One of the tools in my real estate utility belt is making trend graphs. Why is this important? I find that being able to visually display all sales or listings on a graph is a very convincing resource. For example, when a home owner hires me to do an appraisal for bankruptcy or any other reason, and I include graphs of historic sales over the past three years, sales over the last twelve months, and then other graphs showing sales for 3-bedroom units, and properties similar in size to the owner’s house, it’s easy to begin to get a picture of what is happening in the real estate market. The great thing too is that you can graph so many different facets, whether square footage, age, date, bed-count, days on market, short sales vs. REOs vs typical sales, etc…
You can see some examples of trend graphs here if you wish. For now, I made a brief video tutorial to help local Realtors and real estate professionals in the Sacramento area export and work with data from our local MLS. It’s a huge benfit to be able to share things like this with clients, and once you have a little practice, you can crank out graphs very quickly. And don’t worry, if you don’t have Excel on your computer, simply download Gnumeric for free.
If you have any questions, let me know, particularly if you are a local Realtor. Call me at 916.595.3735 or connect with me on Facebook.
Wow Ryan! Ryan, now that will be a great video to watch and learn from!! Bill
Thanks Bill. I appreciate it. Thanks for putting up a post on your site about this too.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. One more time: awesome. Your approach to showing the data is spot-on and makes these numbers far more accessible to consumers and Realtors alike.
We’ve been talking about this one for the last half hour – Bill Cobb forwarded it on to his mailing list – we plan to do a bunch of videos and posts like yours.
Thanks for continuing the raise the bar on the profession and on appraisal blogging!
Alison
Thanks Alison. I really appreciate your encouragement. I think graphs like this are very helpful on so many levels. These are very basic scatter graphs too. They can get far more comlpex, but throwing in a few stellar graphs in an appraisal report is a nice feature to help visually display what the market has done or is doing. I’ll make some more videos too.
Ryan, great tutorial! I will definately be promoting this to local realtors in the Birmingham market. I have been using this type of data in my reports but did not think to educate the local realtors on how to do it. So thanks again for opening my eyes.
Thanks Tom. I hope to teach a basic graph class soon with a group of Realtors. We shall see if anyone is interested. Good luck.