The Usual Suspects
It used to be that you would just look at industry reports or the newspapers to get a good idea of what the current state of the real estate market is. But many people find that industry reports from places like the California Association of Realtors or the National Association for Realtors tends to be overly optimistic. Blogs tend to have a more balanced (or pessimistic) point of view.
Also, blogs are written immediately about whatever current trend or crisis in the real estate market is. Newspaper reports take time to research and write, unless they have a reporter who is also a realtor. With real estate market blogs, you get the inside look at what is going on within the industry by people who are specialized in real estate.
Choosing A Blog
There are millions of blogs out there, and thousands related to the national or international real estate market. How do you choose from them all? If there is a specific area of the country or world you want to research, then that cuts out a lot of blogs right there.
You also want to avid any blogs that use a lot of expletives or curse words in almost every post. That is usually a sign of someone with a chip on their shoulder and not a source of accurate information. Any blog that is linked to of quoted from by many other real estate market blogs is also a sign of an important source of current news.
One of the factors that major search engines like Google or Yahoo! uses to correlate their page rank numbers is how many other websites link to a particular site. They also tend to rank higher pages that get updated more often than those that are only updated sporadically. Just by typing "real estate market blog" and any specific location name into your favorite search engine can help you quickly locate a good blog.