Intero Real Estate Blog

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill stated, famously, that “All politics is local.” The same could be said for real estate.

This is true for many reasons, but for my purposes today, I’m going to focus on just one of them.

Home values.

For my money, there’s nothing that compares to a local expert. Someone who knows the markets in which he or she works. Local agents know the neighborhoods in which they do business in a way that a big box company simply can’t. They know that home prices don’t vary simply from state to state, nor from city to city. They know that home prices are specific to neighborhood and that making sweeping generalizations about the real estate market in a given area might get you in the right ballpark, but they’ll rarely hit a home run.

I’ll give you an example.

Earlier this morning, while I was getting ready for the day ahead, I was watching a popular morning news program. On it, a nationally-recognized real estate figure was encouraging first-time homebuyers to use online tools like Zillow and Trulia to decide what a fair price for a home in a given area might be.

Now, I’m not going to knock Zillow and Trulia. Each of these tools is in business because it’s brought something new and innovative to the real estate table. But the fact remains that the information they make available for home values is very often wrong. Dead wrong. Sometimes, its values are dramatically below actual market price, sometimes they are far above.

These services simply cannot provide the perspective that (A) a human being and (B) someone who’s intimately familiar with an area can.

When you work with a real estate professional, work with someone who understands the subtle nuances of the neighborhoods in their market area. Work with someone who knows that homes on the side of the street with water views are going to cost more than those on the side of the street with no view (for the record, Zillow can’t tell the difference).

Work with someone who’s going to know which price constitutes a great deal for his or her clients.

At Intero, we pride ourselves on being this type of company. We take pride in being a hometown company whose agents live, work, and play in our market area. We take pride in knowing that our real estate professionals understand the market data that really matters, and we take pride in knowing that our agents know the tiny details that will make the biggest difference to you.