John Murphy’s MEDINA REAL ESTATE REPORT

The Swanepoel Trends Report has a very interesting study on the best real estate brands in the country by various categories.

Coldwell Banker, Re/Max, Prudential, Keller Williams, and Century 21 are national brands.   They build a large national brand that they hope will translate and carry weight in the local market.

Real estate markets are localized, not nationalized.  Edina Realty is a regional brand under the Home Services of America umbrella.  Home Services has strategically decided to keep the local brands in place as they have the connection and recognition in those local markets.  Home Services buys the best brokers in their respective markets and lets them keep their brand in tact as it’s most recognizable by consumers.

It’s interesting to see the differences in the various major news organizations web sites dedicated to real estate.  It seems like CNN Money provides the best information, but you can check these out for yourselves.

CNN Money

Fox News

The Wall Street Journal

Trulia is a newer real estate web site - part of the Web 2.0 for real estate.  Here’s their March 2007 press release on the latest trends they are seeing.  They do note a 50% jump in Minneapolis traffic.  I would imagine that is due to the fact that this is a new site and there is interest in the site…not in Twin Cities real estate per se.

The City of Plymouth has $9 million to spend on land for parks and open space initiative.  It was meant to be spent in Northwest Plymouth as that part of the city begins to developed.  However, there are now others looking to spend the money elsewhere in the city.

The most interesting thing is there is a land owner who is willing to sell his land for $300,000 per acre.  Only government would spend that kind of money on land these days.  The developers and builders aren’t spending that to develop.  I hope the city doesn’t go down the road of spending that kind of money for parks or open space.

Here’s the story from The Weekly News.

The air continues to come out of the housing market but it’s important to read articles like this one published on Yahoo! by the Associated Press.  Single family home sales prices dropped by .7% compared to a year ago.  So if for example, the median price of a home last year was $230,000, that home is now down by $1,600.  Is it time to panic?  I don’t think so.  This is a great opportunity for smart buyers to take advantage of the softness.

There’s also an opportunity for sellers as well, but they need to take a very strategic approach to pricing their home.  It is absolutely critical and you need an analytical pricing specialist to help you figure out the right price.

If you’re in to analyzing data and love to track trends in housing, you have to read this excellent report produced by the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors.  They have done an incredible job of report all kinds of statistics that both agent and the buying public will find insightful and helpful in understanding today’s marketplace.

Forbes reports on the housing starts number that came out yesterday.  New construction was up 9%.   What the headline won’t say is that starts are still down 32.7% from the same period in ‘06.

New construction continues to struggle in the Twin Cities marketplace as well.  With the thousands of builders and remodelers we’re going to need to see of number of builders close up shop and projects to go bankrupt before we’ll likely see the bottom in the new construction home glut.

A new museum us to be built in San Jose, CA to show off the innovative technologies for the home of tomorrow.  BusinessWeek reports on the effort by a company called Living Tomorrow.

Here’s the story….

New Century Financial looks as though it’s about to file bankruptcy.  They are the number 2 subprime lender in the country.

With all the news stories of late about the collapse of the sub-prime lending market, I thought it might be interesting to post a link to this site, www.MortgageImplode.com, which is dedicated to tracking the firms going under.

Credit continues to tighten for housing.  It’s a much needed change in business practice, but it likely means more pain for the housing market.