IHTBYB Comes Out Of The Closet!

OK, I'd bettter come out and admit something that may well affect the future of this blog:

I am an Olympics Junkie.

Now you know.

When the Olympics are on, I can do little else than pee, eat, sleep, and watch the Olympics. I can barely form coherent sentence, I show up to work in a sleep-deprived fog, I sometimes don't shower for days.

Why do I have this problem? I don't watch football, baseball, or basketball, or any other professional sport, except on rare occasion. I think watching sports on TV is actually pretty lame.

But I can't help but enjoy what are for the most part, fairly regular-World people, gather together & compete in events that largely define these peoples entire lives. It's really more a real-World drama than sport.

And I don't have a particular favorite sport, person, or team that I am watching, or cheering for. I like ALL of it, I like watching everyone, winners & losers alike. American TV is naturally slanted wildly towards American athletes, so it's hard to get unbiased coverage on this or any broadcast really.

And the Olympics have been sort of commercialized & overrun with "Pros" like Kobe, etc., who you KNOW are going to win. Even the Grama swimmer Dara Torres employs a small scale army to get her in shape. This is probably my least favorite thing about watching the modern Olympics. Too commercial, and loaded with country-switching Pros. Yuk.

But I still love watching. I remember watching the US beat the Ruskies in 1980, one of a precious few things that stays with me after that many years. I remember watching & thinking, "I am watching a historic moment here, and it'll be recounted till I am dead".

And it was. And it is still easily the Greatest Thing I have ever seen on a TV screen. Maybe that's when I contracted this addiction.

Anyway, if you've wondered here I've been, I've been glued to my TV. Can't help it, and I offer no apologies. OK? Sorry.

So it may be for a week or two that you guys have to carry the day. I'm going to try to limit my Olympic fever to a few hours a day. Try.

OK, that said, I busted out of my myopic Bend-addled fog last week, and went for a long drive last week in points beyond.

And I guess it was curious to see this RE problem from a different perspective. I figured it was at it's worst here, and existed in far milder versions elsewhere.

No. Well, yes & no. It is damn bad here. But it is Really Bad All Over.

The truly strange thing that caught me off-guard was the "Commercial Development" seller. You know, because Bend is absolutely chucked full of them: The useless hunk of ground, butt-ugly, too ugly for homes in fact, in some semi-industrial Death Zone, with a For Sale sign on it declaring it fit for "Commercial Development".

My God, this sort of thing is EVERYWHERE. It's along empty highways, next to schools, in neighborhoods, everywhere.

I saw several worthless plots declared fit for Commercial Development in some of the most bizarre places. Empty grasslands, with not a soul for miles. It's like these people paid a few hundred bucks for scrub MORE USELESS than the badlands East of Bend, and all of a sudden decided that it's worth $2,000,000.

Of course none of it is selling, you can tell by the weathered appearance of the signs. This stuff has been for sale for a few years.

And then there is the VAST inventory of acreage properties. I guess living in Bend, and watching the stratospheric take-off of acreage properties made me think there is some sort of shortage, or groundswell in demand for these properties.

No. Well, there may be decent demand, but there is a wave of supply. And it seems to be the same root cause. People either HAVE TO sell for some reason, or there is a gold-rush mentality to it. They think they can get 10-20 fold what they paid a few years ago.

I suppose it was just strange to see that Bend is not that different. We do have a lot for sale, but the problem is far larger than I have ever seen it. I got a new appreciation for how mired in a quagmire the nations RE market is.

It's hard to see how large the problem is until you actually lay eyes on the hundreds & thousands of properties that are out there, and are clearly not moving. Bend is not alone in its inventory problem.

Oy, now for the tech-dregs. I got this from Buster or one of his clones:

BESIDES it being fucking stupid, the CUNT must spend ALL his time looking at the fucking analytic data points, but then again, he's a fucking MBA, he can spreadsheet this generated data, and beat-off.

Note one of the worst that HOME-BOY has enabled is urchin, this SHIT is really NO fucking different than what BENDBB does, its just that homer gets away with it like HBM says, about the masses BEING FUCKING STOOOPID.
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As I thought, this are /etc/hosts entries so that certain domains go to your local loopback address. This is perfectly fine with me. Disable any or all src or href attributes you want, that is fine with me.

You'll find, if you take the time to View Source & search for the above terms ("googleadservices", for instance), you'll find they don't exist on this site.

I'll go one better: Go find an anonymous proxy somewhere & only surf this or other "suspicious" sites using anon-proxy. I'd give you the one I use to surf BendBB, but then it'd be banned... this happens on occasion when they figure out that they are not getting your real IP.

So go ahead & mislead, redirect & generally fuck with the system, it's all good with me. Some of these comments seem to imply that I give a shit about the identity of commenters. I have no unilateral way to convince anyone unambiguously that is not true, but I can urge you to take measures to keep your identity private.

There also seems to be this implication that I somehow "profit" from posting youtube, or other "off-site" crap on here.

Oh yes, I shall soon retire on the vast wealth I am accumulating from my youtube embedded videos. Oh yes. I'm really watching the money pile up from that. That & the craigslist RSS feeds. Woof. You have no idea how many mansions & Lamborghinis that has paid for.

OK, now for the non-borderline schizo's: OK, I just blog for my own enjoyment. I don't make dink, I DO have googles Urchin web analytics on the home page, something I check about never. I looked after I got "Pat-dotted", and got many thousands of hits out of nowhere. But that's about it. I don't care about IP's. I don't censor based on the offensiveness of anything. Hell, I encouraged people to go look at BendBB's "outting" post, cuz I knew that'd be gone before long.

This is just a little blog for posting what Bend media won't regarding Bend RE, and business in general. That's it.

I agree with the commenter, "Only the paranoid survive", and if you feel you are being "outted" here, you can modify your /etc/hosts file, or surf this site anon proxy. I NEVER go to BendBB except via anon proxy because it has been made clear via IP-banning policy that he IS keeping track of IP's over there. I HATE that.

This thing is meant to be open, free, yet respect individual privacy. So I am more about obfuscating your identity than anyone. Type "free anonymous proxy" into google, and find one you like, and bookmark it.

We ALL have a duty to Stick It to The Man in this regard.

Speaking of Sticking It To the Man, it seems the Al Haig moment sprouted some other Bend RE-bubble blogs.

http://benddenial.blogspot.com/

Of course it is impossible for me to assert anything absolutely about who is doing what, but this appears to be a site fired up by our own dearest marge! Good going marge. Keep it up, and feel free to copy/paste stuff over here, URL's and all.

http://angrybendbitch.blogspot.com/

OK, I think this was started by Buster-Clones, as some sort of marge-proxy weirdness. Seems they didn't post since last March, until recently. This one is good if only for the horrible picture on the sidebar.

The top one is classic Cali-Banger. My Lord. That is a real person, not animated horror. And almost certainly of Cali origin.

http://bendbubble3.blogspot.com/

Yup, this one is pretty good, featuring Post WWII apocalyptic pics. Anyone know who this is? Buster? In my Olympics-addled state, I'm finding it hard to keep up.

Anyway, I've been saying for some time that I am all for someone else taking over the reins (reigns?) of this thing, so that we can get a new perspective. I hope one or all of these blogs does well, and someone can take the lead on the Bend RE issue.

My primary objective has been "outting" Bend media as horribly slanted towards Bend RE, to the point of simply being PR whores. Some have not sold out so entirely. But if they are big & in broadcast or print, they almost certainly have.

Finally, before I head back to Olyimpificating my life:

tim said:
I thought we had seasonally peaked on inventory a couple weeks ago (like every other year), but looking at Clive's chart, I'm beginning to wonder if 2008 doesn't mark the emergence of a new kind of desperate late-summer seller.

anon said:
Could be we hit the sweet spot in GREATEST FOOL THEORY, remember it was supposed to come back for two years no. I think that all but the BEND-DEAD know its NOT coming back, sell now while you have a prayer, that is what's going on.

Yeah, I'm starting to question the validity of many Long Held Beliefs regarding the Bend RE market. Used to be you listed early Spring, sold in the Summer, and hibernate in the Winter. Easy, predictable.

But we're entering a new phase here: Forced Selling. People are not going broke according to the seasons around here. And if you go to RealtyTrac.com, you'll see that foreclosures are what is fueling the local market. NOT the seasons.

I figured the local inventory situation would look like a fairly gently rising sine wave, higher peaks & higher valleys. But I'm wondering if the coming valley fails to really materialize. And turns into more of a flat plateau. And next year begins a new wave up from there.

This market is coming apart. It's hard to even predict things that have held for decades, like Bends yearly cyclicality. It think it'll remain, but it'll flatten & ramp up into a monotonic rising wave.

My own view of the RE market outside Bend tells me that NO ONE is coming here to save us. They CANNOT sell what they have. As blindly myopic as I thought Bend sellers were, the rest of the country is pretty close. EVERYONE in this country is selling, or trying to, and they are not succeeding.

The RE market seems well & truly screwed for many, many years.

One more quick thing:

Rent & Invest The Difference still rolls on as my favorite investment theme for Bend.

There were occasional cries of "Invest in what?" several months ago, a legitimate question.

Hopefully, I've answered this criticism. I DO NOT believe RE is a prudent investment for what may well be the rest of my working life. Medians would have to fall to parity with rents for me to become interested, and we're NOT EVEN CLOSE.

Bonds, whether gov't or corporate, are an unknown quantity. Read the comments and you can see that these things are based on the re-payment capacity of some very marginal borrowers. And I believe there will be a cascading effect that we haven't even seen the beginning of.

And as Buster said, Price Ain't The Problem. Banks are ONLY loaning to FICO 800, 75% LTV, pristine borrowers. That's a rare bird these days, and getting rarer. No one borrowing, no one loaning, and everyone throwing around homes like hot potatoes, dropping prices to no avail.

It Ain't Price. We are tapped out or BK as a country. Every last dollar that could be borrowed, was borrowed and now we're coming to find that we can't pay it back.

It'll take a few more years, but RE will hit & drag bottom for a few years. But don't buy it yet.

Personally, I plowed into some spec stocks in July, and am doing OK. I think stocks are the Last Bastion of Safety, which is just strange. Stocks have traditionally been the Flight FROM Safety investment when things get uncertain.

But the usual Flight TO Safety instruments (bonds of all maturities) are suspect. The Full Faith & Credit of the US is now MORTGAGE BACKED. OK, WHY we are BUYING this crap is beyond me. Bear Stearns gets KILLED in the mortgage-backed market & the US Gov't decides NOW is the time to JUMP INTO THE MORTGAGE MARKET.

I don't get it. The outcome seems simple: INFLATION. More specifically, STAGFLATION.

We will print our way "out of this thing". Of course this NEVER WORKS. And maybe sometime I can show graphically why I think that as interest rates go up, stocks actually become the Best Investment Bet.

OK, so I must now return to my butt-cheek carved place on the couch, and watch the Olympics. I promise I'll try to comment more this week, and actually dedicate a brain cell or two to thoughts of RE and the like.

But meanwhile.... Phelps awaits.