BoycottHousing.com: old idea, new packaging.
Assignment: write a brief essay on the theory that the role of the Internet is not to advance new ideas but to re-package old ideas for new markets. Cite a real estate bubble Web site as an example. For bonus points, wind up by speaking as the Voice of Your Generation.
You may have seen KGO-TV's July 11 story on a Web site, BoycottHousing.com, that's taken on the admittedly challenging job of single-handedly cooling off the housing market. The site invites visitors to "agree to a period of time where they will not buy a house, but continue renting or living in the house they already own...Let's stop this (bubble) sooner rather than later".
Since I'm an agent, you'd expect me to ridicule the idea that buyers should make public vows of real estate chastity. And so I will, but not because boycotting is ridiculous. It's an old and honorable strategy, one that homebuyers have used successfully in the past.
And I think this Web site's goal is commendable: "We simply want ordinary families to be able to buy houses without putting themselves at risk". Also to its credit, BoycottHousing.com doesn't blame vanishing affordability on sellers or agents. "You can only blame yourself for paying the price and not fighting back. For being a victim." Yup, that's mighty broadminded for a bubble Web site these days: not jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon, and merely blaming homebuyers for doing what's natural and right.
I have only two small problems with BoycottHousing.com. First, it's late to the party. The boycott started last fall in most areas. Second, not only is asking homebuyers to "just say no" unnecessary, it's naive, because it assumes that a market as huge and transparent as real estate can be manipulated.
Buyers (real buyers, that is, not buyers who've been boycotting real estate since 1998) don't have to be cajoled into boycotting the market when prices stop making sense to them. It's a natural response. Buyers have walked away from the real estate market three times, spontaneously and with remarkable unanimity, within just the past five years: first in 2001, then in late 2002 and most recently in late 2005. Each time buyers withdrew briefly, prices either went down briefly or stopped going up as much. Even uncoordinated and unofficial boycotts are powerful, organic examples of that immutable reality, the market cycle. Since the first market back in dim pre-history, prices have gone down and up countless times in countless marketplaces, somehow without the assistance of the Internet.
Real estate market movements can't be faked. However, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a few of the thousands of bubble sites are now taking credit for real estate's slowdown. If they are, they're confusing cause with effect. Like the mainstream media, bubble sites don't lead, they mirror, reflecting current thinking. They're unpaid focus groups, although the level of discourse makes it unlikely that they're a window on the minds of potential buyers.
Of course, questioning whether BoycottHousing.com and other bubble sites appeal to real homebuyers misses the point. Even KGO's news anchor Pete Wilson, always ready to chew the scenery whenever an up-with-the-little-guys story scrolls across his Tele-prompter, seemed to get it. Like every bubble site or blog I've read, BoycottHousing.com is less about call to action or informed discourse, and more about giving the disenfranchised a place to vent. Kudos to the creator of this site for coming up with a different spin on a familiar theme. Maybe he can pick up a "sponsor" or two.
To punch up the human interest, KGO interviewed an earnest twenty-something couple identified as "boycotting home buying". (Like blogs, television doesn't make you show your homebuying credentials, since in both media, allegory is as good as truth.) The wife posited this theory: "I do think that everyone here is entitled to their piece of that dream and that is whether to own a condo, or an apartment or a house—to be able to afford something."
The idealist in me agrees. But the realist in me thinks of the people I grew up with here, driven away in the '70s and '80s by rising home prices. When we were young, we too felt entitled to live in one of the most desirable and expensive places on Earth.
I'm still here, but now I don't feel entitled. I just feel lucky.
Postscript March 21, 2007: Today as I was organizing bookmarks I found one leading to Boycott Housing and decided to drop in on the children's crusade. And guess what? The Web site that only yesterday begged you earnestly not to buy a home today wants to match you with a limited-service buyer's agent! And there's not even a token attempt to white-wash this brazen about-face. Just a big dose of wishful thinking: "...there are many agents who would be more than happy to be contacted out of the blue, to do the paperwork for you". Not. Once an agent touches a transaction she has the same liability exposure whether she makes $500, $5000 or $50,000. She'd have to be some kind of desperate idiot to put herself squarely in the cross hairs of a plaintiff's attorney for a few hundred bucks. That's the trouble with bubble-think: to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, it keeps falling under the Caterpillar tracks of reality.
And what a great business model! Go out of your way to attract people who wouldn't buy a home if it was gift-wrapped and left on their doorstep, then offer to hook them up with people who sell homes!
This stuff just writes itself!