We've received a couple great plugs for Hardtack recently. Make sure and check out these sites:
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 tighten lending standards, making home purchases less affordable. Federal Reserve policy makers are forecasting that the glut of unsold homes will probably prolong the housing slump, already the deepest in a decade and a half.
``We've still got a very big overhang of home inventory,'' said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts. ``A housing recovery won't happen this year.''
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.
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.
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.
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/.
