Telmnstr

Hello, sorry for being late. I saw that article :-) It got torn up on the bubble blogs. The guy has a heavy interest in promoting real estate. It's simply a credit bubble, and it will end badly. It just needs to pop, real estate can return to proper affordability without risky lending, and life moves on. Too bad the investment wasn't in business. Anywho, bad news for NASA Langley... which is sad, as I really like NASA. The gov't spending thing does make me wonder. With the huge deficit, will the next president cut military spending and force things like JFCOM to scale down? I've worked for the gov't in the past. There is meat that can be trimmed for sure. The flip side is, the best paying jobs in this region (that I see) are directly tied to the gov't. So yea, wealth redistribution has it's advantages. Not unless you own a title loan business or rim shop. It's interesting that Portfolio recovery was on Cramer... That is good news. I'm not heavily familiar with them other than they are a collections agency. I've seen their ads looking for agents. Anyone know what they pay? How many do they employ in the local economy? Do the peons make good money or min wage? As far as .coms, we missed it because we have nothing. We had a few tech companies during that time, but most of them disappeared. Great Bridge failed hard. OOP.com sold out. The local Decipher which makes trading card games recently downsized from 120 to 10 or something. It was in business week (I'm told). Kind of sad to hear that. I work for a small tech company in HR. It's wierd. They recruit people to the region when possible. They claim to have a hard time finding local talent, but I don't buy it. I've referred them local talent and they didn't move on it. I speculate they feel the local talent isn't good enough or something. I see gov't contractors as wealth redistribution. Many of them apparently make 2x+ on top of the employees salary. If you earn $100k/yr, your company bills $200k/yr on top of you as overhead. That seems extreme to me, but I guess it's how the contractors afford the class A office space.

The quicker it crashes, the better off we all are. Seriously. And sure enough, just the other day PilotOnline ran some AP newswire article where by they were suggesting people should run out and buy condos, as they will slow down to 10% YOY appreciation. This type of finiancial advice would get a financial planner or stock broker fired + license revoked. Yet realtors make these types of wierd statements all the time. I wish there were statistics published regarding what types of loans are being made in the local market. Are they ARM/IO/NegAmort? Or mostly fixed? I welcome the return of affordable housing. I was up in DC this weekend for ShmooCon. Got off the interstate at some Northern VA exit. It was nothing but new home construction, everywhere. It was wild. Oh yea, the Yield Curve inverted. That is generally a sign of recession. Speaking of housing, it looks like Granby towers has broken ground. I hope they get past the point of no return. I wonder how many investors / people who have purchased their $500k shoeboxes will try to bail out once all of the housing prices start to slide backwards? Sure they will leave behind a $15k deposit or whatever, but it's happening alot in the other markets.

Sorry :-) I just try to keep up with things. I've read other peoples comments on other forums regarding the HREDA and tend to side with them. The HREDA hasn't really shown themselves that effective. I'm for some things, against others. I'm all for building up versus out. I really like the ODU Maglev project and believe that is a better solution for the future over standard light rail. Don't mean to be too negative but the reading about the credit bubble and seeing what will happen to the US as a result keeps me a bit down. I also think the US corporation is selling out the US public, seeking short term gain with long term consequences. But that is for another discussion :-) There aren't alot of tech companies here outside of resellers and service types, so I think I can get somewhere. If not, I will probably move to Northern Virginia. I was born and raised in Hampton Roads. It has it's ups and downs. The whole thing about cities working together. It won't happen. It's a power trip, competition. They will always work against each other. That's just the way it is. I attended a luncheon for the 25 fastest growing small businesses in Hampton Roads (No, mine wasn't one of them grumble). You could see it between the mayors and their represenatives. The competition.

Hello. There is the HRTC (Hampton Roads Technology Council). Some of their success stories are related to commercialization of technologies out of NASA Langley. They have two offices, one near NASA LaRC and one in what was Kroger Business Park (Now Interstate Commerce Park). They have meetings every so often (Critical Mass). They just did a formal ball as a fundraiser for the technology council in New Orleans. There is also the HREDA. The Hampton Roads Economic Development Alliance markets our regions to large companies. I don't think they have scored many wins. It is funded by all of the cities. There has been some beef that the cities put in unequal amounts of money and the wins wind up in a disproportionate set of cities or some such. NSU has the RISE center. It's supposed to be some sort of incubator thing. It really sounds like it will be competition to other local businesses, which is kind of ironic. It sounds similiar to the ODU thing. The incbators and technology parks are a neat idea, but unfortunately it seems like a field of dreams. Build it and they will come. There was a huge one scheduled to go in near NASA Langley, I'm not sure what happened to it. It was supposed to be commercial companies and gov't branches all together in a nice park. It was to be off of Armistead. When I left NASA there was some ground clearing, I haven't been up that way in a while. The Raleigh-Durham area is home to some really major players, and has been for a while. If you roll thru Research Triangle Park you will see Nortel, Cisco, IBM, RedHat, Ericcson, and biotech companies. This is pre-tech crash. These companies have been there a while and I believe many of them got hurt pretty badly during the tech crash. Honestly, I think the true technology investments are going to India. That is the hot spot, that is the Silicon Valley. That is where the growth is. Other local built it and they will come parks include Corporate Landing in Virginia Beach. Chesapeake has a technology park off of Battlefield blvd behind Home Depot. Suffolk has the one near JFCOM off of College Drive (Bridgeways). Newport News I guess would claim Oyster Point. Hampton has NASA and the one that is supposed to go in off of Armistead. It's little more than the same old office buildings. You will see them tout things like HIGH SPEED FIBER OPTIC INTARWEB. SOS. Same Cox service that is availible in many other Hampton Roads facilities at the same high prices. But back to ODU. They should be able to spawn businesses off of research I'd hope.

Hoobo - the last time similiar easy financing was popular among the lower classes (IO, Neg Amort, etc) was right before the Great Depression. It is my understanding that the mistakes that shoved us into the Great Depression have been well studied and this will most likely be avoided. It's a credit bubble. The minute the easy financing is gone, then no one can buy. People jumped in so they wouldn't miss out on the riches, and they wouldn't be left behind. It's already happening. People can't qualify to refinance their home on fixed rates since the mort rates went up. Their funky loans will continue to ratchet up in cost. Bankruptcy is under new laws. Congradulations, you got served. Indentured servant fo' life. I shouldn't complain because I supposidly make more than the average Virginia Beach household. But I just can't get over the fact that so many people are jumping into this nonsense. And the effect that will happen when it stops. This is so much worse than the .com stock market bubble. In a slight way, I'm anxious to see it happen. Oh man, and the lawsuits. From what I've read there is ALOT of mortgage fraud, fraudulent loans. People are going to be sueing their realtor for saying property doesn't decrease in price. The whole bidding stupidity. What's even crazier is I believe as the boomer generation dies, the population will decrease in the US... meaning as us younger people grow older, there will most likely be less people looking to buy houses. But hey, Miami has something like 20,000 extra housing units in the pipeline. Another neat thing is the reports from alot of housing markets that all these houses were sold so the cities planned for new students to show up in schools, but it never really happened. Bought for speculation since it looks to return more money than the stock market. Anywho, I could go on and on. Good links at thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com and patrick.net/housing/crash.html (click links). Just makes me think... thank you fools for the damage you've caused to the economy. The one last interesting thing is.... once the gov't decides to do something about waste and cut spending, we're going to loose a whole lot of good paying jobs here in Hampton Roads. Those people could go all work at the resort strip in the summer, but no, Richard Maddox and friends all import their labor from Brazil and other countries. Sorry if I'm a downer to the party :-) I'm just more for actual progress. Build things, create things, advance mankind. As a country we just can't sit around reselling real estate year after year. Once the RE party is over and people stop feeling rich over their house appreciation, consume spending is going to slow down a bit (something like 13% of consumer spending was funded by home equity loans last year!? HFS!). Not cool. PS. MAGLEV TRAIN, GOOOOD! PS1 - MIPSR3000 - But in the end, if Hampton Roads has reached a new peak... that means all the young professional people can continue to flee the area like they already do, and get nice homes at good prices in the Northern Virginia area. They are building like crazy, and the market is tanking already... PS2 - MIPS CORE - Someone said the last to rise is generally the earliest to fall. Pretty interesting. HR rose towards the end (USA was behind many other countries in the run up as well). Crazy stuff. PS3 - NO IDEA - Pheonix inventory is up some 150% in the past 2 months! AND THIS IS THE SLOW SEASON! Look out below! Spring time comes, there is gonna be bloodshed!

Regarding ODU's maglev project... the truth is the costs so far have been a joke. The amount of money spent is about equal to a culdesac of Virginia Beach poorly constructed rapidly flipped housing shacks. It's nothing compared to what has been invested by the Germans in their maglev system, which TOTALLY appears to rock. I want to go there, JUST TO TAKE A JOY RIDE on the thing. The transrapid does 250mph. There are videos of the ODU Maglev train moving on a guideway in Flordia before it was transported here to Virginia. My understanding (and it could be wrong, since the news articles aren't technical, they are written for the "real estate can only go up" never-heard-of-a-bubble drooling public) from friends is that the elevated guideway here in Norfolk flexes. When the train is on the guideway, the computer(s) adjust the electromagnet power levels to keep the train floating above the guideway. The problem is, the guideway bounces from the force and then the computer adjusts and then the guideway vibrates and it's oscillates in a loop. If you look up American Maglev, hit their homepage, there are videos of it working on the ground. Nuclear power + automated maglev systems = 24x7 quiet mass transit. Elevated means it doesn't interrupt road traffic. Why everyone seems to have a problem with it, but don't mind cities spending 2.5 times as much on a performing arts theater so the grown up drama club can play, I dunno. If just a slight portion of the money pouring into the useless housing price runup went into funding new companies and new ideas, the world might be better. The Virginia Beach convention center which will be a money looser for the taxpayers but line the pockets of the hotel owners has already cost more than 10 times the investment in the maglev. Don't get me wrong. I've seen the Simpsons, Marge versus the Monorail. I just firmly believe this style of mass transit has lots of potential value as the guideway deployment isn't that obtrusive and it would be very quiet when running. THIS IS THE FUTURE FOLKS. I mean, come on! Oh yea, regarding traffic. I've been playing around with making a better interface for the VDOT cameras. Feel free to comment on my work so far, you can see it at http://www.HRConnect.com under traffic. I'm also building a (Very rapidly growing) database of all past vdot images. Every 5 minutes, some 210MB a day.

Actually I was thinking about the supply and demand issue. People have said there is a good amount of growth in terms of population. Is this from people in other regions cashing out of their properties and taking advantage of our cheap property? I've heard that real estate sales in HR have slowed, but don't have the connections to really see. I know there are some heavy cuts up at NASA Langley. A huge portion of GDP is consumer spending, and a large portion of recent money has come from people cashing out of their properties. When this slows obviously consumer spending will slow. The markets I mentioned haven't crashed, but RE sales in Boston are DEAD, Pheonix inventory is skyrocketing, same with San Diego. Sellers are starting to cut selling prices, and properties still aren't moving. It's all a hurd mentality. The greed and feeling of "I'll never be able to own if I don't buy now" will change to "The longer I wait, the cheaper it will get." RE declined heavily in Cali in the 90s, Texas as well. In some cases it took 10 years for properties to reach the previous sales price. But the truth is there has never been this type of situation before. It's not just the US, we were one of the recent ones. Look at .au and .uk. The house I was renting went from about $170k in sales price to $300kish in a period of 3 years or less. On average, houses appreciate about 3% a year. I'd offer 4% a year max over the 1998/1999 values max. Bidding wars are dumb, when the whole thing blows up people are going to go back and look at the bidding wars and perhaps question, "was I really bidding against anyone else?" I have at least one friend that was "outbid" and when they said they didn't want to bid any higher the "higher bidder" changed their mind and backed out. Ho ho ho. Thank goodness they backed out of that deal. But how much of the demand is caused by the quick gains that one can make by buying, holding then reselling real estate? Once that demand is removed, what will really be left? The past year housing construction has been like twice that of the population and replacement rates (not counting katrina damage). Plus once the boomers kick it that will free up their primary residence and their vacation homes.

Interesting. I worked there but left because the salaries were too low. I know a number of other people having issues because the salaries aren't high enough to really support their mortgages on their starter homes that they recently purchased. The one thing that scares me is what if the gov't decides to cut back on this stuff? They are running up a pretty big bar tab with the fake war and all. The issue on the HR tip is that the money hits the hands of the gov't contractors. I would imagine a large bulk of the money ends up in the hands of Lockheed or SAIC or CSC or whomever around the beltway or San Diego or wherever the company is located at. I might be negative, but I channel almost all of my spare money into actually driving a "technology startup." So I can say I put my money where my mouth is. I appreciate the money I made working for gov't contractors, and to be honest it's where the money is in HR... but I can see the gov't cutting back as they get out of control, and I value real innovation more. The gov't thing is basically wealth redistribution. I am confident once we make more progress on some of my ideas we will become the google kids of Hampton Roads. Meanwhile, if you see me rolling around in my tech truck. be sure to honk or say hi! (Picture at http://tinyurl.com/dbfy6 )

40% of job growth since 2001 is real estate related. The cooling of RE will eliminate much of this employment. Speculators make up _AT LEAST_ 20% of the market. This doesn't include people who casually buy 2nd homes. The reason all of this is attractive is because the returns are greater than the stock market, and real estate is the in thing. Once RE cools and people have to maintain their 2nd properties, they will want to sell. But now they will have to sell at a loss if they bought in recently. Speculators are going to try to bail. The gov't passed new bankruptcy laws on the 17th of October. How convienient, eh? Now if someone tries to use bankruptcy to get out of a loan, they may have to continue to pay off the loan (?and loose the house?) for a very long time. Boston is crashing, AS I TYPE. Check out some of the headlines. San Diego is crashing, AS I TYPE. Check out some of the headlines. Pheonix is crashing, AS I TYPE. Check out some of the headlines. I personally don't feel housing is affordable in HR. According to the stats, I make more than most. To get in a not-ghetto hood, it would cost a rediculous amount of money. I've been looking at commercial real estate as well, it's thru the roof. I've looked at various condo projects, and pulled the records for the property values (in Norfolk). Some appear to be on the market for 60%-70% profit once all units are sold. Yikes. Northern VA is headed for disaster as well. They are building like CRAZY up there. So some might say, HR won't crash even if other markets will. Then why would any one want to stay in HR and overpay versus move to a nice place in Northern Virginia? The one site I look at shows property in Norfolk on the market is up 28% over last 2 months. Let that continue to climb. If they gotta sell (divorce, funky loans) and they bought recently then they could be in trouble. Also, here is something interesting that I personally was wondering about that someone else discovered the infos on. You see, home builders are in the business of building homes. So they need supplies. Land is one of these supplies. It is often said that there is a huge shortage of land, and such. The truth is, the top builders (Centex, TOL, etc) already own or have options on a MASSIVE amount of land. One top builder has room for over 300,000 SFH's. Another was over 500,000. The part of the market that is crunched is the low end. Builders want to maximize their profits (as any business does) so they push to build more expensive properties. Meanwhile people looking to make loads of cash take out HELOCs on their newly inflated properties and buy up all the cheap properties, forcing the lowest class of people to have to resort to riskier, more expensive loans to try to enter the housing market. So really, the rich used to play on the stock market and play with themselves. Now they are basically screwing over the lower class people. BUT, they are about to get theirs. Sorry for the doom and gloom, but some time ago I was looking to purchase a house similiar to the one I was renting as I decided to finally push my employers for better salaries... then low and behold, whoosh up went the housing prices. There was nothing really different about the properties now versus 2 years before, other than perhaps they needed more maintenance. So then I started to look into housing bubbles, and what exactly caused this sudden demand of property. The more I read, the more I became fascinated with it all. I quickly found that those that were bullish on real estate really couldn't explain their place. Real estate never goes down, it's undervalued, and other such things are spewed. The quotes in the media come from Realtors, or the NAR, or the mortgage people. But the bears, they had numbers, examples of previous problems, pointers to statistics and more logical explanations. It's a shame that the energy didn't go towards job creation, new means of transit (mmm maglev), or something else constructive. But then again, it's mostly debt. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. In the end, it's irresponsibility that led to this. The thing to remember is if the gov't tries to bail out people who have made really poor decisions on the taxpayer dime, FIGHT THEM. Don't let them bail out the people drunk on HELOC loans and bad mortgages. It's a slap in the face to those that are responsible and aren't debt abusers. Also, Granby towers... anyone know how many units are sold? I need to stop in there and bite my lip. I'm afraid I'll slip up and say the b word and they will throw me out. Perhaps I need a Mr Housing Bubble tshirt. Also, EVERY market is different. If you look, there is a "our market is different" line for EVERY market. Including those that are currently tanking. Good resource is http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com

Whaa? Have you looked at home prices in our region? They are easily up 100% in some areas over a period of 4 years. Many of the condos are rediculous. Land is mega expensive, and commercial property is mega expensive. Fuel is expensive too. Everything is increasing, except wages. I'm all for logical development but to be honest, the longer the bubble expands the louder the pop. The median household income in Virginia Beach is something to the tune of 53k. What is going to happen is that that real estate is going to crash. It's going to wipe out a ton of jobs (construction, mortgage brokers, financial, agents, kill some ad revenue). Then that should lead to more forclosures, which you know... might bring the affordability level down. Sure people can get stupid loans now, but the debt levels are crazy. I'd like to see buildings full of $150k condos.

Hello, The free wifi type services utilize industrial versions of the same technology you see used in homes. The 802.11b and 802.11g standards. The distance is pretty limited due to the requirement of the antennas to be able to pick up the notebook adaptor card. There is newer fixed wireless services coming online. These use higher power antennas systems mainly on businesses that are fixed in place, and aim towards higher towers and buildings (Town Center has Pinnacle Online's antennas, as do a host of other buildings). The goal here is to skip the requirement to pay Cox or telephone companies for transport. By using public airwaves, it cuts the cost down some. There is then yet another set of broadbandish services coming from cell phone companies. These generally aren't as high speed as the fixed wireless, but should be more portable. Take your notebook all over the country. EVDO (Verizon) is one of these technologies. The cities are talking wifi. Years ago I lined up companies willing to pay for the broadband service and we were willing to pay for the hardware and maintain free wireless at Norfolk Int'l airport. They turned us down, saying it wasn't in the public's interest. If there are fees charged, then the airport makes money, and that is in the public's interest as it's profit. I sort of understand where they are coming from. I'm still not really sure what the huge benefit to this wireless data in downtown areas are. No serious business would rely on using public access service for their business I'd hope. If people aren't careful alot of damage can be done, there is no easy way to make public access internet over radio secure. I think it's more of a me-too, a few other areas anounced it. The fun part is watching the local data providers get mad. It's like public television. The cities are opening the door for people to hurt the telecom companies business. Wild stuff, indeed. Hampton Roads catches up. I have a web hosting company, and all of my servers are in a office I rent in Virginia Beach. The prices for bandwidth from providers is quite a bit more than other areas. This is probably due to Cox's monopoly. There are a few new players deploying fiber, and they are cheaper, but there is a bit more latency since they haul the data all the way back to Pittsburgh.

You must be out in California! The problem with trying to force lower priced housing is that the land becomes so valuable in a hot market. Builders want to cash in as quickly as possible before the market goes south. Something I notice is newspapers always say there is a lack of availible land. But then I've seen other people mention that builders always purchase land, and many of them own lots of it in the markets where there is a shortage of land. In Hampton Roads I do believe the property along Centerville Turnpike (near Chesapeake/VaBeach line) is heavily owned by developers from years ago. As are other land parcels. The thing that will force the prices down is the unavilibility of subprime loans. Right now people can get loans for anything to buy dumps. Many do it because they fear being priced out so they jump in, others want to profit so they jump in. What will happen is the tightening of lending, which will cut off new home purchases, which will push home builders to drop their prices below that of used houses for sale. This has happened in Vegas already, but not widespread.

And I am a former employee of the formentioned Joint Forces Command. Myself and coworkers were not that highly paid by our contractor (HUGE multinational corporation that counts profits with a ticker on their webpage that counts in billions). Not paid well enough to keep up with the cost of living adjustments. That is why I left. People I know that work for other companies now are trying to push for better pay but not seeing it yet. Generally you have to play the game and hop contractor to contractor to work your salary up. But many of those contractors there are stingy with the purse strings. I'm sure they bill high for the positions then pocket the money. Expansion though, there is. There is a large building called J7, then the smaller building called J9 which recently had a 2nd floor added. the hag Precision Bearing building was taken over, and is no JFCOM property. There is also a small machine shop that held out for a long time. I've heard they got bought out as well (wonder what they pocketed?) so that whole area now belongs to JFCOM. Then down the road at Bridgeways there exists the new SAIC facility and Lockheed facility. While it's high paying jobs and everything, do remember that it's all funded by defense spending. Finally when someone decides to do something about the enormous federal debt there could be constrictions in the postitions out there. I am happy to see tech jobs.

There is a website that is fairly popular among the youth called "Urbandictionary.com." It pretty much has user supplied definitions for words, and was setup to track slang words. A friend wrote an interface that allows access to definitions from that site in a chat room (IRC) we all use. I was playing around the other day, and found some funny ones: > !dict Newport News <bot> Newport News: 1 of the 7 urban cities of Virginia's Hampton Roads...Also known as Bad News for its high +crime rate Located North of Norfolk > !dict Virginia Beach <bot> Virginia Beach: the Los Angeles of the east coast had a horrible gang problem in parts of the city +back in the 80s and 90s but got better. East side of the city (the beach) has clubs, huge concert venues, bars, +dozens of hotels, LOTS of prostitutes.. the place to be on weekends. West side of the city borders Norfolk and +is controlled by black/mexican gangs and typically not where you want to be. I don't know if you know this, but 50 Cent mentioned Newport News in a song. It wasn't pretty, very derogatory. And Jay-Z's song "HOVA" I've been told is about selling bad quality drugs to the people in our region, once again because they aren't smart. Sure, Rudy more than makes up for it. I used to joke and call the region "Homicide Roads." But now that I have a RSS feed from one of the local news channels on a website I can't help but notice that it's nothing but hard crime. There is a large poor populaiton in HR, and it's just going to grow as more poor people are generated. Generally you can ignore this issue by sticking to the upper class hoods, but eventually it will spill over. Waterside is causing alot of it to spill into downtown Norfolk. All areas have their problems, I know. But yea, HR is ghetto above and beyond. People that visit from out of town point this out.

First off, don't get excited about the field of dreams announcements from Cities in regards to their technology parks. Everyone has got one. Chesapeake has one off of Battlefield, home of a call center for Panasonic? Virginia Beach's has a call center for Geico... The new one in Hampton I haven't kept up with (Magruder near LaRC? There was supposed to be some huge building but I don't know if it's been completed). The cities build these things then try to attract new companies. But perhaps too much investment is going into residential real estate speculation, versus oh I dunno perhaps funding companies that CREATE JOBS. Many of them are fairly empty. If you look at the HREDA and some of those groups, they really haven't attracted much in the way of real jobs. In terms of condo conversions, I keep seeing people from other markets claim that is the signal of the end of a bull RE market.

Hmmm not that I don't believe you, but I remembered reading about the Maersk terminal and remembered the job count. It is predicted to add 210 jobs: http://www.virginiabusiness.com/magazine/y...r05/expan.shtml There are auxilary jobs announced, and we could land lots of companies that handle shipping (Not unlike CGM/CMA or whatever they are called, and others). The housing bubble hasn't hit, when it does the entire economy will most likely slow as consumer spending comes to a halt, and the personal savings rate goes above 0 again.

Ah. I was going to ask if you worked for Trader Publishing or Trader Online (I believe the 2nd is half owned by Cox, while the first is Landmark). But then I looked at your profile and it says your a Verizon fiber tech. If you don't mind me asking, are you mainly transport or working the FIOS deployment out of the Great Neck CO? (Telcom nerd, have a small company but we use Cox Fibernet. I dream of occupying a floor in the Bute Street AT&T CO, even though it will never happen). That is the worst part of the Granby towers, it's going to obstruct the view of the one. I guess it's a good thing AT&T got rid of the microwave horns on top of the building. Anywho, wish that bandwidth in HR was lower cost on the business tip. I've talked Cox down a good bit but it's still thousands a month for anything approaching real connectivity. Telcove could put some pressure, then all the wireless providers but I have no faith in wireless and prefer to have less between me and the 'net.

Smithfield Foods? (It's not HQ in Norfolk, but it is considered HR, or at least that is my impression).

Richmond has more fortune 500 companies than our 2, correct? The identity crisis might be an issue, but many people know where Norfolk is. I don't think the identity would really help bring new companies. Companies are going to seek out a region for their reasons. Maybe they want to be near suppliers, maybe they want cheap monkey labor, maybe they want to be near clients. Langley I believe will be shedding a large number of jobs, and I'm not sure how many hi-tech businesses are really there. Symmantec lives up there, which grew out of the URLabs aquisition. Trader is nothing more than an existing company bouncing back and forth. They will relocated from the Picus buidling along i264 in Virginia Beach to Norfolk. It is not job gains for the region. I believe the new port will be heavily automated, so large numbers of new employees won't really be needed. India is the new Silicon Valley. What are the niche markets for HR? The cruise ship terminal in Norfolk is pretty interesting. I was optimistic about the Maglev project at ODU, but that isn't looking pretty. Yea, it looks like rap music might be our #1 claim to fame.

I would imagine that most of the large RE development companies are focusing on the hotter markets so they can extract the most money while the market is hot. There seem to be large developments of cardboard crapboxes going up, town houses, and condos... I'm not an RE expert so I don't know is considered normal for numbers of rentals versus numbers of owned homes. It would be easy enough to extract that data for every zip in HR and graph it, but without having something to compare it against it would be meaningless. With RE appreciating so much, I would imagine much of the transient purchasers (military) that move hold onto their properties and rent. The last place I was in, we rented from a homeowner who couldn't sell when he was relocated. (BAD MISTAKE, guy had no idea how to handle a rental property). This would prevent property from going back on the market. Perhaps if the market cools nationally, many of these new condo projects will get stuck and rush to liquidate? Condos are nutty. With a house, a huge portion of the value is in the land, with the improvement being the other half. You pay all this money for a condo, and don't own the land, and could be hit with high condo association fees. Another thing is rents versus price to purchase. My friend rents an apartment for $1200-$1300. The city supposidly says it's worth $280k (after conversion to condo). The numbers don't jive. After 20% downpayment, the monthly mortgage should be slightly below the rent. I dunno, I guess time will tell. Perhaps if RE deflates in many of the bubble markets people will exit? Also, if gov't spending slows, then that could wipe out many of our higher paying jobs. I know people at NASA are sweating their jobs, there could be some heavy loss up there.

Interesting, although I wouldn't want HRT involved. From what I've seen they are a very bad organization (Read the archived comments on PilotOnline's talknet under Traffic and Transportation regarding that organization!!). I was very hopeful that AMT and ODU would get the maglev system working. It seems perfect in that it has a small footprint and should be easy to deploy. More importantly, being elevated it wouldn't tie up road based traffic. Does anyone know the status of the ODU Maglev project? Last I heard they were trying to solve rail vibration / oscillation issues. -- Ethan

Ah, I just checked to make sure I didn't goof, and two ZIP codes in Chesapeake revealed near flat AGI as well, and one ZIP in Hampton. One did show about $1000 extra after 2 years. There are good free lookups at www.melissadata.com, include home sales by zip by month (with average price). Someone who I trust told me real estate is slowing down majorly in Virginia Beach, but it could take a long time for that to turn into visible reductions in prices. In terms of "catching up" ... I don't get that. We aren't going to catch up in terms of corporate growth, and jobs. Our region markets itself as low cost of living, low paying jobs, skilled workforce. I left what would be considered one of the high paying gov't jobs in the defense simulation industry, the pay wasn't that good and I was told upfront I wouldn't see much in the way of raises. I eventually left for a higher paying job elsewhere, I can't imagine what fuel prices are doing to some of the people out there that commute long distances. Let's not sugar coat things, Hampton Roads is pretty ghetto.

Okay, a bit of an introduction I suppose. I've lived in HR all my life. I have a decent job, but spend alot of money funding a tech startup that has yet to be profitable. I consider myself one of the few local tech visionaries. I was planning to purchase a home around 2004 as I predicted my income would approach a point in which I could buy something that I would be satisfied with. Obviously I wasn't prepared for the increase in supposid values of the properties. My income reached the point in which I would have purchased, but now that has been put on hold. I'm a bit of a bubble believer. After seeing all the arguments from the housing bulls, and seeing the facts that the housing bears point to, I tend to side with the bears. Bulls say it's a new paradigm, there is no more land, and real estate never goes down. Bear's point to statistics on insanely increasing consumer debt, risky loan products often not understood by those signing up for them, and stagnation in wages and real job growth. Unfortunately our region isn't really in the scope of most statistics I see, so information is limited. I see all the figures and statistics about Vegas, MA, CA, TX, and other frothy markets. But HR, well most people on a national overview aren't concerned with our region. Every now and then. Once in a while I will see reference to our region in outside publications, the Washington Post mentioned our run up. I'm interested to know if the growth in population in our region is due to gov't expansion due to "war" spending? I realize the simulations complex in Suffolk is growing as are a few other projects, what about other job growth? Is a large portion of the population increase people from larger bubble-markets realizing their gains on housing in Hampton Roads? Or are wealthy people buying second vacation properties in our region? Also, I would love to know how many of the first time home buyers and local home buyers in general are using "creative loan products." You know, the loans with the balloon payment, the IO loans, the loans where owners expect to sell their properties at a large profit and move to a std 30 year mortgage? I know of one person at least tracking the 25%, 50% and 75% percentile in terms of housing sale prices for this region. It will take a while for the data to really show anything, and the data source isn't 100% reliable (I don't believe it's from the local MLS system, it's being scraped from a national site). I do see we are getting a large number of condo conversions. Ghent on the Square is undergoing conversions. I did rough math and I *think* the property is valued at $8 million (Via city of norfolk site) and should yield $28,000,000 if all units are sold (guessing a medium price on units). That would be a pretty nice profit. My friend who lives there but is unwilling to buy said the city just appriased the apartment at $280,000k... I believe condo conversions is considered the final stages of a market bubble, as owners cash out to build up savings to buy distressed properties during the downtrend? Living in downtown Norfolk, I checked the annual gross incomes in 2000, 01 and 02 in the zip code I reside. Between 00 and 01 there was a $5,000 DECLINE, and between 01 and 02 there was yet another decline. Like other markets, it doesn't appear that our salaries are keeping up with inflation, let alone growing (to support the housing bubble). Any opinions out there? Any other housing bears? I'm saddened to see young people I know high on the employment ladder entering such large debt contracts on places that seem so artificially inflated. Also, how many properties are being bought as investment or 2nd homes (I won't say speculation, because anyone buying a house assuming it will increase in value is speculating).