Another Tool to Know Your Market

No one knows for sure exactly where the real estate market is going… after all we all know real estate markets are local. One city’s rents or home values may be trending up and another not too far away are trending down. Knowing what the market you are working in is critical to making a profitable investment. You need to have an arsenal of tools that you use that give you information (data) from which you draw your own conclusions about what is happening and what it means. Reading articles about real estate will often allow you to uncover additional real estate information sources that you can plug into to get the most recent figures and statistics to make informed purchase or sale decisions. I am still a fan of my local newspaper (Sun Sentinel). It has has a number of excellent writers on business and real estate information. Paul Owers has been an great source to point me in the direction of research information.Not only do I get his report with facts and figures to back it up, but I get another educated and informed opinion of what that information means. I still make up my own mind… and you should too… but that opinion as well as the data source are invaluable in helping me make my own decisions. In an recent article, Paul Owers reported on data showing a stabilizing of home values in the past month in south Florida, but pointed out, based on his observation of a number of statistics that what he expected was more decline before the eventual bottoming out. One of the tools he used to make his analysis was the Standard and Poors Case Shiller HomePrice Index (Bam! a valuable tool!). Here is the article

. Here are my recommendations: Read writers you gain good information from. Book mark them, follow them, friend them. Get used to reading what they are saying and why they are saying it. Start collecting these valuable sources. Every time you uncover another data source, save it somewhere you can easily get to it. You will soon discover that you have an informed opinion about what is happening in your real estate market and why. Purchasing multifamily units or wholesale properties gets just a little easier because you have made yourself into an informed buyer.