco are well-aware of the inventory surplus hitting their city.The San Francisco Real Estate Blog also posted a blurb about Hardtack.

Nice write-up at BusinessWeek

2007-05-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

Dean Foust provided a nice write-up on Hardtack and OSG, Inc. today in BusinessWeek's Hot Property blog. The exposure is much appreciated and has given us a nice boost of traffic.

Existing Home Sales - What Hardtrack Is Telling Us

2007-05-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

The National Association of Realtors published figures for existing home sales for April today. Existing home sales fell in AprilThe median price of a home fell to $220,900, an 0.8 percent fall from the midpoint selling price a year ago. It marked the ninth straight decline in the median price.Comparing the national sales median price, $220,900. Checking the median price from Hardtack, it

Nice Plug for Hardtack

2007-05-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hardtack got a nice plug today from SeekingAlpha. In today's article Hardtack was listing as the "Web Site of the Day," which generated us a nice bit of traffic.

Hardtack - Real Estate Inventory Tracking

2007-05-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

http://hardtack.osgcorp.com/Hardtack provides a view into the real-estate inventory available at various levels of the "real estate hierarchy": nationally, regionally, by state, MSA, and at the single-city level. The ability to see the amount of inventory available and the trends in inventory availability has been, before Hardtack, unavailable to the people who need the data the most: home buyers

Boomerang - a New Approach to Business Intelligence

2007-05-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Businesses large and small have been investing in IT middleware and integration solutions for nearly 20 years. The IT stack that has accumulated is often bloated and brittle; layers upon layers of technologies that, while well-intentioned, have paralyzed the business and left it feeling like a mammoth at the La Brea Tar Pits. A by-product of this bloated stack of MoM, EAI, J2EE, Corba, XML, SOA,