The Value of a Market Report
It’s been a few months now since I began writing real estate market reports for my local area. Now I do them on a weekly and monthly basis, keeping the weekly reports brief and expanding on the monthly ones.
I realized as I was doing last week’s report, that I now have an entire collection of market reports for Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Since I’ve been including the link to the previous week’s report at the bottom of each of these blogs, it is easy to pull up months-worth of these statistics side by side in tabs on a web page. And why is this significant (in my opinion)? Because you can then compare them and see TRENDS. Anyone, not just a real estate agent, can pull up these reports side by side and very quickly learn about the real estate market in this area. Even my Dad who lives in North Carolina can have intelligent conversations with me on the phone discussing my market area because he reads these reports that I've written. (p.s. Dad, thanks for reading!)
The first few reports I’ll admit took quite a bit of time. And even though it takes far less time now that I’ve created my own template, I’ve considered how it might be nice to have a partner who would take on this responsibility occasionally when things are busier. But having someone else write these reports would take away their value to me. The simple act of researching these numbers, then writing the report—and realizing the TRENDS—is all too important an act to hand off to someone else.
By doing these reports myself on a weekly and monthly basis, I have truly become the expert on my local market data. I know exactly what’s going on in real estate in my area because I’ve committed to learning.
Many of you here on Active Rain already do market reports for your areas on a regular basis. So this blog is to encourage those of you who aren’t doing them yet to give them a try! In my opinion, it’s time well-invested for both you and your clients.
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