Altos Research

Hey friends - we've rolled out a new home for our blog (finally!). From now on point your browsers, readers, and related whatnot to blog.AltosResearch.com.

Tons of fun new features going on here at Altos Research. Today we get to announce AltosXplorer: our full database query and charting system, is now mobile! That's right folks, a couple terabytes of real estate statistics and pretty charts right at your fingertips.

Altos subscribers: Get your AltosXplorer mobile link by logging in to your account and selecting My Xplorer, Xplorer Mobile from the menu. Then send the URL to your phone. That's it! (You will, of course, need a phone with a web browser. And it'll need to have javascript enabled. My Blackberry did not have javascript enabled by default, FWIW.)

On your phone, you'll be able to select market area, city, zip code, and any of a bunch of different statistics. Want to take a peek at condo inventory trends while showing properties to a buyer client? Just a couple of clicks and you're at the data.

Lead Contact Form Goes Mobile Too!

Many of our realtor subscribers like to use the data to reach new clients. What do you do when you find yourself engaged in a conversation about the market with a someone? Well now you can say, "Here, let me send you a report, you can check for yourself." The AltosConnect mobile lead-sign-up form is super handy. Pop in their name and contact information and they'll have a local market report in their inbox before you're even done with the conversation. How cool is that? We rolled this out a couple weeks ago. Lots of positive response.

To get the link to the mobile version of your AltosConnect contact form widget, sign in to your account, select My Connect from the left hand menu, Save and Preview the widget, and enter your phone number. Again, that's it! Bookmark it on your phone and you'll always have access to your Altos database.

Give both features a try and let me know how they work for you!

This blog has been frustratingly silent for too long. The ebb and flow of running a company and my personal creative juices combined for an extended drought. I have not been totally silent, however. Here are a few of the things that I've been up to, and some things to look forward to:

Twitter, for all its virtues, has clearly detracted from my blogging output. Why articulate a full, reasoned article when you can blurt out a 140-character idea? I'm only partly kidding. The good news is that Twitter has proven help me weave surprisingly deep relationships with the same people who read this blog, so I'll continue. If you concur, make sure we're connected on Twitter. I'm @mikesimonsen

For more complete thoughts, I've started publishing over at AgentGenius. For readers not familiar, AgentGenius is a forum about and for the real estate professionals. The articles I'm writing over there are tending to be about how realtors can use market data when working with their clients. I have a lot more to write for them.

That brings up another channel for my creative output the last few months: Real Estate BarCamps. Since January we've been in New York, Seattle, Virginia, Los Angeles (also Atlanta by way of RE Tech South). Next week we're in Phoenix and Portland. Upcoming are Denver, Charlotte, Chicago, Philly, and Boston. If you're a real estate pro and haven't found your way to these free events yet, I highly recommend them. We lead a session on Using Real Estate Data in Your Marketing. It's been very well attended and very enjoyable. Lots of other goodies on technology, social media, marketing, and the future of the real estate industry at these events. Find your way to one.

At any rate, I have a personal goal this month to get the publishing pace back up. Stay tuned.

We've been quietly rolling out new features for subscribers here at Altos World HQ over the past couple weeks. Today I get to announce a super cool new feature that our subscribers (especially the bloggers in that crowd) have been raving about. [sound the trumpets]

AltosStats Live Market Statistics Widget

Previously our widgets were trend charts. Plug in a chart to your site to illustrate the trend of one or two local real estate statistics. But the data is often just as interesting in a table format - the precise reading, right now. Good information density as Tufte likes to say. To whit:

We built the AltosStats widget to work like our other widgets. Just copy a little chunk of HTML and Poof! Live data on your site.

If you're an Altos Pro subscriber, here's how you can play: Log in to your account. Select the My Web Page menu item. Then click the Stats Widget link next to the market you want to display. That's it. All the data is live and all the formatting is done for you.

We made a skinny version too so you can drop one in the blog sidebar.

There you have it. Enjoy.

The economy may be tanking all around, but we're still growing here at Altos Research. (The silver lining for us is that everyone needs to know what's going on in the housing market.) Today we get to announce the latest addition to Team Altos, Ricky Fernandez.

Ricky joins our sales team as our New Account Manager (he likes the title "Sales Guy" but we opted for a more functional title). Ricky's background is in mortgage finance and real estate, but his biggest asset is his huge personality. He's the kind of guy you can hear smiling on the other end of the phone. Energetic and insightful, Ricky is going to be a real positive for our clients.

They say that bad economic times make good times to build a company. I can vouch for the fact that the cratering job situation in California made it much easier for us to snag rock stars like Ricky (and Kris last month). I'm going to add the corollary that it's also a great time to join a startup. Altos Research is not a venture funded rocketship of a company. When we chose not to raise investment, we also knew that we wouldn't get to staff up hundreds of people like so many here in Silicon Valley. Rather, we're more like an ultralight - highly efficient and lots of fun. As a result, we like to aim for each new hire to lift the company to the next level. As each new person joins, they get the opportunity to join at a critical moment for the company, to significantly contribute to our success. When we look back in a few years on the other side of this crazy economy, and Altos emerges strong and innovative and bigger, we'll all get to say, "I created that." And at the end of the day, isn't that the greatest reward from a job?

But I digress. Help me welcome Ricky aboard. You're going to love working with him.

We see a lot of good real estate data here at Altos. We see a lot of great presentations of that data too. We decided that we'd like to offer some recognition for the best stuff out there. So we thought it'd be fun to have a little awards ceremony. We'll call it the Data-Rich Realtors Awards.

A few guidelines:

• Despite the name, we'd like to honor people in all parts of the real estate world. Realtors, mortgage, investors, other service providers.
• The nominations are not limited to blogs. Though since many of the best publish their work on blogs, we expect that'll be a big part. There are tons of ways to analyze, present, and leverage data in the real estate business. All are welcome.
• Nominations are not limited to Altos Research clients. There's tons of data out there and we want to honor innovative analysis and useful presentation. (Though many Altos clients are indeed data-rich...)
• We're honoring people, not websites.
• Individuals who contribute to websites are indeed eligible.
• We'd like to honor brokerages or other firms, especially if you have the name of the person spearheading a great data project.

Nominate someone! (feel free to nominate yourself!)

Powered by Wufoo

Or email us: send name, web site, and other relevant info, like a particularly great blog, post to datarich@altosresearch.com

We'll take nominees through December 15, 2008

The Winners

Winners will be selected from the nominees by a panel of judges. We'll annouce the winners at the end of December. Nominate early, nominate often!

Some nice press coverage in BusinessWeek this week. We compile unique luxury real estate data for our friends at the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing. If you stopped by the ILHM booth at NAR last week, you'd have seen the great report that their members have access to. The Institute launched the reports at the show.

Coincidentally, BusinessWeek called looking for insights on how the real estate market is performing at the very high-end. The short answer is that, while the luxury market held out longer than the low end, everyone is feeling the pain now.

"The entry level of the upper tier--the $500,000 price point and up--has been softening for a while," said Laurie Moore-Moore, founder and CEO of the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, a Dallas-based group that trains high-end agents. "What we've also seen in the last month is huge uncertainty at the very top of the market. People want to know where are we headed, how serious [the downturn] is going to be, and what is the duration. There are enough questions that at even at the top of the market people are waiting and watching."

Here's how our Luxury Real Estate Market data works: We take the 10 highest-priced zip codes in 31 metro markets around the county (as long as their median price is over $500,000). We composite those zip codes together into a metro regional view (for example of the luxury real estate market in Los Angeles). Then we roll all the metros into a nation-wide view, which we call the ILHM National Composite.

The data and report are available only through ILHM and ILHM members. If you're interested in seeing all the detailed statistics at the national level, you can download the weekly National Luxury Market Report from ILHM. Institute members have access to the detailed luxury data in their local markets as well, which is cool.

Big week here at Altos Research World Headquarters. We get to announce our latest addition to the team, Kris Miranda!

Kris is taking the role of Customer Service Guru. That means most of the time she'll be working with our Realtor subscribers - helping them maximize their benefit of working with Altos, getting them up to speed quickly, holding hands when necessary.

Her talents include all those areas that our clients care about - strong web technical chops, excellent experience with internet marketing and she's a great problem solver.

We have ambitions here at Altos to really distinguish ourselves with our customer service, much the way the team at Zappos and our friends at RealEstateShows have done. It took us a long search but we found someone who has the skills and style to be totally focused on the strategic and tactical success of our clients. We couldn't be more excited.

Everyone bid Kris a warm welcome. She's your new best friend!

We have another cool slide show up at BusinessWeek.com this week. They asked us to dig out the local markets where homes are selling the fastest. Here's a newsflash, folks, even the highest demand markets are moving like molasses. A fun look at the data nonetheless. We looked at 20 metros around the country and picked out one or two zip codes where the rate of turnover wasn't abysmal.

Also, in case you missed the bulletin to the Altos Research fan club: I'll be on the Fox Business channel tomorrow morning (September 9) between 8:00 and 8:30am California time with Brian Sullivan. We'll talking the housing market, natch. Check it out. Let me know if you find the live stream on the FBN site.

Our Latest National Housing Market Report is out. You can download the PDF here.

From the press release:

Mountain View, CA September 5, 2008 -- The Altos 10-City Composite Price Index showed a decline in asking prices of 1.5% in August and 2.3% for the past three months. Prices of properties listed for-sale fell in 20 of 25 major markets according to the Real-Time Real Estate Report,published by Altos Research, the premier source for real-time real estate research, and market analysis consultancy Real IQ.

Asking prices fell at the fastest rate in Las Vegas -- down 4.8% during August -- and 8.6% over the most recent three-month period for an annualized rate of nearly 35%. Listing prices rose at the fastest rate in Denver -- up 1.9% in August -- followed by San Diego where prices were up 1.4%.

"Many markets that had posted multi-month sequential price increases during the Summer months displayed fresh weakness in August," said Stephen Bedikian, partner and research director for Real IQ. "This could portend a general resumption of the downward trend in prices as most markets typically experience seasonal weakness in the Fall and Winter months."

Inventory levels declined in 21 of 25 markets. Inventory fell by the largest amounts in Seattle and Dallas with inventory contracting 6.0% and 4.8% respectively. Many markets showed inventory declines of more than two percent for the past month including: San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Phoenix, Charlotte and Houston.

"While seasonal weakness is typical in the Fall and Winter months, continued widespread inventory reductions like we saw in August could temper near-term price declines," said Michael Simonsen, CEO and co-founder of Altos Research.

Sixteen of 26 markets had an average days-on-market of 100 or more. Days-on-market declined in just three of 26 markets. By far, the market with the slowest rate of inventory turnover was again Miami at an average of 160 days-on-market. Both San Diego and San Francisco experienced the fastest rate of inventory turnover at an average of 84 days-on-market, followed closely by Austin at 86 days.

Data in the Real-Time Housing Market Report is based on analysis of over one million properties currently listed for-sale in 26 metropolitan markets across the country. The report is the most timely source of housing market data on current market activity.

The report examines housing pricing, inventory levels and market conditions in 31 major U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs): Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington, DC. The Real-Time Real Estate Report is released every month.

The folks at IAC (NASDAQ:IACI) broke into five different companies this week with the real estate and mortgage related assets now under the umbrella of a company called Tree.com (NASDAQ:TREE) Is escaping from the conglomerate goo going to help this group prosper? Tree ostensibly has a bunch of internet properties but from where I sit, only two are viable, ahem, branches- LendingTree.com and RealEstate.com.




The former is the web 1.0 mortgage holdover with traffic now supported by TV ads. The latter a straightforward real estate broker with simply the best domain name in the business. The rest of the properties are a collection of, shall I say, unimpressive lending and home-search affiliate web sites.



Needless to say, being a volume mortgage player is a scary business right now. Maybe the secondary markets recover enough to support this model on-going, maybe, um, not. According to their S-1, Tree has limited exposure to the subprime and Alt-A mess. Surprising that they escaped that temptation that hit the etrades, etc. so hard. Good for them.

What does Tree have to offer? As a web site, RealEstate.com is decent enough to get a solid stream of leads by virtue of being many home searchers' very first stop on the internet. (Evidenced by the steady 800k visitors/month). The domain name is a built-in low-cost marketing channel for a brokerage. A really nice asset for sales and to recruit agents (the real business of brokerages). Is it enough? The site risks getting walloped by innovation happening in the intensely competitive home search space. (see Trulia, Estately, Redfin, Roost, Zillow, heck even Realtor.com is lumbering more quickly these days.) The big question for the future of this unit is whether the technology costs of keeping competitive continue to remain cheaper than traditional marketing channels for brokers.

Of Tree's lesser brands, I identify with the business proposition of Improvenet - home contractors and service guys need a better way to be found). But the competition with craigslist has to be brutal. And Angie's List is starting to run away with the premium end of the contractor referral market.

The bottom line for TREE is this: in the internet real estate space, it's a tough time to be an incumbent and a great time to be an innovator. Tree, despite the new name, is the incumbent.

[disclosure: we have realtor clients in the RealEstate.com brokerage and like all our clients we sincerely hope they kick ass.]

We love it when our clients get good blog fodder from our data. We need to be more diligent about showing the link love to 'em. Surfing around with a little insomnia tonight I found a whole set from just the last day or two. Check out these wonderful realtors with great, data-rich blogs:

Wilkas Group in San Mateo

Irina Natchaev dives into the San Gabriel market

Ryan Hartman in Philadelphia (Welcome aboard Ryan!)

Marian Bennett in Half Moon Bay

Here's a special hint: if you're a home buyer or seller looking for data in any of these markets, you can actually subscribe to the detailed local reports from us. But why would you? These marvelous pros will give you the reports for free! How cool is that?!

Our latest National Housing Market Report is out. This one examines data through end of July 2008. You can download the PDF here.

Here's the press release:

Real Estate Report: National Housing Prices Down by 0.8% in July

Report measures current real estate data in major markets around the country. Data shows Las Vegas continuing to lead as the weakest US housing market with real estate prices down another 4% in July. Current real estate data shows some summertime price stability in Midwestern markets Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA August 5, 2008 - The Altos 10-City Composite Price Index showed a decline in asking prices of 0.8% in July and 1.3% for the past three months. Prices of properties listed for sale fell in 13 of 26 major markets according to the Real-Time Real Estate Report, published by Altos Research, the premier source for real-time real estate data, and market analysis consultancy Real IQ.

Asking prices fell at the fastest rate in Las Vegas - down 4.0% during July - and 7.5% over the most recent three-month period for an annualized rate of 30%. Listing prices rose at the fastest rate in Detroit - up 4.8% in July - followed by Cleveland where prices were up 2.7%. Prices were also up slightly in the Midwestern markets of Indianapolis and Minneapolis.

"While prices continue to fall in coastal and Western markets, prices appear to have stabilized in Midwestern markets that were previously declining," said Michael Simonsen, CEO and co-founder of Altos Research. "The real test will come in the fall when markets typically experience a seasonal slowdown which will be exacerbated by high job losses and foreclosures."

Asking prices fell at the fastest rate in Las Vegas - down 4.0% during July - and 7.5% over the most recent three-month period for an annualized rate of 30%. Listing prices rose at the fastest rate in Detroit - up 4.8% in July - followed by Cleveland where prices were up 2.7%. Prices were also up slightly in the Midwestern markets of Indianapolis and Minneapolis.

Listed property inventories declined with the 10-City Composite markets showing a decrease of 2.0% in July. Inventory rose in just 6 of 26 markets with the biggest decreases occurring in Detroit and Cleveland.

"Broadly declining inventory is a positive sign in the near-term, particularly for the Midwestern markets which all showed inventory declines," said Stephen Bedikian, partner and research director for Real IQ.

For the Altos 10-City Composite, the average days on market was 111, a slight increase from 109 in June. Thirteen of 26 markets had an average days-on-market of 100 or more. By far, the market with the slowest rate of inventory turnover was Miami at an average of 156 days-on-market, nearly a full month more than the next slowest market - Tampa. Austin led all markets with the fastest rate of inventory turnover at an average of 78 days-on-market.

Data in the Real-Time Housing Market Report is based on analysis of over one million properties currently listed for sale in 31 metropolitan markets across the country. The report is the most timely source of housing market data on current market activity.

The report examines housing pricing, inventory levels and market conditions in 31 major U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs): Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington, DC. The Real-Time Real Estate Report is released every month.

Altos scores the big spread in BusinessWeek today! I was really happy to fulfill this request. The folks at BW wanted a national real estate slide show that wasn't just yet another chronicle of the market meltdown. They wanted to see where things were good too. Grown weary of all-bad-California-all-the-time, they also asked to take a look at 20 or so major metros around the country. So we suggested that we pick a nice sampling of metros, and then find the best and worst performing zip codes in each (in terms of median home price over the last year.)

And you know what? We found some very interesting trends. Aside from poor Las Vegas, we are able to find some healthy pricing trends in every metro we sampled.

What do the up markets have in common? Well, almost without exception, they're the nice parts of town. The biggest down zip codes? Again almost without exception, the hardest hit markets are the cheapest parts of town.

The phenomenon is working like this: There are a few folks who are well financed, and they for the first time in years, get to buy in the best neighborhoods without a ton of competition. Mortgages are still historically cheap, if in fact you can get one. While at the low end, no one can get financing, and of course those with the craziest mortgages are now selling or foreclosing. The mayhem starts at the bottom.

Check out the full article. Fascinating reading.