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

Hey everyone,

I wanted to apologize for the downtime this weekend. I also wanted to thank those for reporting problems.

As you may have heard, Dreamhost, the hosting provider of this site, was hacked.

In theory, this security event should not have any impact on this site.

However, at around the same time, it appears that this site’s memory consumption has soared. I’m trying to understand why.

The next few days will be rough as I seek to figure out how to fix this. I apologize in advance.

Thanks!

-Burbed

In the meantime – how will Burbed’s terrible uptime impact the real estate market in the Real Bay Area? Discuss!

2011 was a year of transitions. Some things ended too soon (Steve Jobs), some things finally concluded (the Iraq War). For me personally, 2011 was also a year of transitions – second order impacts of the challenges of 2010.

I would like to thank the entire Burbed community for continuing to make this such an interesting, funny, educational place to be. I would like to thank all the commenters – quality, trolls – all alike (except spammers – thanks but no thanks.) I would like to thank the sponsors of Burbed for helping keep the site running. I would like to thank all those who sent in their “finds” – there were some awesome finds this year.

I would especially like to thank Madhaus for keeping this site going. To be frank, without Madhaus there wouldn’t have been a Burbed in 2011. Madhaus’ perseverance in delivering great posts on the site has amazed me, as is her persistence in getting me motivated to do some of the behind the scenes chores that I so suck at. (Like site uptime…)

It goes without saying that 2012 will be another interesting year for all. My involvement on Burbed will likely continue at its current level due to ongoing personal challenges. I look forward to continuing to see the great “finds” that you folks keep sending in.

I wish you all a Happy New Year.

Thank you for your support.
-Burbed

Last year, when we wished everyone the best wishes of the Season, we suggested you buy a house for some of your loved ones.  Looks like somebody took us seriously.

Look at the last bullet on the flyer:

Some home buyers purchase homes as gifts.  Hmmm, maybe by “some” they mean “I read this on a Real Estate website.  Therefore, somebody somewhere out there must have actually purchased a home as a gift.  Given that my income is about five percent of what it was in 2005, I will suggest almost anything to increase it in hopes that there is at least one suggestible person out there sitting on carloads of cash.”

Well, sure, this is a Bay Area real estate website, and we did indeed suggest buying a homes as a gift.  Whether these agents understood we were using the literary technique of humorous exaggeration to make a point is one of life’s eternal mysteries.

This is an Open Thread.  How many houses are you planning to purchase as gifts?  Are they all in the Real Bay Area?