No, this is not a book review of David Lereah's Book.  I've not even read it yet, but from what I've seen on-line it does look good.  I'm ordering it from Amazon tomorrow.

I was inspired to write this post by a guy named Kevin. He wrote the only negative comments on my blog post from yesterday about the 30 States that had Positive Changes over the last year!

His comments got under my skin a little.  I knew he was wrong about a great many things, but he made me think.  Mainly I was thinking about how to prove him wrong or to argue my points well, but I actually had to think about it.

One of the things that he threw at me was:  Just like when the pollyannas try to silence the realists with the message "all real estate is local".  -  I really didn't have to think about that one.  It is so clearly a true statement that I only had to look up data to prove him wrong... The argument was easy.  There are markets that are good and there are markets that are bad in every State.  There always have been and there always will be.  They will always be changing.

The media has been reporting the troubles of the real estate industry and they should.. It is newsworthy.  However, the stories I've seen/heard/watched almost all seem to make it look like the housing market is bad everywhere.  Its not, of course.  But, that's the message that has been reported.

I've not seen a national story that says anything "More than half of the States had Real Estate Prices Go Up over the last year" (which is true).

When I was responding to Kevin, I looked up his State, Virginia, in the 2nd Quarter 2008 OFHEO House Price Index just released this week.  Virginia is the perfect example of "all real estate is local."  There are 8 Metropolitan Statistical Areas covering areas of Virginia in the report. 4 of them had price increases, 4 had price decreases over the last year.  The worst market in the State of Virginia had a pretty bad year, ranking 250th of the 292 areas measured.  However, in the same State of Virginia, the Kingsport-Bristol-Bristol market was the 14th Best of the same 292 areas measured.  Virginia is a pretty small state geographicly, but to have such a huge range of market conditions within that same small State clearly demonstrates the message "All Real Estate Is Local."