How many times have representatives from different title companies brought their fancy charts and graphs to your office?  You know the charts and graphs that I'm referring too.   These are those charts and graphs that are suppose to reflect current market conditions.  They look very professional, don't they.  Let me ask you this.  Have you ever checked those numbers to see how accurate they really are?

It's nice that the title representatives do these things for the Realtors.  But if they are going to go the trouble to go through all this work, it would be nice if they would verify the accuracy of the reports.

Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.  We received a report from a Title Company yesterday comparing June of 2007 sales to June of 2008 sales.  This report was for different cities in both San Bernardino and  Riverside counties of Southern California.  The Big Bear valley was broken down by area.  Well, the first thing that caught my eye was that of all of the areas listed in the Big Bear Valley, Sugarloaf showed the largest drop in property value.  According to this report, homes in the Sugarloaf area dropped 48.98%!

Just like the picture in this blog, I sat here and scratched at my head.  I know the Sugarloaf area very well. I know what's for sale in that community as well as what has sold.  The numbers in this report just didn't match up with what I know to be going on in Sugarloaf, so I did some checking.

Big Bear has it's own Multiple Listing Service.  There was a time when most everything for sale in Big Bear was in our MLS.  With all of the bank owned (REO) properties coming on the market, that has changed.  But for the purpose of this blog, we will use data pulled from the Big Bear Multiple Listing Service.

The report from the title company shows that there were 11 Sugarloaf homes sold in June of 2008.  As I previously mentioned, this report showed a drop of 48.98% in home value. 

When I checked the numbers against the Big Bear Multiple listing Service, I found that there were only 8 sales in Sugarloaf in June of 2008.  That isn't to far off the Title company's report of 11  But they reported a drop in home values of 48.98%.  When I ran the numbers based off of the 8 properties that sold and did the comparisons, I found a 21% drop in values when comparing June of 2007 to June 2008.  That's a big difference!

My point to this blog is this.  When you get these reports from a title representative, or anyone else, check them out.  If the numbers don't look right, then check them out!  The last thing you want to do as a Realtor is to be quoting statistics to your client that are not accurate.  This isn't going to help your credability.  So again I say.  Check these reports out when you get them!