Larry has decided to wind down his blog

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Liar Loan

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Well, all good things must come to an end.  Larry has decided to cease blogging on a daily basis. 

He made the following announcement this morning:

I recently wrote Reflections on 10 years of blogging. I started blogging two weeks before my 40th birthday, and now, two weeks after my 50th birthday, I realized I am ready to move on. I blogged every weekday for 10 years, published a book, saved many people from buying during the bubble, and directed many others to buy investment properties at the bottom of the market. Whenever I look at the framed print of the book, I feel pride at those accomplishments.

When I thought about why I keep writing, I realized part of it was emotional attachment. The urgency to educate people about the volatility in the housing market is gone. I enjoy the comradery of the astute observations, and I enjoy the act of writing itself, but I don?t feel I have anything more I can accomplish with this blog, so it?s time for me to leave.
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http://ochousingnews.com/know-fold-em/

Since I know some of you are here on Talk Irvine because of your original association with IHB, I thought I would share the news.

Feel free to leave a comment for him to say goodbye.  Hopefully, we can end things on a good note and put any grudges that may still exist behind us.

Take care,

-LL
 
Times have changed, I'm still amazed at how much he was able to post after he left IHB.

Looking back, I can admit that I got caught up in the doom&gloom hype. We could have kept the house we bought during the bubble as it trades now for what we bought our last house at, but the savings in mortgage payment did allow us to continue to send our kids to private school until we decided where to send them to public school... and also financed my lavish baller lifestyle of buffets and $7 (now $8) haircuts.
 
Larry provided a great public service - education. I started following IHB in 2006 when we were considering buying our first house, and I was scared shitless at the prices and price increases in the Irvine area. He provided me years of priceless education regarding house valuation. I hope I added some value to his blogs in the comments for years.
 
I do appreciate Larry and IHB.  He wrote what we felt and helped us stay on course as we sat on the sidelines from 2004-2012.  We were able to buy our first house almost at the bottom and I thank Larry for that.  I will make sure to write a comment on his blog. 

What ever happened to OCFlipTrack?  IIRC, his blog was first and then he folded as IHB got bigger.
 
irvinehomeowner said:
Times have changed, I'm still amazed at how much he was able to post after he left IHB.

Looking back, I can admit that I got caught up in the doom&gloom hype.
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I think what made it so fun back in the day is that not everybody agreed on what was going to happen.  You had the perma-bulls vs. the perma-bears and everybody else in between.  The debates were epic, enjoyable, and informative from 2006-2011.  Once home prices bottomed, the perma-bears slowly started disappearing.  By 2013, there was really no debate anymore.  Everybody was in agreement that house prices were soaring due to Fed intervention.  Now the consensus is that we are in a bull market that will probably last another couple of years.  Even bearish types won't disagree that we are in a bull market, they just might bicker about when the next crash will occur.  We've replaced those housing debates with debates about other topics, but really it hasn't been the same for the past 4 years.

I'm a firm believer that housing in California is cyclical and there will be another crash sooner or later, probably smaller than the last one.  It will be interesting to see if the blogosphere picks up where it left off, or if that was just a phase in Internet history that will never return.  Maybe social media has replaced the need for blogs, but without blogs there would have been no dissent against the media narrative being pushed by the Real Estate Industrial Complex during the housing bubble.  In this age of prolific fake news, maybe blogs still have a role to play in challenging the "truth" we are fed.
 
I'm still waiting for the market to get flooded with foreclosures once the ARMs reset to unsustainable monthly payments.
 
I think the problem with blogs is the extremes they have to push to get eyes.

Some of the things that Larry said were very hard to get behind, when you go from analysis to speculation, it becomes difficult to stay "right".

Sure, Irvine housing "crashed" but not to the levels many were predicting. With the magic of hindsight, I can say that almost any SFR that you bought during the bubble is okay now, you just had to wait it out.

Too bad... I was really hoping for that 3CWG at $650k.
 
Readers are attracted to hyperbole more than accurate and truthful headlines.  That's why Dr. Housing Bubble still gets 150-200 comments on every post.  Larry tried to be more balanced by writing ultra bearish headlines but including lots of data driven analysis in the meat of his posts.  Unfortunately, most readers don't really care about facts.  They want the sensational, and they don't mind being fed lies as long as the story is enjoyable to read and has some kernel of truth.  Zero Hedge is an example of a blog that follows this "sensationalized" model, while truth tellers like Calculated Risk get ridiculed as "sell outs" for simply sharing the facts whether they be bullish or bearish.
 
I can say now a days readers are attractive to potential environmental hazards, upgrades, politics, business leaving California etc.

:) ;)
 
I agree with LL.  I found IHB to be fairly balanced and there were a lot of commenters that made very compelling points. 

Regarding the crash, it wasn't far from the purchase prices but it was far from the amount pulled out of the housing ATM.  Many houses were over leveraged.

Frankly, I never understood why the house we bought was foreclosed on.  The owners did pull out all the equity but had they stayed, they would have been fine.  Of course we are happy how it worked out for us. 
 
eyephone said:
I can say now a days readers are attractive to potential environmental hazards, upgrades, politics, business leaving California etc.

:) ;)
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Or cars, or best and final offers, or mother chasing butchers, or Lake Forest new homes.
 
90% of Larry's daily IHB posts were some variation of "don't buy this house because you can rent it for less now and buy it for less later."  Got so boring after a while I skipped the blog altogether and went straight to the forums.
 
I am in agreement with Larry that your primary residence ("home") should not be treated like another income property.
 
I think IHB was only able to be monetized after 2012 once his book came out and he tied into a real estate sales firm. Considering a 2006 start, that's a great deal of writing without much to show until then. Those who blogged pre-meltdown prevented quite a few from being seduced by the siren's song of home ownership, only to watch so many others go crashing into the rocks. Too bad there weren't more who listened given the uncountable catastrophes that could have been prevented.

My .02c
 
A blogger friend of mine was acquainted with Bill McBride, and it was relayed to me that he was pulling in about $100k annually at the peak of Calculated Risk's popularity during the downturn.  I'd have to imagine it's dropped off significantly since then, but that was the earning power of one of the top blogs from that era.

Considering all of the people that Larry helped save from financial ruin, hopefully he made enough from blogging to support his family through the worst of the downturn.
 
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