I usually really enjoy this blog, but I’m not sure I understand the point of this post at all! You rail against a blog and an article citing professional opinions and various statistics on the real estate market (like it or not this is the way we analyze a market). Then you basically state you don’t have the qualifications to advise on these sorts of matters, but that you have opinions on houses. I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean!

Look, Jamie at the Sun is trying to educate people. Her cross publicizing her article in her blog is common practice. I get RSS feeds, see an update that she posted an article and read it. Otherwise I’d likely miss the article as it quickly gets buried in the business section which I forget to check sometimes for weeks.

You seem to want to belittle someone who is just trying to post information from all sorts of sources for us (including expert analysis and stats), but you offer your vague “opinions” with no facts to back them up. Since we know you are a real estate agent, we can make our own assumptions about your opinions and motivations here. Yes, almost every house is different, and should be viewed as such when purchasing. But do you yourself not pull lists of comps when a client is determining a price? We still use comparisons when shopping for houses! I’m shocked information on your industry bores you so much! Perhaps you should look into a new field.

I downloaded a spreadsheet from Zillow today that shows that houses in Baltimore have appreciated by
11.7870313433334% annually over the past five years. If you want it, e-mail me off-list and I’ll send it to you as an attachment. According to an e-mail I received from Zillow today, house prices in Baltimore appreciated 2.1% in the past year. You could spend years diddling with stats, but at some point you have to put a key in a lock and actually look at a house.

While I totally agree with your last sentence there, I don’t trust Zillow as an accurate source for stats. Maybe it improved in the past year, but last time I checked, it seemed way off compared to what I was seeing as far as actual sales prices. It’s a tool that might be good for searches early on in the buying process, but I would prefer to look at actual sales comps in the past 6 months. And then one needs to be aware that sellers are more recently bringing money to settlement, further reducing the “value” below the tax record sales price.