November 2007

Late last week, Greg Swann announced that I had joined the cadre of authors at Bloodhound Blog. Since that announcement, I’ve made two posts on Bloodhound, and with each one comes an email or two from someone asking me why I would contribute to another Phoenix real estate blog. “Joining the competition” as someone put it.

I joined Bloodhound because I think it is a collection of some of the finest writers in the RE.net. An opportunity to join a group like that doesn’t come around every day. I’m looking forward to contributing, and honing my writing skills. You see it in sports every day. How many superstars have elevated their entire team to greatness? Bloodhound is chocked full of superstars. You’ve got to play with the best to be the best.

For the record, I’ve never seen Bloodhound Blog as “competition” for the Phoenix Real Estate Guy blog. Sure Greg and Cathleen (and Allen Butler) are all based in Phoenix.  So what? Bloodhound writers don’t write for local markets. Bloodhound a nationally focused real estate blog. This blog is a locally focused real estate blog (for the most part. I do tend to wander into national things. And completely non-real estate matters as well. But that’s just what you get here).

The point is, although Greg and I are in the same market, we are not direct competitors. The Phoenix real estate market is wide and varied — much like the Phoenix geography. I live in and focus on the east side of Phoenix. Greg lives central and tends to focus on historical/mid-century homes. We really don’t directly compete for business. Besides, there are close to 60,000 homes listed for sale and with 40K something agents, the odds of any two running into each other are slim to none.

There is plenty of real estate — both in the physical and  cyber worlds — for all of us.

A regular visitor to our Phoenix real estate stats page, we’ll call him “Glenn”, likes to keep me on the straight and narrow. I often fall woefully behind in updating the stats page on the website. Thanks Glenn for the reminders!!

One report that Glenn looks for is the quarterly “Economic and Market Watch Report” issued by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS). Unfortunately it takes them 6 - 8 weeks from the quarter end to post this report. Combine that delay with my own delay in posting it and you get folks jonesing for their stats fix.

This report contains a ton of information, breaking down quarterly prices, sales, days on market and more by zip code, for all of Maricopa and Pinal counties. It also contains commentary from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Chief Economist Lawrence Yun — for what that is worth.

Monthly indicators, trends and forecasts are also included.

The current Q3 2007 report is available for download here. (PDF format.  Big file, be patient.)

If you are interested in previous reports, go here.  At some point, I’d love to go back through old quarterly reports and evaluate how accurate ARMLS forecasts have been. It could be an interesting exercise…

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Technorati Tags: Phoenix real estate market stats, ARMLS

No, “Cool Commercial of the Week” will not be another failed regular feature of this blog. Let’s face it, there just aren’t enough cool commercials out there to post one weekly.

But this one from a British telecom provider certainly qualifies.

He’s got a hot sexy looking blog (let’s see what kind of searchers that term pulls in…) and he’s an all-around nice guy.

But Christoph Schweiger has been MIA on the blogging scene for quite some time. There was a great post about his historic Scottsdale home on Oct 25, but his post prior to that was dated July 25.

But on Nov 25 (what is the deal with Christoph and the 25th??) I spotted his avatar in MyBlogLog.

Could he be poised for a comeback?

I hope so…

Technorati Tags: Christoph Schweiger, missing blogger