Real estate is local.
If you did a search for that phrase on ActiveRain I bet you would get tens of thousands of results. It's a mantra in the real estate business. Anyone who has been doing this for any amount of time has heard this phrase and anyone (from a consumer's perspective) worth doing business with knows this to be a fact.
So why then does the National Association of REALTORS® roll out the esteemed Lawrence Yun every year with a bunch of predictions about the national real estate market? Who do these predictions impact? Wall Street or Main Street?
ActiveRain members are dealing with Main Street. And on Main Street, real estate is local.
Mr. Yun has forecast that existing home sales will edge up 1% in 2012. Where will this happen? In every city across the country? Of course not. Some cities will continue to experience sales declines while others will experience sales increases much greater than 1%. A broad national number does none of us living on Main Street any good. It just doesn't.
So who better to give predictions about local housing markets across the country than local real estate professionals? We say no one, not even NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun.
We would love if you would consider taking the time to participate in our 2012 'Hot or Not' Real Estate Survey. If you are a member of ActiveRain, we will give you 500 points for the opportunity to hear how you think the market is going to play out in 2012.
Of course we want your opinion.....but possibly even more important is the opinion of your peers. Not because their opinion is more important that yours, but because the more responses we get, the more representative the survey becomes. We would love if you would consider sharing this survey with others in your office or in your local boards.
As we compile and release the results, there will no doubt be media opportunities for many of our members that choose to take the survey. But we need to get to that tipping point in each market before the results have validity. So take the survey yourselves and please think about sharing it with others.
Real Estate is local and no one is more qualified to make local predictions than local real estate professionals.
(click below for the survey)
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