Jan Hurren

With changes in lending, REO's and Short Sales in the mix, now more than ever, you need an experienced agent to help you make sense of the market.

Broad housing market reports are a dime a dozen these days, and if you ask me, that's a good approximation of their worth. Markets are sliced and diced and compared across the board, drawing multiple -- and often conflicting -- conclusions with shaky, obsolete data. The market's up, or maybe it's down. It's good, it's bad, and it's confusing.

For most people, even with access to all this information the results are more inconsistent than ever, often dated and out of context.

Timely and accurate information, provided on a local level with a real-world perspective, is the real estate market's most important commodity -- as your real estate professional, in the trenches daily, it is my work to make sense of the numbers and bring timely insight to my clients. The best analysis does not come of looking in the rear-view mirror, but rather from seeing just the facts, clearly, as they unfold?

Metric discrepancies are about more than selling products or securing a reputation in the marketplace -- they go to the heart of how we think about information. The one real estate mantra that has remained unequivocally true through some of the most tumultuous years in the history of my profession is that all real estate is local.

By focusing on broad market-to-market comparisons instead of individual markets. Instead of chasing fleeting affirmations that change day in and day out, let's focus more on whether single-family homes or condos are more prevalent in a single area, the variance of seasonal market shifts, or the changes in sales activity that often precede major trends.

Let's talk about the facts as they stand today and not on reports that are already five to seven months behind the market when they hit newsstands.

Most people won't buy stocks today based solely on six-month-old research, nor will they decide what to wear today based on the average temperature...Why wouldn't the same principles apply to real estate? The fact is, it does.