I hate taking Zillow too seriously. I mean, Zillow, Willow, Billow. It is just not an imposing name. Okay, the story did say that homes sold in the last year included casualties of war on one in three. Its scare tactics for most of the country however. If you look at their link, http://www.zillow.com/reports/RealEstateMarketReports.htm, they make some statements regarding sold prices having fallen 9.7% in the last year and 12.8% since the peak in 2006, but what they fail to mention is that tried and true stand by of mine which is that real estate is “local.” Real Estate is not and never will be a numbers game like the stock market. If the Dow Jones Industrials fall 20% in a quarter then you have a pretty good chance that most of the stocks that comprise this index fell about 20%. After all we are talking about 30 stocks. If housing falls 9.8% as a national average in calender year the odds are that without a national market for real estate, such as Wall Street is to stocks, your property probably did not fall 9.8%. It actually might have appreciated.
That’s right. Real estate is local. If you don’t live in Ground Zero (Florida or California in particular) in the housing market you really had little to despair over. I looked at their chart of the nation with all the neat colors all over it and what I found when I zoomed into my little area of the world in Athens GA was that prices did nothing. Nothing good and certainly nothing bad. If you did not live in Atlanta or Gainesville, but you lived in the rest of the state of Georgia you were okay. Take a look at the chart and zoom in to where you live. It is a pretty neat tool.
If you hear these claims that the sky is falling due to this report or other ominous reports that the media likes to throw at us please remember that median sales numbers on a national basis do not affect you.
