Business todayReal Estate RelatedWindermere Real Estate August 3, 2011

The person in the room with the most information wins.

A recent stat I saw a few days ago stated that 73% of Realtors make most of their income from non real estate work. Scary! What if you walked into a coffee shop and the person making your latte was your doctor? I don’t know about you, but that would not instill very much confidence in me about the skill set of my doctor. I know I’m being a bit flip but I really want to drive a point home.

Buying or selling a home today is not easy. Buyers and Sellers want to hire a professional to help them with this process. How professional are you? Are you coming to the table with the most information?

Here are some great sites that can really help you to put together information that will help a seller better understand the market they are about to list a property in, and info to help a buyer understand what their new investment might do as far as appreciation is concerned.

PMI-US

Keep in mind these guys have money on the line when it comes to mortgage insurance. Their research on the future of certain markets tends to be very accurate.

Housing Predictor

Housing Predictor provides independent real estate market forecasts on home prices and mortgage rates for more than 230 cities in all 50 U.S. states, plus news and analysis on the housing market.

FHFA

The Act gave FHFA the authorities necessary to oversee vital components of our country’s secondary mortgage markets – Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks.

City Data

They have collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as they could.  They have over 74,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment…), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, religions, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances and employment, weather, tornadoes, earthquakes, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, air pollution, latest unemployment data, time zones, water systems and their health and monitoring violations, comparisons to averages, local poverty details, professionally written city guides, car accidents, fires, bridge conditions, cell phone and other towers, mortgage data, business storefront photos, a forum and a social network with 1,000,000 registered members and 18,000,000 posts, blogs, 5,000 user-submitted facts, 27,000 exclusive local business profiles with photos, restaurant inspection results, and more demographics. If you ever need to research any city, zip code, or neighborhood for any reason, from considering a move there to just checking where somebody you know is staying, this is the site for you.