“For people to think that we could go back to traditional lending standards and have prices remain where they are now is just crazy," said Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacific Capital in Newport Beach. "Real estate will have to go back to 2000 levels. And a lot of people who just bought a home will find that instead of having an asset, they have a liability.”

[Quoted on March 18, 2007, during the sub-prime (soon to be prime) lending meltdown. It didn't have to be.]

Just want to get these pics out before I shut this thing down once and for all. The above graphs are too important to ignore. I'm sick of the abuse and hate mail. You can find the data for the last two here and the article here.

Ok, ok. Here is Vision RE's data:

Look at those sample sizes! They are tiny. Can you really say that there was a real 58% appreciation in Sausalito when only 5 sales were recorded or a whopping 262% appreciation in Tiburon when only 3 sales were recorded? Get real!

The 10% bump in prices that DataQuick reported for January is a statistical fluke. Even DataQuick admits it for crying out loud! I called them and they told me that in January 06 there were a lot of condo conversions in Marin that came on line and that resulted in an unusually low median sale price for the county. Thus, January 07's more normal pricing looks like a huge bump. This can happen in a small market like ours. I asked what she thought true appreciation was for Marin and she said more likely in the "low single digits".

Apparently, a long-time reader also called "BS" on DataQuick and so he emailed them. DataQuick told him exactly the same thing (I guess that is what their PR people told them to say). Here is the email reply from DataQuick that he forwarded to me:

The year-ago median was low a year ago because of a some condo conversion project up in Novate. This can happen to the median when you have just a couple of hundred sales.

jk

And I think it is really shameful that a blogger should have more investigative journalism skills than our lame excuse of a paper, the Marin IJ. I mean, they were all over that 10% figure but did they even bother to ask what was behind it? It's too bad it will be the only source of info for people.