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| Builders Advised to Get Intelligence from Car Dealers? |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 05.22.2008 | |
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Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) I had to check the date on a new article in Professional Builder to make sure it wasn’t a late April Fool’s joke.  No fooling, though. The article seemed right up my alley by its title: “Keep Your Eye on the Data: Don’t wait for us to tell you when we’ve bottomed out. Watch your local data for signs of the upswing.”The article was a recap of key predictors of a housing turnaround that were apparently presented at the International Builder Show in February by one of the industry’s leading experts, Chuck Shinn. The predictors reported weren’t what shocked me, although including not one metric about demand and consumers (household formation, ownership, employment, income, bankruptcies) was a real let down. The shocker was this recommendation, which I am quoting directly from the online article: “You’ve got the internal data, but where do you go for the rest? Make friends with your local car dealer and try to arrange an agreement where you can see what they gather, he says. Dealers watch local housing market data like hawks — and getting into conversations about their sales rates can tip you off to your market’s economy, too.”
This is SO WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS I can’t even calm my fingers down to list the reasons why. Perhaps I should shut down www.housingintelligence.com and simply redirect traffic to a listing of all local car dealers. 
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