Pest Control

From the Sacramento Bee:

Thousands of unsold and empty houses in the Sacramento region are fast becoming breeding grounds for mosquitoes. As the region's housing slump creates more vacant houses and a growing excess of homes in transition between buyers and sellers, Culex mosquitoes that can spread the West Nile virus to birds, other animals and humans are thriving in uncared-for swimming pools, garden ponds and yards flooded by broken sprinklers, said David Brown, manager of the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District.
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Sacramento Association of Realtors spokesman Greg Vlasek said there are 9,672 houses for sale in the mosquito district's Sacramento and Yolo counties coverage area alone. Nearly 1,400 have swimming pools.

The district is calling in a new cavalry in its war on mosquitoes: real estate agents. "As you show homes for sale or visit unoccupied properties, please assist us by reporting unmaintained swimming pools, ponds, fountains etc. to the district," states a letter being e-mailed to 6,500 agents today by the district and the Sacramento Association of Realtors.

Brown said the plea -- a first for the district -- follows growing numbers of complaints from Sacramento and Yolo county residents about algae-filled swimming pools, small kiddie pools, spas and ponds in their neighborhoods.
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The glut of houses that are empty or for sale is aggravating what's already expected to be an earlier West Nile virus season than last year.
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As real estate agents add mosquito patrol to their duties, there are more than 14,000 homes for sale in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties...The rising number of foreclosures is also emptying out more houses in the capital region...Add to that a large but unknown number of empty houses owned by investors.

From 60 Minutes (also video):

For realtors, the six percent commission is sacrosanct. It's remained in place, even as the price of homes has quadrupled over the past 25 years. But as correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, things are beginning to change. What happened to travel agents, stock brokers and book sellers – the encroachment of the Internet – is beginning to affect real estate agents. And the sacred six percent is under assault from online discounters.
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Glenn Kelman may look like a bike messenger, but he’s an Internet entrepreneur, the president and CEO of Redfin. "Real estate, by far, is the most screwed up industry in America," he says. "And we feel like things that Amazon or eBay or Yahoo have done of other industries, we can do for the real estate industry."

From freeerisa.net:

The portal to this information is a network of blogs created by individuals who are not trained economists but are passionate about housing. These bloggers have growing conviction that a historic bubble in U.S. housing has just begun to deflate. With the help of thousands of readers who add content daily, they report real estate transactions and trends straight from their local markets – from the bottom up. A myriad of observations and contributions, continuously filtered through the Bubble Blogosphere, form a mosaic that may become a model for a new school of populist economic research.
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The Bubble Blogosphere is attracting a growing audience of people who share values that are mainstream, not extreme. Bloggers and their fans believe the housing bubble was created by excessive speculation, easy credit, greedy mortgage companies, and many gullible or careless buyers. In their view, people should not buy houses they can’t afford, debts eventually must be repaid, governments should not bail out borrowers, and flippers get what they deserve.