The Battle of Consumer Profiles

Long the bible of consumer data in residential real estate, NAR's venerable Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers now has competition.

With the 2016 Profile, which was released on Halloween and is based on a massive survey of both buyers who have participated in recent residential transactions, NAR celebrated 35 years of annual publication. When the Profile was launched in 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for his first term, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" opened in theaters and the median value of a home was $55,300. in recent years, the Profile has been the source of information that defines residential real estate today, such as these often-cited findings:

• The percentage of home buyers who used the internet to search for a home increased to 95 percent in 2016 after holding steady at 92 percent for three years in a row.
• Sixty-four percent of sellers found their agent through a referral from a friend, neighbor, or relative or used an agent they had worked with before to buy or sell a home.
• FSBOs typically sell for less than the selling price of other homes; FSBO homes sold at a median of $185,000 last year (down from $210,000 the year prior), and significantly lower than the median of agent-assisted homes at $245,000.

While the venerable NAR Profile set the standard for years as the "go to" source of consumer data, now it has a competitor with some different ideas about what measure and how to present its results. Just a a few weeks before NAR releases its 35th edition, Zillow introduced the first Zillow Group Report on Consumer Housing Trends.