Real estate broker Jim Klinge visits an incomplete development in Carlsbad, Calif. He has become a notorious Internet chronicler of the real estate crash in northern San Diego County, where he has lived and worked for decades.

CARLSBAD, Calif. — 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 blogger, covering the real estate crash in northern San Diego County.

Rather than downplay the greed and excess that caused the region’s travails, he enjoys exposing it.

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 Web site, 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 could not 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 Association 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 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 percent annual home price appreciation in some neighborhoods, and arguing “sellers have gotten too optimistic and are pricing their houses WAY too high.”

Nowadays, Klinge said, his blog gets about 2,000 unique visitors a 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.

Lately, his videos have been picked up on Calculated Risk, an influential economics blog whose followers include Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Along with the house wreck videos, the site includes statistics on local home sales totals and price declines. Klinge has skewered brokers on the blog, calling them names like “clown” and “cherry-picking cheerleader” for not admitting that the housing market had tumbled. But he said no one has gotten upset enough to retaliate.

Klinge didn’t start out as the Hunter S. Thompson of real estate. He used to believe. In 1987, just three years into his career, Klinge had set up his own office in San Diego’s tony La Jolla area and was riding the rising real estate market. He was convinced home prices would keep soaring.

“Everybody wants to live in La Jolla,” he said, repeating what he and everyone else were saying then.

Klinge learned the hard way that even chic beach communities go down when the housing market tanks. “By the end of 1990, I could not find a buyer. I had no idea what to do, I had no history or experience” with a down market, Klinge said, “like a lot of agents today.”

He closed his office and became a mortgage broker. Arranging refinances got him through the 1990s real estate slump, and he returned to home-selling in 1995.

Klinge said the 1990 real estate downturn made him cautious as home prices skyrocketed in this decade. “I never got overly bubbleicious,” he said. His blog’s underlying theme, he said, has been this: “You can’t forget this is a regular business cycle. There are ups and downs, and you’ve got to plan for that.”

He knew the market was headed for a crash, he said, one day in July 2005, when a woman called about a house that Klinge was selling. “Up until that point, the only thing buyers wanted to know was how much over list they needed to offer. All of a sudden this lady was being critical of everything, the property, the price. I hung up the phone and told my wife, ‘It’s over,’” he said.

A few weeks later, he started blogging. His wife, Donna, who helps manage the family brokerage, was nervous. “He was really pushing the envelope with the blog, taking people on, naming names,” she said. “I took deep breaths; I didn’t know how it would turn out.”

She said she was shocked one day to see a photo on the blog of two young men sitting on the floor of a house with their wrists bound like prisoners. They had been squatting in a foreclosed house Jim was selling, and he had sneaked up on them as they slept and tied them up with plastic zip ties in a brazen citizen’s arrest.

But Donna, who began dating Jim when they were at California State University, Fullerton, in the early 1980s, had after 20 years of marriage grown accustomed to his provocative style. So far, he’s known when to stop pushing, both on the blog and with her and their two daughters, she said.

He also manages to keep things civil with his industry colleagues, a notoriously upbeat lot. Kris Berg, another San Diego County real estate broker who writes a blog as sweet as Klinge’s is sour, says Klinge “is a nice guy, a great guy.”

Klinge recently took a reporter along when he visited a house with Christine Liashek, 29, a first-time homebuyer. He did more warning than selling. She was drawn to a cozy, 1960s three-bedroom Carlsbad house with a swimming pool. It was just the size she and her husband — they have a dog but no children — were looking for. Standing in the living room, Liashek looked to Klinge for his opinion.

“That was the high school out there,” Klinge said, nodding his head toward the front door, “You’re going to have night football games, people parking here,” Klinge told her. “The baseball field’s out there, too. You’ll probably hear the batting practice.”

Liashek still liked the house enough to ask him to show it to her husband later. Then she asked him about a new home development nearby.

“I call it Foreclosure Ranch,” Klinge said. “The reputation concerns me. It’s probably the worst place in Carlsbad for foreclosures, and it’ll be hard to shake that,” he warned.

Liashek and her husband passed on the new development and the house near the high school.

But they’re still looking with Klinge. Unlike previous generations of homebuyers, who relied on their real estate agents to provide them with lists of homes to view, Liashek finds properties herself online and e-mails Klinge the addresses of houses she’s interested in. Klinge will let her know which ones aren’t worth a visit. “He’ll say this one’s under power lines, that one’s by the freeway, that one’s in a bad school district,” Liashek said.

“You do not have to waste your time going around in circles with Jim,” she said, “I really appreciate that honesty.”

But don’t expect other agents to start bad-mouthing one another’s houses and tying up teenagers.

Or even, Klinge says, highlighting the risks in a shaky market.

“They’re chicken,” Klinge said.