Real estate market got you down? REALTORS can learn the correct spells and incantations to keep the bad housing spirits away.

If the housing market fell nearly 17% the month after the original housing tax credits were supposed to end, what’s going to happen when they really do come to an end? Are REALTORS ready for the Day After?

Some questions Matthew Ferrara thinks REALTORS should be asking of FHA – before it’s too late.

According to a new survey by NAR, by a factor of 4, most buyers think open houses are far more useless than they were just a year ago.

Hindsight is always 20/20, they say. Unless, of course, you spend most of your time navel gazing. So it’s almost myopic to point out that some ideas’ time has come. And other ideas’ time has passed. On one hand, it’s time for every sale to include in-house ancillary sales. On the other hand, [...]

Download a copy of the latest survey of REALTORS by the Center for REALTOR Technology and you’re certain to be fascinated – startled, perhaps – at what’s happening on the Bat-belts of modern agents trying to make buying and selling homes a twenty-first century experience. While the report is no page-turner – in [...]

Bizarre, Cool, Finally and Funny: Observations from the NAR Annual Conference, 2009
Each year, as thousands of REALTORS descend upon some unsuspecting city in American, we bring you observations from the event, complete with raised eyebrows of all kinds. This year’s Annual Convention of the National Association of REALTORS in San Diego is no exception: the [...]

Live from NAR Starts Friday – with Matthew FerraraThose who do not learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. So said someone we’ve all long forgotten, but I’m sure you can Google it. But rather than worry about who said it, shouldn’t we be worrying about whether we’ve heeded the advice? [...]

Real estate is essentially a research industry: trouble is, most agents and brokers think the most important research is about houses, prices, square footage and such. Considering the data that sits in most MLS systems – unverified and incomplete – you’d think they would know better by now. In fact, the best research [...]

Which is harder to spot: The Loch Ness Monster or the housing industry recovery? Given the number of false sightings for both, it’s not hard to imagine that we’ll ever see either. It seems that few people can tell if they’re looking at a recovery or not: Even the “Voice of Real Estate” changes its [...]

According to NAR and Radar Logic, home prices rose month-to-month from April to May in 10 cities in America, like Boston, Charlotte, Seattle and Denver. Words like “recovery” are used in the press release, because, at least from the Voice of REALTORS, the word “inflation” is off limits. Since the press release is just a [...]

Ten Questions with Real Estate Expert Matthew Ferrara
By Dianna Kawell
Reposted with permission from WCR’s site.Real estate is becoming an increasingly technology-driven industry. Every day, a typical REALTOR® depends heavily on her laptop, GPS and digital camera to get the job done. For what was long believed to be a face-to-face business, 88 percent of REALTORS® [...]

In one of the cruel ironies of the housing market today, the total number of units sold this year isn’t that far from historically normal volume. According to the National Association of REALTORS, the seasonally adjusted annual rate for sales in May is around 4.77 million – generally trending the pre-bubble long-term volume  for a [...]

“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” So quipped Mark Twain after hearing his demise had been published in the New York Times. The same might be said today about the real estate industry. A lot of hullabaloo has been making its way through the web these days – the end of brands, [...]

It’s true that I’ve never agreed with the National Association of REALTOR’S Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. It’s nothing personal; but it’s everything professional. I just don’t understand why today’s economists can’t figure out why inflation is bad. Of all of the complexities of economics, inflation is pretty much the easiest to understand. We’re not trying [...]