Huntsville Area Association of REALTORS® (HAAR) announced a new partnership with the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) earlier today. For some time now, HAAR REALTORS® have been asking for more information about how the housing market in our area is impacting our overall economy, what are the trends to which we can look at to further understand our housing market, and how can we begin to aggregate data to see trends rise up for us to see. In response to this, in December HAAR board of directors meeting they approved a new economics research partnership with the University of Alabama-Huntsville Economics Department. The team of economists at UAH who will study our housing data as found in our MLS, along with the historical research that is provided by the Alabama Center for Real Estate and the REALTORS Property Resource benefit from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) as well as the research produced by Dr. Lawrence Yun, NAR’s Chief Economist and his staff. This new study will give our members here in Huntsville a deeper dive on housing data in a quarterly and semi-annual report about the state of our housing economy. Specifically, we plan to make these reports available to REALTOR® companies to white label alongside the association to give consumers the most accurate picture of housing data in our area. Our hope is that this type of deep-dive reporting will firmly secure REALTORS® as the “Voice of Real Estate” in North Alabama.
“This is something we’ve never done before – and something our area has never had access to on this level. We are excited to bring this to every member of HAAR later this Spring and throughout 2018,” said 2018 HAAR President Valerie Miles.
The team of researchers from UAH consists of: Dr. Al Wilhite, Chair of the Department of Economics at UAH, Jeff Thompson, from the UAH Center for Management and Economic Research, Dr. Brinda Mahalingam, researcher and professor at UAH, and Maddie Glosemeyer, student assistant to the project. Also several HAAR board members are serving as the task force to oversee this project: Sharita Whitehead, Jim Johnson, Jay Jones, and Bill Stewart.
We expect the first report to become available to all HAAR members in the coming months.