Sunday, February 10, 2008
This morning, we awoke to find thousands and thousands of people coming to the site. The Sunday edition of The Washington Post included a very nice column about our company and our site. Interestingly, lots of people seem to read that paper.
We had more traffic in a few hours than in the past few days, and our technology platform was creaking under the load. Our servers were doing just fine, but we were bumping up against some hard bandwidth limitations. We just didn't have fat enough pipes from the Internet to our servers. So the site seemed slow -- which is too bad after spending months making it as fast as possible!
We were able to take some action today to mitigate the problem -- mostly moving static files like images off to another server using a different connection. But after 12 hours of very-high-volume, we are still playing catch-up. It's somewhat like changing your tire while driving at 55 mph.
In addition to the site being hammered, we had to bring all hands on deck to answer phones and live chat requests.
Obviously, we are delighted that the Post (and columnist Elizabeth Razzi) took the time and trouble to write about us. It appears that she did a considerable amount of research on both the site and our business model, and we are grateful she had so many nice things to say. We will try our best to live up to them.
(And if you thought the site seemed slow today, it should be back on its feet quickly. We hope you'll give us another chance.)
Friday, February 08, 2008
When the US House of Representatives passed the “stimulus package” a few weeks back, most reports focused on the $300-1200 tax rebates that Americans would get in their mailboxes later in the year. At the time, an important piece of the legislation went under-reported. The bill proposed to raise the conforming limit--the maximum loan size Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac can buy--from $417,000 to $729,750.
In the weeks since, especially among those in the real estate industry, word of this change began to spread; it became more widely reported in the media as well. But the specifics of the bill were not well-presented. The change would raise the new limit to no more than 125% of the median price in certain “high-cost” areas, with a maximum of $729,750.
In fact, the Senate just yesterday approved a bill with the same provision. It was quickly approved by the House and is expected to be signed into law by the President quickly.
The HUD Secretary is to determine within 30 days what the median home prices (and therefore new conforming loan limits) are for each “area”. The only wildcard is: how will he define an “area?” The most likely answer is by MSA; median home price data by MSA is readily available and well-known.
Here’s the problem, and the thing most commentators missed in the initial excitement about the new limit: very few places in the country would enjoy the new $729,750 maximum. Because many MSAs are very broadly defined--they include many outlying counties far beyond the city core--their median home prices are surprisingly low.
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