The Hunter S. Thompson of real estate

Sometimes the truth hurts. Real estate salesman Jim Klinge doesn't care.

Cruising through the sunny hills of Carlsbad in a massive silver Mercedes-Benz, he looks like any other pitchman of the California dream.

But Klinge, 50, has become a notorious Internet chronicler of the real estate crash in north San Diego County, where he has lived and worked for decades.

Rather than downplay the greed and excess that caused the region's travails, he revels in exposing them.

He surveys the wreckage with a pocket video camera, shooting footage of vacant, once-pricey houses turned into eyesores, voiced over with his deadpan narration. Then he posts them on his website, at www.bubbleinfo.com.

They're shaky, noisy clips full of coarse images and language.

"Would you spend a million dollars for that house?" he says in one video, showing a two-story, boxy wreck with the rushing sound of a freeway in the background.

Why does he do it? To sell houses.

Klinge is a real estate broker, has been since 1984. He just doesn't act like one.

In the summer of 2005, Klinge says, he sensed the housing crash coming. He had been through the real estate downturn in the early 1990s and was wary that the red-hot market couldn't last.

But his real estate industry colleagues continued to declare that home values would keep soaring.

Most agreed with David Lereah, then the chief economist for the National Assn. of Realtors, who finessed the question of the market bubble this way: "I could think of froth as effervescence rather than some popping of bubbles," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2005.

Klinge heard the same thing from fellow brokers in San Diego. He felt that such talk emboldened buyers to take on more debt than they could afford and prompted sellers to ask too much for their houses, which would cost them time and money as their homes went unsold. He started blogging, his first post questioning the 20% to 30% annual home price appreciation in some neighborhoods, and arguing that "sellers have gotten too optimistic and are pricing their houses WAY too high."

Nowadays, Klinge said, his blog gets about 2,000 unique visitors per day. About half his clients now come to him from the blog, Klinge said. He closed 43 house deals last year, he said, down from the 61 sales and purchases he brokered in his peak year of 2004, but enough to keep him in business when many agents have quit.