Use Market Data to Create Interesting Blog Posts

Let me make some suggestions on how to use data and charts in your blog or newsletter to make it interesting and differentiate yourself:

1. Do ranking lists.  Everybody loves keeping score.  Name the 10 highest/lowest price towns in the county.  Has it changed since last year? … five years ago?  Which towns have depreciated least/most in price since the peak? (then use your knowledge to explain why).  There are many possibilities.
2. Compare what’s going on in different price ranges.  Most of the charts out there cover the market as a whole.  Different price segments may not all be behaving the same way.  Pick a couple of segments and show and explain the differences.
3. Compare towns.  Pick several similar towns you cover.  How have they performed in terms of price and sales over the past several years?  Which has the best values now?
4. Compare property types.  How are single families performing compared with condos?
5. Use the data and charts to explain a narrative.  Let’s say you’ve heard about a couple of recent deals where people moved from Orinda to Redwood Heights.  Might be a trend, might not be.  Look at charts of inventory and number of new listings in Orinda.  Are they going up?  Check trends in sales and prices in Redwood Heights.  Are they stable or improving?  In other words, come up with factual evidence to support your ideas.  You’ll be much more convincing.
6. Everybody’s interested in the rich.  Pick the wealthier towns in your area.  Are they closer in price than they used to be or further apart?  Explain why you think this is.
7. Educate your audience.  Introduce people to a statistic that’s important, but that they might not be familiar with.  Consider Months of Supply or Sales-to-List Price Ratio.  Define it and then explain what it means and how it applies in your area.
8. What are values really doing?  Average and median price don’t tell the whole story.  Look at price / sq ft as well.  Compare historical sales prices of some typical properties.

[Anywhere above you see the words ‘price’ or ‘sales’, you can substitute ‘inventory’ or ‘market time’ or ‘months of supply’ or ‘new listings’.]

The beauty of this is that all these ideas can be used again and again.  Doing the work the first time is the hardest part.  But I guarantee you’ll learn something useful about your market.  And once you’ve done one … others are much easier.  And you can basically write the same column six months later … and it will be different because the data is different.

For (free!)  information on how to download and use data from your MLS, see http://bit.ly/epNz5Z

And … RMU has tools that save time and make all this easier … www.RealtyMarketUpdate.com

Thanks to Brian Boero of 1000WattConsulting for inspiring this

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