Kudos for bloggers

I don’t know about any other married couples, but I didn’t stress out about the race for real estate – we didn’t have any money saved, plus my credit is still shot and I’m a big believer in if its too good to be true, it probably is. So even though my cousin, who immigrated here from the Philippines less than 10 years ago, became legal by marrying a Marine and to my knowledge only has a community college education, bought a house in Bakersfield, I didn’t care. All in due time, all in due time.

Maybe its partly due to my being a blogger. Heh. The LAT credits bloggers with providing an alternate voice of reason to the rush to buy property, even though many could not afford it:

Three veteran bloggers — Rich Toscano, Ben Jones and Patrick Killelea — wrote extensively of a housing bubble two years ago, while prices were still moving higher.

They questioned the “cheerleading” about rising homeownership, Inman said, and earned praise from readers whom they helped persuade to hold off on purchases.

“You were one of the influences that saved me from buying in Los Angeles,” a reader wrote on the Housing Bubble Casualty blog, which is run by San Diego resident Brooks Hollan. “It was hard not to go with the herd. Your no-nonsense, rational commentary helped me stick to my guns. Thank you!”

Hollan and other commentators are another example of how bloggers are providing alternative sources of information and analysis across a wide spectrum of topics, said Stuart Gabriel, professor of finance and business economics at USC.

Besides, I’ve never been one of those people to rush into any big decision. This time last year, my landlord had successfully bid on the unit above us, but was notified he couldn’t buy it because it was reserved as low income housing. He let us know about it, in case we wanted a crack at it. But the timing was totally off – we did not have enough saved, we had plans to go to Hawaii, plus, I’d just started a new job that put us out of the low-income category. Plus, my credit was still shot. So we bowed out, and its a good thing – Trinity got the VC Star job, and the rest is history. Besides, even if we’d bought it as an investment, I think the best it would have been for is as a rental unit.

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