If you were buying a used car, wouldn’t you check it out on Kelly’s Blue Book or Cars.com?
Then why do you expect your buyers and sellers to make a decision about the most important transaction of their lives based upon months-old real estate data from thousands of transactions as far as 30 miles away?
Anybody can parrot the latest national or regional Case Shiller or NAR data, but making home buying decisions based upon after-the-fact disconnected mish-mash metrics is like calling off tomorrow’s picnic based on yesterday’s national weather forecast.
Sorry, but there is no Blue Book for houses.
If you want to find out the value of a property without an appraisal (and if you haven’t had problems with an appraisal, you haven’t been in the business long enough), then you need to get the most hyper local data you can get. Unfortunately, the more hyper local you go, the harder it is to get good data.
Until now…
Until now. Big Data has arrived in real estate. After years and years of gathering information from MLSs, appraisals, mortgage applications, closings, and assessments, we have reached a point where good hyper local data is getting better and better – more current, more accurate, more useful.
Not only is all real estate is local, every property is unique, which means its value is distinct from its neighbor. When the comp down the road sells for an inflated or deflated price, it may or may not change in value simply because an AVM says it should. One new service, from Weiss Residential Research, allows you to find the current value of any of 50 million homes in the US and get a forecast of its near-term direction.
If you want to stop reading because this is beginning to sound like economics, statistics, or serious math, bear with me.
The single fact I want to convey is that today there are new tools – and tomorrow there will be better tools – that will help you drill down to the subdivision level or even the house-specific level to provide values and near-term forecasts. With a click or two of your mouse, you can create listing presentations, CMAs, and marketing pieces that sing.
One popular example is Smart Charts from RealEstate Business Intelligence, a subsidiary of the MRIS listing service. Smart Charts drills down to the subdivision level to produce charts, graphs and tables that you and pop right into a PowerPoint presentation. It’s only available through MLSs.
What consumers really want in their agent:
For years, NAR has published an amazingly authoritative survey called the Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. For years it has reported that one of the top qualities consumers are looking for in a real estate agent is knowledge of the real estate market. When a buyer or seller asks, “How’s the Market?” they cut to the heart of one of the qualities most clients really want in an agent today: rock solid knowledge of current local market trends backed up with hard statistics, not blog chat or open house anecdotes.
Think about it this way: If you were a corporate executive managing the biggest financial transaction in your life, wouldn’t you expect to see some high quality, extremely hyper-local charts and graphs (and a solid discussion about what they mean) from the company you hire to quarterback the deal?
One thing’s for sure: If you can’t explain your market with hard, current local data there surely is a competitor out there who can.
#RealEstateDataToday
Steve Cook is editor and co-publisher of Real Estate Economy Watch, which has been recognized as one of the two best real estate news sites in the nation by the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Before he co-founded REEW in 2007, Cook was vice president of public affairs for the National Association of Realtors.
