When I first moved to Seattle, I casually let it slip to a friend that we were selling our house in Illinois. When I told her what we bought it for, a year and a half ago, she scoffed. A home under $100,000? No one had seen that figure here in decades. I thought surely the housing market couldn’t be that bad. But once I started investigating, I realized… it was.

While investigating how long it would take to be able to afford a home again, I stumbled across Seattle Bubble. It was a lone voice crying the wilderness of over-optimistic realtors and newspaper columnists that helped me keep a little perspective (and hopefully made a few inroads with those columnists, as well).

Seattle Bubble won the first round of Blarch Badness handily, and is now up against USS Mariner in Round 2. Here’s what creator Timothy Ellis has to say:

MB: What was your impetus for starting up Seattle Bubble?
TE: In the summer of 2005 my wife and I were “window shopping” for a house, and the more we looked, the more we realized that something was seriously out of whack with home prices around here. I started to do some research online, and began finding news articles, blogs, and most importantly hard data that seemed to show that the real estate market was in an irrational frenzy, and the wild price increases were not sustainable. I tried to find a site where I could find specific information about Seattle’s market, but it didn’t exist. So, I decided to start collecting all this information I was finding, and put it online in a blog so that anyone else with the same interest wouldn’t have to re-do all the work I had already done.

MB: Are you from Seattle?
TE: Well, if by “from Seattle,” you mean was I born here or did I live here as a child, then the answer is no. I have lived in Seattle for about ten years. I came up here for college (SPU), and have lived here since.

MB: Where do you find your content?
TE: There are a lot of places to get information about the real estate market. We get some of it from news reports, some is based on data directly from the local MLS, some of it is just analysis based on statistics like census data, or even stories from personal experiences. I generally try to indicate my sources directly on each post, so that people aren’t taking my word on anything, but can go out and see the data or information for themselves.

MB: Do you have a regular posting schedule?
TE: Generally we try to post at least once a day, each weekday. I like to get the post up in the morning, so there’s something new each day for people to read.

MB: What types of posts do you think your readers are most interested in?
TE: Funny you should ask that since we just had a poll on that very subject last week. The most popular posts tend to be the ones that contain data-driven analysis of the local housing market. There are really only two other
sources of information out there about the local real estate market: newspapers and real estate agents (through blogging, mailings, or direct communication), and the newspapers get most of their information directly from the real estate agents (and their organizations). I’m not going to say that real estate agents are liars, but they do have a financial incentive to present the market in a way that favors more buying and selling. This tends to result in reports that are not very forthcoming about the true condition of the market. The readers of Seattle Bubble are smart enough to see through the spin, and want a source that gives them data-based, factual analysis, not sales spin.

MB: Do you have a specific audience of readers in mind for your blog?
TE: As I alluded to above, the people that participate in Seattle Bubble (in the comments, on the forums, and through emails) are basically just people that are interested in the housing market for whatever reason, and are smart enough to seek out a source of information with less spin. Granted, we are not some sort of unbiased truth repository, but our community is frank and open, thanks to the ongoing participation by hundreds of active users.