As we have mentioned in other articles, developing a Real Estate Niche is important.  Most real estate professoinals will focus on a certain area, a specific type of home, or a certain service that relates to a process in real estate.   What about international real estate markets??   Who does a resident in Los Angeles California, looking for a vacation chalet in Switzerland turn to?  

Chances are there aren’t any agents in California that specialize in vacation homes in Switzerland.   The idea of trying to find someone qualified in Switzerland is probably not to appealing to the prospective buyer.   

This is why having a working knowledge of international property is important.   There is an excellent site for researching real estate in international markets.   PropertyMagnate.com is a very useful site that has a plethora of information on this subject.   If you have a client that asks if you can help them finding a property abroad, you can now confidently answer “Yes!” with the help of Property Magnate!

When interest rates go down do home prices go up?  When interest rates go up do home prices go down?Although interest rates seem to affect home prices there is another major factor that seem to affect the prices more.  That is supply.  Supply is the number of similar houses available at a given time that allows Buyers their choice.  This condition is called a “Buyers Market” and has a serious affect to home prices.  Sellers have a problem is having their listing stand out or separate their house from the pack.  Buyers have the ability to negotiate and play one seller against another.

“The Times are A Changin” and the way people choose an agent to help them make real estate decisions will not be recognizable in the near future. The Real Estate Industry has not realistically kept up with the Information Age. Home owners and Buyers used to be dependant on the only information available and that was from the realtor organizations.

Today, information and availability of houses for sale or for rent can be accessed many ways. With the public information of deeds ownership and transaction information being digitally accessed from any search engine, the trip to the County Recorder is not necessary any more. We used to depend on databases created by and for realtors so that decisions could be made with relatively limited access.

But the main missing ingredient is the evaluation of this information. That needs to be done by an experienced person in order to see where values realistically are trending. Like they say, “Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and experience”. If either one if missing the evaluations should be suspect.

The assumption that values track a predictable pattern and that the past three months dictate the next few months is not valid. If you buy into that then everything should be predictable and we all know that is not true.

- Tim Leadbetter