jeffchin.com

Being a homeowner in the Washington, DC area as of 2004, this article has me concerned. The article is only eight sentences long, but tells the recent history of the housing market succinctly in ~20 graphs of the year over year % change of home prices in twenty major cities. Houses in the Washington, DC area between the years of 2001 and 2004 were increasing at a rate of about 10-15% per year, and spiked around 26%, but in 2006-2007 have showed a major dip down to -5%. From this chart, they expect DC prices to drop another 4.2% in 2008 over 2007 prices. Ouch.

Not a good situation for those who bought in 2005-6

A couple years ago, I agreed with most people in the area: There would be no bubble bursting for the DC housing market, but the twenty graphs for cities all over the country beg to differ. You can look at this situation two ways: 1) With all the prices in the area dropping and the slowing of the market, this can be a great time to buy or 2) If you want to sell your house, you might have lost some equity in the last two years, so if you can’t afford that, you might have to hunker down and hold onto your property until the market recovers. With the current trends, who knows – it could be 2-5 years until the prices turn around. The results are disturbing in that all but one city (Charlotte) is on the decline. Kudos to a couple of my friends that decided to jump ship from the DC area, and buy places in Charlotte. I knew it’d be a hot market, but compared to DC, what the heck are you going to do when you’re in Charlotte?

Charlotte's the only city profiled with housing prices on the rise.

I’m lucky enough to have decent equity built up in my house so I can sit around for a little while but I’m always on the lookout for my next potential home. This set of graphs really spells out the US housing situation, and for a numbers and metrics guy like me, less words and more graphs make it all the easier to understand. My only complaint is that the chart should have a standardized y-axis so that each city’s line is relative and easily comparable. This is data presentation 101. Otherwise, to the untrained eye, someone might not see the benefit of buying in 2001 and selling in 2005 in DC vs. Charlotte. (For a $200k house, an increase of ~140k vs. only ~21k in DC and Charlotte, respectively). What to do, what to do…only time will tell.

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Pictures from my day at Kings Dominion are up now on Flickr. Check out the set or the slideshow.

Another week flew by and only two runs logged. But I did find a way to keep myself energized for working out in general. I have been folding in some stationary bike before, during and after runs. It works my legs without putting stress on the ol’ knees. I took a trip down to King’s Dominion and Richmond this weekend, so I’ll post pictures from that short trip soon, but I think I left my camera over at my parent’s house today from Father’s Day. My favorite ride was either the Hypersonic XLC or the Drop Zone: Stunt Tower. I really like that plummeting to the Earth feeling, which is fueling my skydiving excursion in late July (hopefully)…

[week 10 of 26]

• Runs: 2
• Distance: 6.1 miles
• Time: 59.5 minutes (9.8 minutes/mile)
• Weight: 200 lbs.

Total Stats (10 weeks total):

• Total Runs: 18
• Total Distance: 54.7 miles
• Total Time: 8.9 hours (9.8 minutes/mile)
• Max Weight Loss: 6 lbs.

This startup almost slipped through the cracks on me. GrandCentral is an amazing service and there are a ton of customization options. Their big idea is to reduce up to six of your phone numbers and voice mailboxes (cell, home, work, 2nd cell, etc.) into one phone number. If you have more than six phone numbers tied to you, you’re out of luck and you have a problem. That GrandCentral phone number will never change, and can represent any phone number that you might gain in the future as well.

I’d go over some of the cool features here, but they’ve laid them out so well here that there’s no need. (Also check out the TechCrunch article) I do like the archiving of voicemail messages online and the ability to mark numbers as spam. I registered for a free phone number in about 2 minutes. Check it out and let me know what you think…hopefully everyone can move to something like this and simplify everyone’s life. I really want to try it out, but don’t want to push the number out to all my friends just yet, so drop me a line if you want my “new” number…

Update: One bad thing that I just realized, is that you can’t yet receive text messages to your Grand Central number…a major drawback if you’re trying to be an early adopter.

6/25: Yet another update: Techcrunch has released a post about Google acquiring GrandCentral for ~$50 Million. Very interesting move by Google.