Say goodbye to the “mystery man” default avatar in comments.  Now they’ll be marked by a random pixelated identifier. And we’re not only doing it live, we’re doing it #retroactively.  Check your old comments; you’ll see you now have a unique retro avatar if you haven’t already set one up via Gravatar.

Insects, robots, monsters, vehicles, and some… you don’t want to say.  It’s a low-res Rorschach test! Feel free to whine about this change or let us know what some of the avatars remind you of.

Zuckerberg’s Loan Gives New Meaning To The 1%

Zuckerberg, 28, is the world’s 40th wealthiest person, with a net worth of $15.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His company went public in a $16 billion initial public offering in May. The shares were down 19 percent since trading began as of July 13.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu declined to comment on Zuckerberg’s mortgage.

“We’re not going to get into the personal finances of executives,” he said in an e-mail.

The Palo Alto house cost $7 million in March of last year, purchased in the name of a limited liability company, according to a deed filed with the Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder.

Zuckerberg’s address was published by Palo Alto Online and Burbed.com, a Silicon Valley real estate blog. Three neighbors reached by phone at their homes said Zuckerberg lives at the address. They asked that their names not be used because of concerns for their privacy.

Let me take a moment to thank Madhaus for the enormous effort it takes to post all these stories. Without Madhaus, this site would not have been featured on Bloomberg.com yesterday.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank the readers and commenters on Burbed, for making it such a vibrant and interesting community.

Finally, I’d like to thank Mark Zuckerberg for helping the Bay Area take another step in reaching its goals of becoming the best place in the world to live.

Thank you everyone!

By now, there is no doubt that I’m the worst server admin of any Bay Area Real Estate blog. It’s just not my forte.

For example, try as I might, I simply can’t understand why memory usage by this wordpress instance looks like this:

I’m led to believe that maybe it is the plugins.

Throughout this week, I’m going to try turning some of them on and off to see what the difference is.

I apologize for any weirdness in advance.

On the flipside, if there are any wordpress mavens amongst you, please let me know.

Thanks!

My apologies for the lack of a post yesterday. What can I say – facebook ipo frenzy got me!

While Burbed remains a highly valued and award-winning website, our readership levels have been dropping even faster than home prices in places outside the Real Bay Area.  Clearly it’s time to take some serious stock of what this site is for, what it’s trying to do, and whether to set some new goals.

The Problem: Burbed was created to show the insanely high housing prices for insanely poor quality homes in the Bay Area.  Today, as long as you’re not looking too close to Google, Facebook, or whatever neighborhood in San Francisco is trendy this week, you can find nicer properties at some of the most affordable prices since the 20th century ended.   Meeting our mission is difficult and increasingly irrelevant.

The Solution: People want guidance on how to buy or sell a home without any game playing.  What few readers we have left have learned to be wary of agents, but trust us completely.  Therefore, effective immediately, Burbed will stop pointing and laughing at badly marketed homes, when we could make a lot more money buying and selling them.

That’s right.  We are now, starting today, Open for Your Business!  That means we won’t be bad-mouthing real estate professionals, showing homes with poorly-maintained property or messy rooms, or cracking wise on unrealistic asking prices.  And in the current real estate market, the sky is the limit on asking prices, so who are we to object?

List your home with us and we’ll get it out to the customers who would otherwise never read real estate ads.  Hire our team of informed and lively agents to find you the perfect place to live in, while entertaining you during the drive from one house to another.  (Some of them even own vehicles with room for more than one other rider!)

Please patronize all our brand new sponsors you see on this page.  You’ll be seeing a lot more ads for them and other exciting products and services, throughout the site as our new business model takes shape.  Things are going to get very exciting around here, so we may have to limit comments if there are any difficulties.

Thanks again for visiting Burbed.  Often.  And remember, Now is the Time to Buy or Sell a House!

WITH US.

You may have noticed while we’ve been rebuilding Burbed, the links to other worthwhile websites went away for a few weeks.  I’m happy to report they’ve all been restored.  (Or at least they all should have been restored; let us know if a favorite was eaten by Ceiling Cat.)

Have a look around and see if you find them useful, interesting, informative, or fun.  Also feel free to let us know if there’s a site you love that ought to be included.  Be sure to tell us why Burbed readers would enjoy it.

Feel free to complain about which category your favorite site was misclassified in, too.  It wouldn’t be Burbed without whining!

Did you know that Burbed turned six last week?  Our very first post was on February 4th, 2006.  Here’s a peek:

What’s really great about the very first house on Burbed is it’s a castle on Buckingham Avenue!  That’s like finding a ski chalet on Zermatt Street, or a tilt-up industrial building on Technology Drive!

If you look up the listing history on Redfin, we can see just how good a job the agent did with that $555K asking price.

What do you think this house would sell for in today’s fever-pitched market?  Close to Facebook… I would say $888K FTW!

Any suggestions for celebrating six years of Burbed content?  This is an open thread.

Some good news! A lot of the missing content was restored! Hurray!

Some bad news! Everything posted since yesterday is gone.

Hopefully the site will be a lot more stable now though!

-Burbed

Do you have some photos that you feel truly represent the Bay Area housing scene, and would like to see them in the banner area?

Send them my way!

-Burbed

(Real Bay Area preferred. Thanks.)

Yeah, the site looks funny. I’m trying to rebuild it to improve performance. More changes to come!

-Burbed