All Real Estate Is Local: What You Need to Know to Profit in Real Estate—in a Buyer's and a Seller's Market

As pointed out by Lereah, senior vice president and chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, “over 80 percent of homeowners in America depend more on the value of their home for retirement than stocks and other savings.” This guide to evaluating local real estate markets is meant to make “smarter property buyer[s]” of both heavy investors and first-time house hunters. In textbook-ready prose, Lereah (Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust ) leavens the often stressful process of real estate procurement with common sense and clarity. Lereah introduces fresh concepts like “market DNA”—the set of attributes that determine a given market's future performance—which he uses to profile specific locales and explore the relative merits of such concerns as climate, resources, diversified economy, education, government, sports, medical services, transport, culture, safety and less obvious “X factors” (e.g., the power brokers of Washington, D.C.). Lereah's profusion of tables, indexes, ratings and rankings are practical, and his step-by-step guides to the purchasing process are well laid out. Along with the ins and outs of an intelligent buy, Lereah includes some 80 pages of statistics on a wide range of cities, making this a valuable reference. (Apr.)