I posted the lower part of this blog on Nov. 1 and with the new group, thought I'd bring it back to life with a face-lift.

I recenlty finished reading Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love House, a book by Marjorie Garber, and it was an interesting concept. But a bit over-blown. The basic premise is that as the baby-boomers have aged they've replaced their sexual fantasies with possessions - in her explanation - its real estate. While I'm not up on the theoretical side of the discussion, her stories and discussions were easy to follow and fit well into the concept.

My problem with the concept is that you could replace virutally any high-prized possession - for example a car - with real estate in this book and probably have arrived at the same conclusions. Buying a multi-million dollar house or a Bentley would provide the same emotional satisfaction for the buyer.

Posted on Nov. 1: 

I recently started reading Marjorie Garber's Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses. It just seemed to combine two of most male real estate agents top interests.

The book was written in 2000 and is an analysis of how as people age, real estate has replaced sex as their "secret obsession."

"Though looking for real estate may be stressful, looking at it can be incredidbly alluring. High-end real estate circulars arriving daily in the mail are like Playboy (or, indeed like the aptly named Penthouse), with opulent, expensively produced centerfolds. Where the Playmate of the Month is always airbrushed to perfection, the Playhouse of the Month poses, perfectly, on an impossibly green lanw against an eternally blue sky in a fou-color, glossy, heavyweight, fancy, magazinelike atalogue. (Garber, 15)"

She goes through the stages of our love of houses -- and they are eerily similar to those of love, lust, and marriage. Don't want to divorce your wife so you can have that "trophy wife", then according to Garber you are more likely to have a "trophy house" to fulfill that fantasy. Now I'm not all the way through the book, so I won't pretend to understand the whole thing.

But, I have to admit it wasn't jiving for me. I know that people that enjoy real estate but as much as sex?

Hence the reason for the graph above, there are more blogs indexed through IceRocket.com with "real estate" than are blogged with the term "sex". Stop. Digest that. It took me a few minutes as well.

But, now is this proof? Well, kind of but then there are loops.

• How many blogs about sex are being pinged to IceRocket? Sure there is quite a bit of traffic, but I don't know that all those "free adult sites" are pinging their RSS feeds through to other sources.
• Not all blogs that are talking about sexual activities will use the word "sex". But then, the same could be said about "real estate". But then, I think there are more real estate agents writing about real estate than call-girls -- and we are looking to build search engine relevence, so we are adding all those "keywords" in each of the posts.
• This is a single site, so I could go to another blog search directory and the results could be completely switched.

Regardless, I thought it made for some interesting discussion.