If you're looking for information about both national and local real estate activity, Trulia is a great resource. There are two separate areas on the Trulia home page for trend data -- (1) Trulia Trends and (2) Heat Maps.
Trulia Trends compiles ten-city lists in these categories:
- Most Popular (based on property views)
- Price Movers (top five increases in median price, and top five decreases in median price)
- Search Movers (top five cities with the biggest increase or decrease in search activity)
- Foreclosures (top ten from RealtyTrac)
Heat Maps provide a visual representation of pricing and popularity for everything from the entire nation right down to the neighborhood level. The state data includes average listing price, median sales price, and a Trulia search popularity rank.
When you run a Heat Map at the city level, Trulia provides a great list of data by neighborhood including average listing price, average sales price, median sales price, price per square foot, and a search popularity rank. Clicking on a neighborhood name will take you to a detailed page with historic trends, current listings, school info, community info and more. Here's an example of a heat map for Henderson, NV:

If you need to do some quick research on an area and are looking for a good mix of data and visual presentation, give Trulia a try. You might gain some valuable perspective that could translate to better service for your clients and improved results for your real estate business in 2008.
It's been awhile since I've been to the site but I was not really impressed in the past. Values in our area were really misrepresented and quite a bit off. This was a bit after they debuted so perhaps it's a bit more accurate now. Good reminder for me to visit the site again. Thanks for the post.