I have been pouring over posts for the last hour and there is one kind of post that just confuses the heck out of me. It's the infamous market report post. I have seen some fantastic market reports posted on ActiveRain in the last few years. There are a handful of people that I will actually stop and read a market report if they post it and I come across it. However, most of them fall into the 'very mundane' (common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative) category.
If I was the average Joe Plumber looking for information about housing in my home town, I can promise you that a blog post with a bunch of stats about average sales price, days on market, inventory levels and whatever other BORING garbage your MLS will automatically populate would not do anything for me. Why?
BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW WHAT THOSE NUMBERS MEAN!
You are the real estate professional (supposedly). Do me, the consumer, a favor and INTERPRET the data for me. Take those numbers and make some sense of them. Tell me what inventory level means in relation to me buying or selling a house.....why? Because I don't know the difference between 50 days on market and 100 days on market. Anybody with access to the MLS can pull those reports up and copy and paste them into a blog. Not anyone can interpret the data and make it worth me looking at.
How would you feel if you walked into your financial advisors office and he/she took out a bunch of excel graphs and said, "here you go, good luck figuring out what to buy, but if I were you I'd really pay attention to this market cap number right here". It's almost laughable yet day after day I see real estate professionals posting market stats with no explanation of what they mean.
The only thing I can figure is that you withhold the explanation in hopes that someone will be so awed by your magical statistics that they will immediately pick up the phone and call you for your expert opinion. Do yourself and them a favor and just give them the explanation while you have them on your post. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe withholding the explanation is helping drive call volume, but it seems far fetched to me. If I land on your post today, the chances I am in the market to buy today are not very high. Most likely I just started getting really interested in the market but I am still a ways off of purchasing. But if you were to give me good solid information that I could understand and present it in a fashion that made me think you knew what you were doing above and beyond you know where the control+c and the control+v button are, there is a great chance I'll be coming back to see what you think next month and the month after until I am ready to buy.
As consumers have access to unparalleled amounts of information your position as professional is incumbent upon you being able to INTERPRET that information for them.
Please Please Please interpret your boring stats for me!
(I'm sending an ActiveRain T-shirt to the next three people that send me a link to a market report post that I could actually learn something from as a consumer because the shirt says 'your personal real estate think tank' and not 'good luck trying to figure out what the *&$# I'm talking about')
(rant over.......I'm going home to start my vacation)
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