I agree, I'd love the delete option, or the closed thread option mentioned above. I've had success emailing Kurt and asking for my "wanted: real estate" thread to be deleted last year after I found something, and he deleted it for me, which I appreciated. I understand though why he might not want to give delete button control to the public to use, as it helps the potential revenue of any website to have more original content vs. less (especially for SEO/Google). And aside from the For Sale and real estate/rental posts, I like being able to learn from old threads about local happenings and culture. Helps as a newer resident.
Two more things I'd love to see:
- perhaps a sticky helping short term summer residents understand the market and housing options. The posters looking for summer housing to work at Seaside/Watercolor who want to pay per month what housing rents in a week clearly have no grasp of the market, and could benefit from a primer to adjust expectations. (Sometimes I'm concerned about college math and analytic skills since they know high season pays their paycheck, but they are looking for low season - or lower, even perhaps in dreamland - rates.) I'm encouraged to see so many individual room rentals this year though, as that gives students a realistic option to meet their budget needs.
- I wish some realtors would realize that sales-y, super-repetitive posting in this type of forum (specifically the main real estate section) can actually turn off prospective buyers. We all have access to emeraldcoasthomesonline (dot) com to see the regular MLS listings. I like to come to this board to to interact as a community to learn about neighborhoods and see things not in the regular pipe stream (ie for sale by owner) or open house notices. But I do not come to scroll through professional third-party sales ads repeatedly; it kinda seems like SoWal/Kurt should be paid for overt third party advertisement posts that are not a direct buyer-to-buyer transaction/search. (Realtors have to buy that type of ad space in other 30a media outlets.)
