Lately, I have noticed a lot of local Reno, Lake Tahoe and Carson City area Realtors and Real Estate offices are taking advantage of this statistics craze.  I think it is a good direction as Zillow and a few of the other ones are a total joke.  Zillow exists for one reason only; to make money off of ads.  I have researched many canned products but have yet to find anything as good as a human using various sources.

The problem with Zillow and even some Realtors comps is that they operate in the past.  In a declining market, the comps are too late, you must weigh the heaviest on actives as they tend to drop and not close for many months later.  Even 04-06, I had to rely on actives as it was the opposite scenario with an increasing market. 

It is funny to note however that both sellers and buyers will use Zillow to their advantage.  If Zillow has it lower than asking price, the buyers show up armed with that information.  The same is true for sellers if it is high.  Please, if you want some Reno real estate comps, just e mail me.  I won’t shake you down and call and e mail you afterward, we are just too busy to play that game.  People either work with an experienced Reno Realtor or not, that is their choice.

 Some of the other real estate statistic sites are;

Data Quick, they tend to be good as they use Fannie Mae and other loan recording stats as well as county which encompasses mls prices after it records.  It is a suscribor service, if you wade around, you can find some press releases sometimes in your area.  I have never paid them as a lot of the information is free on other sites.

Case Shiller/Standard and Poors; a similar model, it is a  measure of price movement according to area based on Fannie and Freddie loans.  The problem is, they only cover 20 markets of loans above 417K (jumbos).  Wall Street tends to look at this one.  It was developed by Karl Case and Robert Shiller.  It has limited coverage and for example, Reno may get a bad rap with them because of Las Vegas statistics.  It tends to get overstated on the upside and downside because of its broadness.  Don’t get me started on that overly speculated hot desert town that keeps hurting our stats by the way.

N.A.R., C.A.R. and N.A.H.B. are all trade related statistics that will tend to look for the positive trends.  These may be some numbers that I would throw at buyers for example.

Title companies can be great, ask for the customer service department.  Sometimes, they can get you a password for services such as fast web with First American.  These tend to be good stats as they are based on County Recorder information.  If you have a problem getting a password, I have some connections who can get it for you.

One that I refer to is the Ofheo index, it tends to be a model similar to Case Shiller; it relies on Freddie and Fannie loans but doesn’t monitor jumbo loans (417K+).  Like many of these models that rely on loans, they don’t cover owner financing, cash, wraps etc. which are becoming popular again with the credit crunch.

Another one that is worth mentioning is Hanley Wood, even though they are a paid service, they have a lot of free archives.  This is one that builders small and large will use as it is demographic and economic weighted.

One item to note, unless you are in an area of a lot of cookie cutter similar homes, the mediun price range can get out of line by extreme low and high priced activity.  For example, Montreux homes and Montreux lots in the Montreux golf course area have had a good run in 07.  This has pushed up the mediun price in this area.  Of course, one of the reasons the upper end did ok was that many of those buyers pay cash and are not impacted by the credit cruch.  By the way, there is money out there and it is not as bad as people think.

I have to apologize for not putting the links in, the latest word in the internet world is that the search engines don’t like you doing that as it ads to spam.  (Spammers will get links off of blog text).  My tech/SEO guy is looking into a way to prevent that and is in contact with some San Jose folks on it. 

I hope this helps you in your search for Reno, Carson City and Lake Tahoe statistics.

Your Reno Realtor,

Ron Bell

775-750-5256

Filed under: 2008 STATISTICS