2 Million Single Family Homes... And Counting

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 was broad based decline across multiple areas.

Since then, inventory counts have been rebuilding, with a few areas still doing strange things (Seattle is a great example).

Please note, this is not the end all-be all tally of home inventory. Hardtack does not track every market, only the 300 largest. To be certain the amount of inventory up for sale right now is truly staggering, and represent a real threat to the near term financial health of this country.

Whichever way it works out, Hardtack will continue to provide transparent statistics and information on this crucial part of our economy.

More Plugs for Hardtack

We've received a couple great plugs for Hardtack recently. Make sure and check out these sites:

Housing Intelligence

California Housing Forecast

This 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.

Real Estate Inventory - How High Will It Go?

February 23rd, 2007: 1,609,000 Single Family Homes
May 30th, 2007: 1,924,110 Single Family Homes
Inventory Increase: 315,000 Houses
or about 100,000 per month
or 1,400 houses every day

I 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 started tracking the market using Hardtack, we were at 1.6 Million homes listed in the MLS. Today we at 1.9 Million homes, with the rate of growth continuing from it's inflection point March 21st. In early May it looked for a few days as if the inventory was starting to flatten out, but then arced back upwards and resumed its previous slope.

Why is this happening? Firstly, the active season for buying and selling homes is from the spring to mid summer. Part of this is so that families can re-locate and get their children in the new school district before the start of the new school year. In addition to this normal volume, there seems to be a large number of investor and speculators who are trying to sell their investment properties before the market goes any lower, or they run out of money to cover their payments are are forced to join the swelling numbers of foreclosures.

How high will it go? I suspect we will break 2 Million single family homes on the MLS inventory by the end of June, if not sooner. How the market will work through this much inventory is the big, important question for our economy.

Good review of Hardtack

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

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 about real estate, some of it comes out every month. I was unhappy because it had been processed and filtered and "seasonally adjusted". In essence I was getting the feeling that the information was so highly processed that the numbers were saying whatever the real estate business interests wanted it to say.

I decided to build the first version of Hardtack - something I called "Ivy Mike". Named because it was a successful fusion device - the first actually.

Ivy Mike was largely a very primitive experiment with some early Boomerang concepts and code, but as it ran it certainly was able to scavenge and collect the housing data I was looking for, and over the course of the summer of 2006 revealed the early weakening of the housing market and the deflation of the bubble.

In January of this year we decided to move ahead with a full scale system that expanded from Ivy's 40 large metro areas to Hardtack's 300 or so. That effort led by Rob and Kevin is the web site that one year later is beginning to get broader notice.

Hardtack has been a great demo platform for Boomerang, and an excellent vehicle to refine and enhance our platform for hosting Feed technology. My thanks to everyone who has worked to make it reality, or who have given it a look over and learned something new.

More recognition for Hardtack

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

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

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

The National Association of Realtors published figures for existing home sales for April today.

Existing home sales fell in April

The 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 reports the median number as $276,002. Why the difference? Let's dive into the guts of Hardtack and figure out.

Hardtack works by reading data from the web front end of the MLS systems. This means we are tracking the prices that people are asking for their properties, what they hope to get. Nation wide, in almost every market the inventory keeps climbing higher, over 1.9 Million single family homes on the market as of today. In many places across the US, sellers are asking more than what most buyers can now afford to pay. Either because they think their property is worth more than the market will currently bear, or sadly because they have used modern exotic financing approaches such as cash out re-fi's and home equity lines of credit and they are trying to sell for how much they owe, which in some cases is more than they can possibly get.

Median Selling Price: $220,900
Median Asking Price: $276,002

That $56,000 gap signals a fundamental sickness in the housing market, one that will need to be worked out over the next few years.

Nice Plug for Hardtack

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

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 and home sellers.

The Hardtack application demonstrates two of Boomerang's key strengths: the power of the feedlet idea and our ability to create snazzy UIs.

The backend application of Hardtack consists of feedlets that produce a variety of content from some legacy data sources. Whether the data sources are legacy applications, databases, other web resources, flat files, or anything else, feedlets provide a layer of abstraction that expose the data source to any XML-capable system in the environment.

The UI of Hardtack fuses together a variety of data and displays it multiple ways: maps, charts, and in tabular format. The result is (hopefully) a very simple, compelling view into a particular dataset.

Take a look at Hardtack and let us know what you think. Your feedback helps us drive new features!
http://hardtack.osgcorp.com/.