Price Research

For an interesting way to research true median home prices, go to the Realtor.com
web site. Type in the city you wish to research, and note how many properties
come up for sale (in total). Then, drop the maximum selling price in the box
until you come down to half the total listed properties.

This should give you a much more accurate idea of the median home price than
the figures the real estate people give.  Condos will be included in this
figure, but they are housing, and should be included in median prices.

For example, in my own burg of Oklahoma City, the figures put out on
Housing Tracker put the median home price at $155,000, more or less. From the
Realtor.com web site, the median home price (half of all houses listed above,
half below) comes out to around $125,000.

This discrepancy shows up in most of the cities that I did this little
experiment on, with true prices always being lower than those put out by the
real estate shills.

I made some dough last time around when housing collapsed in Oklahoma. Here it
was mostly garden-variety fraud, inflated appraisals, carelessness and
overbuilding. I bought some pretty good houses for under $10,000 (late 80s and
early 90s mostly).  When banks are crippled and unable to do much lending,
house prices collapse.

Question--why do we no longer have savings and loans? Answer--they put
themselves out of business in the last real estate bust. Banks have a
disturbing habit of following each other over a cliff, time after time.