All Real Estate Is Local: What You Need to Know to Profit in Real Estate - in a Buyer's and a Seller's Market (Hardcover)

~ David Lereah (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As pointed out by Lereah, senior vice president and chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, "over 80 percent of homeowners in America depend more on the value of their home for retirement than stocks and other savings." This guide to evaluating local real estate markets is meant to make "smarter property buyers" of both heavy investors and first-time house-hunters. In textbook-ready prose, Lereah (Why the Real Estate Book Will Not Bust) leavens the often stressful process of real estate procurement with common sense and clarity. Lereah introduces fresh concepts like "market DNA"-the set of attributes that determine a given market's future performance-which he uses to profile specific locales and explore the relative merits of such concerns as climate, resources, diversified economy, education, government, sports, medical services, transport, culture, safety and less-obvious "X factors" (e.g., the power brokers of Washington, D.C.). Lereah's profusion of tables, indexes, ratings and rankings are practical, and his step-by-step guides to the purchasing process are well laid-out. Along with the ins and outs of an intelligent buy, Lereah includes some 80 pages of statistics on a wide range of specific cities, making this a valuable reference.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Tip O'Neill famously said that "all politics is local," referring to the fact that voters are concerned primarily with the problems of their own community. Lereah, senior vice president and chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, says that the same lesson applies to the housing market. He points out that although the real estate boom of 2000-2005 has been thought of as a nationwide phenomenon, parts of the country have not participated. While cities like Miami, Las Vegas, and San Francisco have seen prices soar amid a speculative frenzy, prices in such areas as Detroit and Indianapolis have been stagnant. He explains how to analyze local real estate markets using factors such as employment, population, weather, schools, and even sports teams to gauge where the community is headed. Lereah considerably downplays the risks in the market due to the recent fallout from subprime-lending delinquencies, and he overemphasizes the view of a home as an investment rather than a place to live, but there is plenty of hard data here to educate prospective home buyers. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Business (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385519222
• ISBN-13: 978-0385519229
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #875,706 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Another swing, another miss., April 10, 2007

By	Brandon R. Sonderegger "Web Cartoonist" (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mr. Lereah likes to publish books. Tragically, they have almost comedic timing. He wrote a book on how to get rich in tech stocks that came out in 2000, when the tech stock market collapsed. His previous book was about how the housing market would continue to grow at double digit rates through the end of the decade. He then re-released it when it was obvious that there was a bubble with a new title on why the real estate bubble won't bust. That brings us to his latest book All Real Estate is Local. Now he tries to backpedal off of his hyping of the bubble areas and start bombastically declaring that even though the national trend of inflating housing prices across the country has stalled and is reversing, you can still find good deals if you start focusing on tinier and tinier sections of housing, down to individual neighborhoods. The cheap, easy money that fueled the boom is on the way out, and it will be harder and harder to qualify for loans and interest rates are likely to keep rising. The net result is stagnant or deflationary housing prices.

He's been wrong in his previous two books, and now he's swinging for the fences at a ball that's in the dirt for his third. Instead of saying "Buy everything!" like his last books, now he's saying "Move your buying to an area that isn't already wildly overpriced!" So write those checks for investment homes in Topeka, Kansas everybody!

If you want a book to educate you about real estate investing, this isn't it. If you want a book that tries to convince you to stuff money into some realtor's pocket, then this is the book for you. If you just want to buy yourself a home, forget all the real estate books and calculate your renting costs vs. your owning costs, and then make an informed decision as to when you want to purchase.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars My Gosh, June 8, 2007

By	Steven Cassinger (Charleston, SC) - See all my reviews

If you don't know already by this date, Mr. Lereah has resigned his post in the NAR. He is disagraced all over the internet as a liar (do a Google search) and rightfully so. If he believes what he says, at worst he's an ignorant fool. If he does not he's a lying fool...either way the man is a fool.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious Mea Culpa, February 3, 2009

By	NumbaCrunch (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

The real estate info in this book is decent; Lereah knows a bit about the housing market, clearly.

But even better, this book is a fantastic historical document, just because of its interesting role in the great housing bubble. Lereah pumped this book out in a hurry in 2007 when it was clear the predictions he made in his book from 2006 ("Why the boom will not bust - Real estate prices will rise for the rest of the decade") were falling to pieces.

This book is basically saying "ignore that, you can't generalize about real estate, it is all local". In 2007 that might have seemed to be a reasonable cover-your-butt strategy for Lereah, but unfortunately even this book's main point turned out to NOT be true; as we have seen, real estate prices in fact are highly correlated across markets, since they are heavily driven by the availability of finance, which is a national (if not international) factor. Prices in all 20 metropolitan areas that are measured by the S&P index are now falling in synch; if all real estate is local, this is quite a coincidence. The fact is that the same macroeconomic factors are driving ALL real estate markets. But the title "some parts of real estate are local" is not quite as catchy, I suppose.

Of course, if you continue to re-define a market small enough, you can find a neighborhood, street, or individiual house that bucks the trend. This is not exactly a phenomenon that is unique to real estate. In ANY data sample, there are individual examples that go against the trend. For example, if someone says the average person in a group is 20 pounds overweight, they do not mean that everyone in the group is exactly 20 pounds overweight -- there might be someone 70 lbs overweight and someone 30 lbs underweight in the mix. This variation doesn't mean that we should dismiss the "20 lbs overweight" average as meaningless; the average gives us some very good information about the group that we are measuring.

This is what Lereah would have you believe; that because there is some variation in the data, that the average of the data is meaningless. I guess if you look at the world that way, all EVERYTHING is local, since there is variation in every type of measurement. Lereah, as a trained economist, should know better than to abuse his readers' naivete about statistics in order to cover up his prediction mistakes.

If this book was an academic work, it would never survive the peer review of his fellow economists; they would blow it out of the water. But I think the target buyer of the book was a freshly-minted, newly blazered REALTOR in 2007, who will likely not hold David to the same standard as his economist peers. (just repeat "all real estate is local," and go out and sell some houses!)


OF COURSE it is true that any individual house may experience a price gain or drop that is different from the national average, but it is still exremely meainingful to follow macro trends, particularly now that global finance is more interdependent than ever. And those trends have proven Lereah quite spectaculary wrong.

He is now 0 for 3 in his predicting career; the two real estate books and his book about getting rich on internet stocks, released just as the NASDAQ collapsed. Lereah didn't bother to write a "cover up" book on that one, but presumably he could have: "All stocks are local; even as the NASDAQ is way down, if you look hard enough you can find a couple stocks within it that are up!" See how childish the argument sounds now that I put it in a different context?

Lereah should get out of the predicting business, or he should sign on with a hedge fund to make predictions, where the fund immediately trades the opposite of what he says. And when he writes a book, look out below.

[By the way, I read some books by a distant ancestor of Lereah's from Holland in 1637: "Are you missing the tulip boom" and "Why the tulip bulb bubble will not burst" - both quite good.]