Huang Shan Today

You’ll need to get more information than you can pick up just by driving through, of course. You’re actually performing a small-scale private demographic study, and you need to do a certain amount of research.
For a general sense of the market, there’s no more informative exercise than gathering up three or four months’ worth of the Sunday real-estate section of the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in your area and going through all the ads at once. Later we’ll consider the fine points of reading the classifieds, but at this point all you want to do is get a general sense of the condition of the market, locally and in the communities you’ve identified as worth checking out. Do there seem to be a lot of properties for sale? If so, what kinds of houses predominate? Mainly single-family homes, mainly condos, a mix? Do prices seem to be holding steady, or are they moving visibly up or down? Do the same ads appear again and again, or is there a quick turnover?
A good real-estate broker can provide or help you obtain much of the detailed information you’ll need. But your search will go far more smoothly if you establish your preferences and priorities before you begin working with a broker or start actively looking at houses. A South Florida broker tells me that as few as 5 percent of his prospective buyers have taken any trouble at all to find out what the market is up to in the areas that are of interest to them. Make it your business to be among that 5 percent.
As you peruse the real-estate ads, you should be looking not only for specific information about home prices and sales activity, but also for more general information about economic conditions or development trends that might affect the real-estate market in the areas you’re interested in. For example, let’s say you see some attractively priced houses advertised, but they’re in a neighborhood you wouldn’t ordinarily consider because it’s badly run down. In studying the real-estate pages, however, you learn that the noisy, ugly elevated tracks of the transit system are going to come down, or that the area has been targeted for a major redevelopment program, virtually assuring that this down-and-out neighborhood is on its way up. If you find out about these plans early enough, you may decide to get into that neighborhood before it’s “discovered” and prices begin to soar. In order to get that kind of information, you may want to scan the smaller, community newspapers, since they’re likely to cover such local development stories before the major metropolitan dailies do.
Many newspapers’ real-estate pages offer regular feature articles profiling suburban towns, and these can also be important sources of basic information about the communities you’re interested in. You may also want to establish a clipping file to organize this information and to keep track of the classified ads over a period of time. That’s a good way to gauge how long properties are staying on the market and to see whether prices seem to be heading up or down.
Also, in your quest for information, you shouldn’t ignore the shoppers — that is, the tabloid-format newspapers that circulate in a much smaller area and are typically distributed free in shopping centers. They can be incredibly valuable aids in your search process, often carrying pictures of the advertised properties, which the dailies don’t do.
In addition, cable TV stations in many communities run “home shows” consisting of still shots of available properties along with basic specs. These shows are usually on at odd hours, don’t even begin to show everything that’s for sale, and don’t give you an in-depth tour of the properties they do show. But even if you don’t see a house you want to visit, you’ll at least get a good glimpse of several homes in different areas and perhaps come up with some ideas about new places to consider.