If you've caught the news in the last few days, you've heard that new home sales were up nationally in July. If you read your local newspaper, (in the Annapolis Real Estate Market, that will likely be "The Washington Post" or "The Capital"), you'll learn that despite the month over month rise, new home sales are down 10.2 percent from July of last year. And if you were listening to the TV or radio news really closely, you may have heard that while new home sales were up nationally, they were down in the northeast.
Confusing as that may be to all of us, how do you think your clients interpret this information and what it means when listing and selling or purchasing a new home?
What does it really mean at the local market level?
In order to understand that, you need to dig deeper and look at sales at the county and even zip code level. So where do you find this information? Your local MLS service provides the information if you know where to look, but the average home owner/buyer doesn't have ready access.
Therefore, one of the most important services we as agents can provide our clients is to put our local housing markets in context. By carefully reviewing the numbers: sales, listings, sale price to list price ratios, median sales price and comparing the changes from month to month and year to year, we can gain valuable insights into the housing market at the local level.
Coupling this with information regarding significant employment drivers, such as Military Base openings or closings, Fortune 500 expansions or contractions in your area and national trends in migration, will help you to better understand your local housing market.
You can then offer these insights, backed up with real data, to your clients in order to enable them to maximize the value of their real estate transactions, whether they are buying or selling. You can even offer them access to your compilation and analysis of the data which I do on our website www.aahomes4u.com if they are interested in the details.
Knowing these numbers and being able to speak about them confidently and knowledgably will mark you as a professional with your clients.
In a future Blog, (this is my first!) I'll discuss ways to analyze the numbers.
If you find this information useful, please subscribe to my Blog! With Thanks to Brad Carroll
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Hi Michael. Great post. By the way, you can make it even easier for people to subscribe to your blog by making the words "subscribe to my blog" be a direct link. I looked at the code and this is your personal subscription link you will need to use: http://activerain.com/action/blogs_admin/subscribe?subscribed_agent_id=53152