I can’t believe it has already been 1 year since we started the Irvine Housing Blog. A lot has changed in that time: lending standards have tightened, OC inventory has continued to pile up, OC builders have reduced their pricing, foreclosures have picked up, sales have slowed down, 160 major US lending operations have “imploded”, and the US Dollar has set record lows.
Although not as drastic as what has happened to the housing market, IHB has gone through a number of changes as well. ISM and I began this without knowing whether anyone would be interested in what we were going to write. Lucky for us, two sites that provided our inspiration (OC Fliptrack RIP and Bubble Tracking), linked to us and that really got things moving.
Take a look at our stats:
We went from less than 50,000 pageviews in October 2006 to over 550,000 pageviews in August 2007. Do a Google search for ‘housing blog’ and IHB is the 5th site (6th link) listed! There are a few items on this chart I’d like to point out (1, 2, and 3):
- The IHB Forums were launched on January 2, 2007. What began with a slow start eventually turned into a very active and knowledgable community. We have 525+ members, 940+ threads, and 17,000+ comments and every day these numbers continue to grow. There is a wealth of information here ranging from Irvine tract and village information to discussions about architecture and design to threads devoted to wine and beer. The forums also gave rise to our IHB T-shirts (thanks Nude!). More recently, we implemented a live chat (thanks Caycifish!) that has proven to be quite popular.
- Irvine Renter joined the IHB team with his first post on February 27, 2007 and he’s been simply incredible! Although I realized he knew his stuff, I was still surprised by the sheer volume and depth of topics that he has educated all of us on. He has taken this blog to another level and we’ve received tons of positive feedback from people who have enjoyed and benefited from his writings (especially his analysis posts). The community profiles that he has written clearly show his love for the City of Irvine; take a look at the beautiful pictures and you may discover a park or tract that you weren’t aware of before.
- An article by Daniel Gross of slate.com linked to IHB on July 26, 2007. The article was syndicated in the Washington Post and Newsweek/MSNBC and brought some great national exposure to our site.
Many thanks to ISM, graphrix, and socalhousingbubble for their solid contributions. In addition to the main blog posts, there have been numerous blog comments that have provided insight into the feature properties. An interesting stat is that our spam blocker has caught 20,072 spam comments as of this moment. I also want to thank Redfin and our other site sponsors for their support!
Thanks everyone for a fantastic year! All of your contributions are what has made this site become what it is. What’s next? We want to keep the momentum going and we’ve got some ideas for the site that we are planning to implement soon. As always, we’re happy to listen to your suggestions on how to bring more value to our readers.
Go IHB!
