Although this is my first post here, I’m going to skip the usual ramble on introducing myself. I’ll get to that later. Besides, who am I is less important than what I say.

A couple of nights ago I went and saw Robert Campbell speak at BAWB . Robert, an economist by training, has claimed to have found the five indicators that can tell a real estate investor when to sell and when to buy. Without coming right out and telling us to sell our San Francisco Bay Area homes, he managed to scare a number of us into thinking seriously about it.

I bought his book at the meeting and read it last night. Only to discover that if I had waited and bought his book on his site I would have gotten his software as well. Darn! (can I swear on this media?)

Two of the indicators are: 1) existing home sales, 2)# of foreclosures. You take monthly #’s and calculate a moving 12 month average. My, I hadn’t heard about moving averages since I studied the stock market. Is this where real estate is headed? Short sales take on a whole different meaning?

So today I went a’googling. It was tough to find the data I needed online. To calculate a 12 month moving average, I need 18-24 months of monthly data. DataQuick news has recent # of sales for many of the California counties (although not Butte, which is where one of my rental properties is located). But it’s ALL sales, not existing home sales. The closest I got was the hud site, but it’s not granular enough. It has monthly # of existing home sales, but for all of the western states (including Arizona). I didn’t spend as much time on the foreclosure numbers, but that seems to be calculated quarterly not monthly.

Of course I found a site that promised me the information for $995. Ouch.

If anyone knows where to find this info let me know. Robert claims that you can ask Real Estate agents for this information .. so that is what I will be doing tomorrow.

TechGrl