Once again I turned on my computer (atually, it’s a computer that Brian let me borrow until the insurance company replaces mine) and in my news feeder there’s a new article about how bad the housing market is. OK, the article is about NAR’s latest home sales statistics, which indicate that prices are dropping and homes sales have slowed to the most desperate pace since they started keeping the statistics in 1999.

While I’m sure all of their research and numbers are accurate, and it’s true that the housing market has slowed, these national housing numbers are mostly irrelevant to you and me, or the guy down the street who’s selling his house.

To say that prices are down 5.7% this month, or that sales are off 20% year over year is misleading. It’s like saying that it’s 55 degrees and partly cloudy in the United States right now. There just isn’t a national real estate market. It’s a very localized business.

Your neighborhood may be worse off than the national average, or it may be doing better. Like the weather, it depends where you’re at. It’s always 5-10 degrees cooler on the Castro Valley side of the hill than it is in Pleasanton. When it’s warm in the East Bay, it tends to be foggy and cold in the City. You know how it goes. And so does the real estate market. While Pleasanton and San Ramon are holding-up well, markets like Tracy and Hayward are languishing.

There’s a lot to say on the markets, bt my point this morning is that these national statistics that the media runs around with really need to be taken with a grain of salt. If you want to know what’s going on in your neighborhood, talk to a local expert. And if you’re trying to figure out what to wear today, don’t use the satellite image of the entire country, get a local forecast!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.