Edmonton Housing Bust

After 26 loooooong days, hours on hold, no-show installers and multiple ISP’s… I’m finally back online. What a nightmare, but finally Telus came riding to the rescue (there is a statement I never thought I’d make). Shaw, and I don’t say this off the cuff, I mean it from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourselves. Really. With a wire brush even.

Anyway, enough of that diatribe. Just writing to apologize for the lack of posts the last month, and to give you guys a heads up that I’ll be making up for lost time the next couple weeks and post up a storm. I’d like to thank you guys for sticking around, and I’m going to make it up to you. I’ll have something fresh up tomorrow night.

Greetings all, hope you’re all back at work and recovered from the long weekend. I was hoping to have some new bankruptcy or arrears data to do a work up on tonight, but they haven’t been released, so no such luck. If you’re really jonesing for some numbers you can read through the CIBC and RBC reports that came out today. I haven’t looked through them yet, and don’t typically put much stock in them… but when one is hard up for data, they’ll do.

In the absence of fresh stats, I’ll do something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile… that being, poll you guys and gals regarding what features you might like to see on the site. Since moving to the domain in the new year, it can allow us to do a lot of new things.

One thing I’ve been considering is starting up a forum, as there isn’t really any out there exclusive to real estate in Alberta, in fact there few that even discuss it even in passing. The issue there is whether we get the traffic to support such a forum. While I think we get sufficient readership to make it worthwhile (as long as it isn’t totally idle I’d be content), most tend to only lurk.

So the question is whether you guys would be interested in a more active medium. As is, the blog by itselfs seems to be more than capable of handling current discussions, but a forum would allow you guys to drive the discussion where ever you want and could promote more in depth discussion.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this out there and see if there was any interest, or have any other ideas of features/concepts you’d like to see.

You guys may have noticed, I have a bit of a thing for numbers. A stat geek if you will. Hard to believe, I know. Anyway, while looking for things to fill the hours on a rather dreary Wednesday there wasn’t a whole lot of new offerings out there to sink one’s teeth into… sure, there were the some new releases from Statcan (labour and GDP), but nothing that caught my fancy.

So, I took a look at the sites traffic stats just for the hell of it… and not to toot my own horn, but they look pretty good. In fact, April has already smashed the records for visitors not just since switching to the domain, but for all time (all 16 months of it, yeah, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?!).

So, to the literally hundreds of you who who have nothing better to do than stop by every day and read my ramblings… I applaud you. And this is coming from a guy with nothing better to do than write this tripe. We’re getting more than double the traffic we were getting even just six months ago, which, truth be told, I was very happy with at the time.

So, compared with our rather limited history, things appear to be going very well, but I was interested to see how this stacks up with the other blogs of our ilk. Of course such data regarding visitors, hits, etc, is not really available (unless, perhaps, one is a far better hacker than I)… thus the best service out there is the Alexa rankings.

I hadn’t checked these since back in January when we moved domains… before the move we were nicely in the mix for real estate blogs in Alberta, but not at the top of the list. Then, obviously when I moved domains all that history was lost and our ranking was negligible as a result.

So, imagine my surprise when I checked in last night and saw that as far as Alexa is concerned, edmontonhousingbust.com is now the most popular real estate blog in all of Alberta. The bubble blogs? Kicking their asses! The realtor blogs? Taking ‘em to the woodshed!

Of course we’re but a mere minnow compared to the major sites on the ole interweb, and even dwarfed by the likes of greaterfool.ca when it comes to Canadian blogs… but as far as the Turd Island of Alberta real estate blogs go, we’re King Shit!

Now, I can already hear you saying that the Alexa rankings have their flaws… or that this is nothing more than measuring of ones e-penis. To which I respond, it’s true, they are flawed, but they’re also the only objective measure of these things. So it is what it is… and as the latter contention, that is also true, and it’s nice to be e-hung!

The girlfriend just strolled by and offered up some more of her patented input, stating, “at least you’re “hung” somewhere.” What a woman?! You’d think a mouth like that would offer up some benefits in other parts of the relationship… but alas, no such luck. Oh well, it’ll just be that much sweeter when I finally trade her in for a newer model!

Anyway, that’s about it… just a little self-aggrandizement. Fear not, I haven’t dislocated my shoulder from all the patting myself on the back. Yet anyway. We’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming in the next post, and with that some numbers of actual consequence. In the mean time and inbetween time… that’s it… another edition of Stampede Wrestling Alberta’s most awesomely popular real estate blog!

P.S. Just so you don’t feel like I’ve entirely wasted your time with that mastabatory pap, here is a heads up to check out an excellent episode of Nova on PBS if you get a chance (it should be replaying the rest of this week) called “Mind Over Money.” It examines the debate over rational vs. emotional economic theory (something we’ve discussed here a fair bit)… it’s the Chicago School vs. the world it seems… personally, I’m with the world, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is complete in utter shite. At least in my not-humble-at-all opinion.

So… we’ve moved!

We’re now operating solely at edmontonhousingbust.com, moving over from blogspot. I’ve tried to make the transition as painless as possible and mimic the old appearance/navigation. Also should have an automatic redirect sending ya’ll this way. There are still a few kinks to workout, so if you notice something I missed fire me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll get on it… but at least from my brief stint troubleshooting we at least appear to be functional (I’m working on updating the backlinks, but it’s slooooow going).

Other than updating your bookmarks, hopefully there isn’t much that should change for you guys. In the weeks and months to come I’ll be playing with some new features that are now available thanks to moving to our own domain. Again, if you have any suggestions in that regard, by all means get in touch with me. So, yeah, that’s about all I have to say… hope you all are having a good weekend!

Seems we have a fair number of readers on Twitter that are linking to us, so I figured I’d give you all another way to follow the blog.

http://twitter.com/edmontonbust

I’m thinking of using it to link to various news stories and other blogs of interest that I might not get to covering in detail… so hopefully it should be a good supplement to my more long winded entries here.

So feel free to share with the world you thoughts, reactions, praise, disdain here, there and everywhere.