Just for a thought :)

Reading newspapers and watching the news, it is clear that many people question and wonder if the real estate market is starting to pick up. For the past few months, sales have been increasing primarily by small investors across the country, who, are taking advantage of buying foreclosures, short sales and distressed properties. However, did prices start to rise? What drive’s prices in the real estate market are jobs, not investor’s. Politicians are arguing how many new jobs they’re creating, but what about all the jobs Americans lost when companies started to outsource to China? With all optimism, do we see jobs coming back? China’s market is changing trends, wages are rising and China is starting to become a consumer as well. If the United States didn’t outsource to China, perhaps empty American factories would start to fill up with workers. However, don’t forget that India and Mexico can substitute China’s cheap labor. There’s no doubt America has been a leader in Innovation, but will we become once again “made all American”? Real estate investing can no longer rely on economic trends; we have to look at economic clusters of individual areas. An industry cluster is a group of firms and related economic actors and institutions that are located near one another and draw productive advantage from their mutual proximity and connections. Cluster analysis can help diagnose a region’s economic strengths and challenges and identify realistic ways to shape the region’s/real estate economic future. After all, jobs help families to restore their credit and give them the ability to finance a home. We have to understand how clusters work and interconnect strategies to grow the economic clusters across the country. We can no longer allow excessive landing to happen. Slowly, we have to apply different strategies, such as lease options/rent to own to give families time to stabilize their financial situations and simultaneously help current owners/sellers sell their homes for top sales price.