Monthly Archives: November 2007

Dave Stark’s 3rd Quarter Real Estate Market Newsletter

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Dave Stark: [432K PDF]

My, my, this was certainly an interesting quarter of activity in the South Central Wisconsin real estate market! For a while there, it was looking like we might start to see an uptick in activity compared with the 3rd quarter of 2006. In fact, note that single family home sales for the third quarter in the combined Dane, Sauk, and Columbia markets are off only 1% from the same quarter of 2006. For the year, they’re off only 3%. Condo sales are off a little more, falling 14% for the quarter and 11% for the year. As we said in our last edition, the market appeared to have settled into a groove, down roughly 10-12% from the unrealisticallyfrantic 2005 pace.
And then, in mid August, the Great Sub-Prime Fiasco hit the national media like a nuclear bomb, and things changed dramatically. Within the third quarter numbers, reported closings in September are off nearly 24% from last September (as of this writing*). That shows you just how drastically things changed in mid-stream. The sensational reports speculating that Countrywide might go bankrupt seemed to throw the market into a kind of paralysis, and buyers scuttled to the side lines again just when they seemed to be finding the courage to come back onto the field.
Unfortunately, as has been the case throughout this period, the perceptions the public is being left with range from overstated to just plain wrong. While the events of August were real, our experience is that most local home buyers and sellers don’t understand what it means for us. The media has done a very poor job of distinguishing between what’s going on nationally and what’s going on here locally. The impression many people have is that foreclosures are skyrocketing, foreclosed homes are flooding the market, driving up inventories, lenders are going out of business so that home loans are no longer available, interest rates on the few loans that are available are rising, and home prices are plummeting. None of these things are remotely true in our local market. But as the September closing numbers suggest, these perceptions do have an influence on people’s behavior in the short run. Yes, something is going on, but what is it, really?

Dave Stark is a longtime friend and client. www.starkhomes.com

Former Technician ‘Turning In’ AT&T Over NSA Program

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Ellen Nakashima:

His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.

Perhaps our elected officials might consider this matter vis a vis AT&T’s flawed video “competition” bill. unlikely

Is It the New Automotive Century Yet?

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Ed Wallace:

Finally, we are being treated to a good old-fashioned bare-knuckles fistfight. The biggest and most respected players in the automobile industry are trashing each other’s technological plans for future automobiles, while promoting their own concepts as the future of the industry. It’s an elevated debate, not a product-vs.-product dustup. What I found most fascinating about all of this was Carlos Ghosn’s position that, one day in the near future, only electric cars might be allowed in some of the most congested cities in the world. There’s little doubt in my mind that he’s probably right; he’s just looking at the European viewpoint on that issue, not necessarily the Japanese.

Georgia Plant is First for Making Ethanol from Waste

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Kathleen Schalch:

for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing energy independence lies in cellulosic ethanol. That’s ethanol that could be brewed from things like corn stalks, straw, wood chips — things we normally throw away.
Companies have been racing to find cost-effective ways to make this form of ethanol. A company called Range Fuels in Georgia is scheduled to break ground Tuesday on the world’s first plant for making cellulosic ethanol.

Audio
Range Fuels website.

Angkor: When It Rains, You Score

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Stephen Brookes:

Rain was lashing against the side of the plane as we broke through the clouds. Below us, Cambodia stretched out like a perfect disaster: fields flooded to the horizon, palm trees whipped by the wind, a sky so dark and heavy it seemed about to collapse. As we dropped closer, we caught a glimpse of two people pushing a truck through knee-deep water, struggling to keep from being washed away.
“It’s fantastic!” I said to my wife, whose hand was clamped on mine in a vise-like grip. “It looks like we timed this perfectly!”
We’d come to Cambodia to see the famous temples of Angkor, those magnificent ruins that make up one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Asia, if not the world. And we’d come in July — in the heart of the monsoon, which sensible people had told us was pure madness. Wait until the dry season, they said, when the skies are clear and you’re guaranteed as much sunshine as you can handle. Go during the long, wet summer — when more than 50 inches of rain falls — and you’re certain to get stranded in your hotel, swatting at mosquitoes and hoping you don’t come down with malaria.