"It is no surprise that Florida has the largest number of excess vacant units and that Nevada has the largest percentage of excess vacant units. What might be a surprise to some is that California is below the U.S. average."

This is not to say that local homeowners are off the hook. In Ann Arbor, which I studied for my masters thesis, I think they deserved a good bit of blame on some occasions. In many cases former students, when they become homeowners, shift their alliances and values, something we see especially when students of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s reaped the benefits of urban deindustrialization as students with cheap housing and of urban revitalization as homeowners with rising property values.

"I am listening to a presentation at the Homer Hoyt meetings on the condo meltdown in South Florida. Developers planned on building 95,000 units in the city of Miami between 2002 and 2007. In the 2000 census, the whole city had 163,000 units."

"These could be investors buying REOs for cash flow, condo "reconversions", builders changing the intent of new construction (started as condos but became rentals), flippers becoming landlords, or homeowners renting their previous homes instead of selling.

As Scott Monroe noted, this huge surge in rental supply - what he calls the "gray or shadow market" - has pushed down rents, and pushed the rental vacancy rate to record levels. Yes, people are doubling up with friends and family during the recession, and some renters are now buying again, but the main reason for the record vacancy rate is the surge in supply. Eventually many of these "gray market" rentals will be sold as homes again - keeping the existing home supply elevated for years."

"It’s only natural that you’re asking how the hell we wound up in this mess. Why did a bubble inflate in commercial real estate? Why are smaller banks so disproportionately exposed? What caused this catastrophe?

Fortunately, we figured it out for you."

"We can see the problem we face by looking at the continued silo-ization of instant messaging. Check out this list of instant messaging protocols. It’s a mess because so many of the commonly-used platforms are still, in 2009, private silos. Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. With tweeting we do have interop, and that’s why tweeting has taken off while IM stays stagnant. XMPP helped a lot (it’s why you can see Google IMs in Adium, for example). But we don’t have NEA with Twitter, and that’s why tweeting is starting to stagnate, and developers like Dave are working on getting past it."

"As NMHC chief economist Obrinsky noted, it is common in a recession for apartment vacancies to rise, as households double up by moving in with a friend or family member. However an added factor in this recession is all the single family homes being offered as rentals. This is additional competition for apartments and might also be impacting demand for apartments."

"It's a no-brainer that financial firms would be hit by the commercial real estate downturn."

"Sam Zell is widely regarded as one of the savviest value investors around. The fact that Zell, an old hand in real estate, was cashing out was widely seen as the sign of a market top."

Scary. Scarier than you think.