bostonbubble.com

[JAP]

What's the point of a thread with this title? The same thing happens EVERY time one starts. The people who do not own, looking to buy a house, and are currently renting come on here and spew info/facts that support ONLY why the housing market will continue to decrease and not to buy.

The people who own, are in the process of buying, or have a direct vested interest in the RE market doing well (Realtors, mortgage brokers, etc) come on here and spew info/facts that support why housing will not go down much further if at all, give reasonings why you should buy now, and say why housing is still as great of an investment as it was pre bubble era. There are MANY less of these people here.

So IMO almost everyone's posts on here have a significant bias so to me it doesn't really give me much useful info. For the record I am in the process of purchasing a home but think it's still best to wait to buy to see what happens in late fall. Unless you can find a steal...

[Kaidran]

Well this is bostonbubble.com so you might expect a majority of people to think that houses are overpriced. I think we are all agreed that predicting the future impossible. It is just interesting to hear what other people are thinking about the market and why.

I am curious what people think about Boston ITers opinion of tech jobs in Boston for the next few year, especially because that is all that is keeping me here.

[Boston ITer]

[Kaidran]

I guess I'm with JAP then. It you knew everyones motivation to begin with why start the thread?

[JCK]

[Boston ITer]

Well, aren't you a bit curious about why only Balor and I seem to think that the non-health care white collar job market in this town is sloping downward?

Everyone else seems to be on the bandwagon of 'what goes down always comes back up'.

[JAP]

[Kaidran]

I am very curious about jobs in Boston, I just dont have any answers. My company (Biotech) seems to be doing very well but I dont like my chances of finding another if they started any layoffs.

JCK: people predicting PO have been wrong about dates, but not about discoveries. I think you are right that there is a huge amount of waste that we can eat into if capacity drops. I sincerely hope you are right about limited impact.

[JCK]

[GenXer]

Don't take any predictions seriously. One can be optimistic, yet bet on housing prices to fall. If there is anything certain is that interest rates are going up, in a year or in 2 or in 5. They may be going up a little or a lot, depending on what's happening. The dynamic will be different howerver - it is very much possible to maintain a 10% unemployment for years, and inflation may be coming in terms of higher oil prices (and most likely not higher housing prices). However, again, too much push and pull and grey areas. Anything can set off another avalanche of a crisis. This is what I'm willing to put all my money on - we'll definitely have a crisis in the future. But again, buying a house in Tx with cash (or at least, putting up a good chunk of it in cash) will certainly beat anything one can buy in Boston when the interest rate rises. Savers will win on this one - higher rates certainly mean lower prices in Boston, and given that there is a very high chance that the rates will INCREASE, I'd say there is also a very high chance that the prices will fall in the future, or at least not rise (again, depending on where we look - I'm thinking Boston). Again, we don't know by how much, and it is also not a given that prices will necessarily fall when interest rates rise, but one can be sure that in areas where the prices are very high there will be much more pressure on prices to fall.

But to anybody buying a house in Boston right now this is almost a wash - just like a bond whose price falls when interest rises, buying a house thats 20% overpriced now with a low rate may mean the same thing as buying a house that's 20% lower in price but with a higher interest rate to compensate. However, as I said before, those who save and put down more than 20% will definitely have an advantage when interest rates rise. Thus, one way to play this real estate market is to wait and save - in the long run, not only will you win because you rent, but you'll definitely have the opportunity to buy a house when nobody else wants to buy because of high interest rates. Again, we don't know how much they'll rise, and when, but rise they will.

[admin]

What about the decline of the US dollar as the world's sole reserve currency? I think that would change a lot of things here, such as our ultra low interest rates, our ability to run massive federal deficits, and our bubble driven economy in general. Does anybody have any thoughts on how a shift away from the USD could be triggered and/or what system might replace it as the main reserve currency?

- admin

[balor123]

The Boston job market is very lopsided. If you are looking for Enterprise/B2B business, then you'll find plenty of them. If you are looking for semiconductor jobs, then you won't find them. Boston had a strong semiconductor presence 10 years ago but it's now all moved to Austin and Silicon Valley.

I have been passively job hunting for the last few months and it doesn't look good in either CS/EE. A lot of those startups are too squishy for an engineer to consider - lots of businessy people and maybe a few low skill low pay programmers. I don't know about Biotech but I hear it hasn't been doing well for a while. We've got some web startups like Seattle but at some point that will fissle like in the first web boom. It's hard to tell how many people are still working here because most of the companies just aren't hiring.

Aside from Adobe, I don't hear about big companies setting up large shops here anymore. As I discovered in another post, Boston does have a lot of VC but like I mentioned it isn't going everywhere. Looking at VC investments recently there's a few general categories that I see, which might be representative of where the jobs will be in the future: Biotech, squishy companies, web startups, and companies outside Boston. Surprisingly, I didn't run into as many MIT startups as I thought there were. Many of these are started by serial entrepreneurs left over from the 80s/90s boom and most of them will be retiring in the next few years, leaving just the recent grads to do the startups (a lost generation by a Boston VC). Surprisingly, for all that I read in MHT, there weren't many alternative energy / smart grid companies either. Anyway, I don't think those companies generate many jobs, despite being heavy on investment.

[Boston ITer]

[Kaidran]

With new Biotechs I think the feeling is you succeed by getting bought. I don't think many start ups believe they will reach a public offering and none would actually become a viable company anymore. You can cash out by being one of the few people that started it but you are probably going to be looking for a new job soon after you have explained your technology to the purchasing company.

[Boston ITer]