Beginning on March 1st, I started running stats from a company I partner with — Altos Research — for some of the towns in the area.  I had two goals:

  1. I wanted to provide some information that was concise and fairly easy to interpret as well as graphical and,
  2. I wanted to see if stats and the accompanying town name would boost my readership or blog visitors.

Goal #1 was easy to achieve. Altos Research provides a nice Wordpress plug-in that enables me to name my parameters and it formats them into the blog.  Pretty neat. Pretty easy.  Goal #2 was another story.  I use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to my blog and it doesn’t seem to have gotten an appreciable boost as a result of a week’s worth of stats.  Maybe that’s just too short.

The other side of this experiment got me wondering if people really care about a rolling blog of stats.  Sure, if you happen to catch your own town, it’s interesting for the day.  If you don’t live there, not so much.  I was picked up by LocalSpur.com the day I ran College Park, MD stats.  That was kinda neat.  It didn’t create a huge spur of traffic, though.

So, now I’ll return to what I think, what I know and what I can find out about the local real estate market and National events (e.g., expiration of the home buyer tax credit) as they affect the local real estate market.