Wow, this must be embarrassing

Like the privately held Bay area lender who shall hereafter remain nameless (don't ask), DataQuick President Marshall Prentice must not be liking what he sees when he Googles himself.

At first, a typographical error was suspected but, as it turns out, the spelling is correct. A search on "Marshall Prentice" returns a late-2005, not-so-flattering post from this blog in the number one spot.

Regarding Southern California, DataQuick President Marshall Prentice seems particularly intent on shaping public opinion about what the future holds:

"The big question is still whether or not the real estate market will end this cycle with a crash, or with a soft landing. Right now the latter scenario is still the most likely. Home values have doubled in the past four years and almost all, if not all, of those gains are here to stay," said Marshall Prentice, DataQuick president.

So, that second sentence is passable as sound analysis of the current situation - no evidence of anything crashing yet. But that third sentence is really very prescient, no? Divine omniscience? Didn't know that you had that in you Marshall - how else to explain stating as fact that an early 1990s style pull back in price levels is out of the question?

This post goes on at great length about a series of DataQuick articles, calculating "typical" mortgage payments, and a few other topics.

It's hard to believe that this is from 20 months ago and it still comes up as number one - it looks like Marshall needs a stronger "web presence" to knock stuff like this off of the first page.

That's one bad thing (or good thing, depending on how you look at it) about blogs and especially those hosted by a company such as Google where disk space is essentially unlimited - this stuff hangs around forever.

Admittedly, using DataQuick's median home price figures, Marshall's "almost all, if not all of those gains are here to stay" prediction is far from being wrong - SoCal median home prices are still rising, though you'd have a hard time convincing sellers of this.

The problem is that the housing slowdown is going on much, much longer than any of the optimists ever envisioned and the chances of that guarantee holding up fade a little more with each monthly report from DataQuick.

Ironically, in the most recent report on May sales, Marshall himself wonders why prices haven't fallen further.

"Sales have been dropping now for the last 20 months. The first part of that was just coming off the frenzy of 2004 and 2005 and didn't put that much downward pressure on prices. The sales declines of the last half year, though, will have more of an effect on prices. It's remarkable they haven't come down more than they have," said Marshall Prentice, DataQuick president.