Online valuation sites have gotten a lot of interest from people curious about real estate values, trends and data.
So this morning I started playing around with cyberhomes.com an online valuation site that I hadn't visited before.
Like other online valuation sites, I found the valuations for individual homes to be hit or miss, often missing by a pretty wide margin.
But when I looked at the broad trend reports available on cyberhomes I found them to be indicative of the market here in the Tucson Foothills. The chart below shows the moving average sale price for homes in the Tucson Foothills, area code 85718, for the past five years.
Here's a tighter version of that same chart reflecting average sale prices in the Tucson Foothills for the 2nd quarter of 2006 thru the present. That big dip you see in the 4th quarter of 07, that came on the heels of the crash in the mortgage markets in August of that year. Jumbo loans, which are a popular financing option in the
Foothills, became difficult to get and very expensive, so higher-end sales collapsed, for a while. 
They call the chart below a buy/sell indicator.
This one illustrates the shifting trend
(call it a downward spiral) from a sellers to a buyers market over the past two years in the Tucson Foothills.
If you're a buyer or a seller, this is a trend you can't afford to ignore.
Because broad trend reports like these indicate the direction of a market over an extended period of time, as well as highs and lows within that period, for my money they're a more reliable gauge of activity, values, or whatever it is they're measuring, than making decisions based on what happened during a 1, 2 or even 3 month period.
see TheFoothillsToday.comto search for and learn more about Tucson Foothills Homes
