I started to read this fascinating book last fall after seeing many posts about it on Active Rain. I immediately saw so many ideas for blogging that I started to plan a series of posts based on the book. Then I ran into the freight train known as the end-of-the-year. Now I'm back to it, and I've finally read the last two chapters today. I'm not sure I'll do the humungous series I had originally intended, but I plan to do a few posts over the next few days with highlights from the book that are related to real estate.

The book is Microtrends and its author is Mark Penn, Washington D.C. business and political consultant and current advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign. (Don't stop reading; the book is not a political diatribe.) The central thesis of Microtrends is that society is changing in ways that few people appreciate or understand; that a look at the numbers suggests that people should look at the numbers more often. According to Penn, most observers are missing the fact that trends with vast potential for impact on society involve less than 1% of the population. By the time they hit 1 percent, the trends are "ready to spawn a hit movie, best-selling book, or new political movement."

Penn hits on something important to us as real estate professionals in his introduction. While the U.S. population growth has slowed to less than 1 percent, the number of household formations has "exploded" - almost 115 million people were heads of households in 2006 versus only 80 million in 1980. The percentage of households consisting of one person living alone increased from 17 percent in 1970 (when my mother, living alone, was an oddity) to 26 percent in 2003. The proportion of married-with-kids households has fallen to less than 25 percent.  

Who instead are the homebuyers? I'll cover that tomorrow.

See how I'm tying this reading into my real estate marketing efforts by reading this post: Why So Many Statistics?

Here is Mr. Penn's website and blog about the book: Microtrending.com