It was a chilly winter day in late 2004 when the idea of Housing Predictor suddenly struck like a lightning bolt. I'd been thinking about developing a website to provide information on the housing market that had not been offered, not just another place on the web to search for homes for sale. At this point I had developed more than 20 web sites, almost all of which were real estate oriented. Like a lot of people I wondered how long this feverish pitch in the real estate market could keep up before it would come tumbling down. After all real estate has always been a long term investment, and after years in real estate sales and investing I wanted to produce a site that would be informative and helpful for consumers everywhere in the U.S. Housing Predictor is actually the work of a very small group of dedicated hard working professionals, only a staff of seven. Today it has exploded on the internet to become one of the fastest growing sites in an industry proliferated by thousands of new web sites a day. I started selling real estate after leaving television news back in 1989 in Santa Rosa, California. I liked selling real estate, but the journalist in me drove my desire and I wanted to delve into the internet to provide helpful information people could use in their decision making process. Real estate clients would ask me about real estate markets all over the country. I made it my business to learn about them and my interest grew from Santa Rosa to a national scale. I moved to Spokane, Washington in 1993 to sell real estate. As the number of my investor clients grew and as I gained more investment properties all over the country, I had to make it my business to keep my clients informed and up to date on various local real estate markets. It was then when I found out just how difficult it was to assimilate accurate information that was readily available. I thought long and hard on how to go about changing that. As a journalist in the newspaper and television industries more than 15 years I always worked diligently to get the facts right, and I thought if I could create a website that could forecast the future of housing markets it would be very valuable for consumers. Not that all forecasts are ever always right, no matter what the economists like to tell us. But I thought at least a good educated view of local housing markets could help people make more informed decisions. I knew it would be a mammoth undertaking to produce housing forecasts for local real estate markets in all 50 states. So in late November, 2004 the development of what would become Housing Predictor got its start. At first it was a two man operation and months later we would add a staff to work on the development, including real estate analysts and economists. Housing Predictor was quietly being researched and developed for two years before we would officially launch the site. We intentionally launched Housing Predictor with little fanfare on November 15, 2006 because we knew we had more work to do to strengthen the site. For the next two months we worked diligently to make things right and make sure the forecasts were as accurate as possible on all 250 local housing markets. The word was getting out about what we were doing and we gained a following on the web at first from places like Craigslist and MySpace. The traffic was increasing daily. People wanted to not only know about their local housing markets but also about housing markets all over the country. After more than five years of booming real estate appreciation there was great interest. Housing Predictor is taking on its own personality of sorts. The information it provides is not found regularly elsewhere. My own experience as a real estate investor and selling real estate in California, Washington and in Florida, where I make my home is only a small dimension of how this next generation site was built. The site also includes The Top 25 market forecasts for 2007, a new housing search center and will soon release the Worst 25 projected markets for 2007. Housing Predictor will also be adding interactive features. Web sites are a lot like children in the way they are born. They are a lot of hard work. They can be painful at times and everyone takes on their own personality. Housing Predictor is growing it's very own everyday.
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