Beware The Agent That Thinks All Real Estate is Local!

Last week I put together a market analysis for a client in Milton (a local suburb in northern Atlanta) and I started looking at and thinking about how and why some of the sub-markets differ from each other and from Metro Atlanta as a whole and how they not only relate to each other, but, how they interrelate to other local real estate markets and therefore the national real estate market. As a real estate agent, I often read blog posts from other agents. Sometimes it's to learn, sometimes it's for entertainment while other times I am reading to try and spur an idea of my own so that I can write something myself. One theme I run across frequently is the real estate agent, who swears up and down that all real estate is local and they are the local expert and all we need is a period at the end of that sentence because they are the end all be all know-it-all. Period. I say nonsense.

I say that only a very naive or new real estate agent thinks all all real estate is local. I say that markets are interwoven more now than ever. Homes for sale in Atlanta and the housing market here is dependent on homes for sale in other cities around the country in a similar way that home sales in sub-markets of Atlanta affect and are affected by each other. Maybe relocation is more of a factor in some places than in others, but, if homes aren't selling in one area of the country, it's going to affect other areas by the time you compound that problem to a national level. I think it's true that there is little value in a median or average price of a home in the United States, but, new starts, sales volume and pricing trends on a national level are an integral part of a local real estate market.

Too often, I see the arrogant, know-it-all real estate agent in the office - or, more and more often on their personal soapbox they call a blog, extolling their virtues as the Yoda of real estate because they say that all real estate is local. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So, before you run off telling someone you think that all real estate is local, you might want to consider why second home sales on the beach may be affected by factors other than hurricanes or think about why someone can't relocate from Michigan because they can't sell their house to buy your listing or why the couple in Kansas who dreams of moving to San Francisco can't because homes are not affordable to them. these are legitimate factors that affect a local real estate market, but, they are not local factors.