The Res/Nonres. Triangle: A Tale of Three Sites

This month in our review of Web sites, we turn our attention to three significant sites: one covers the residential markets (the Meyers Group) and two cover the nonresidential side of things.

The Meyers Group

This site, meyersgroup.com, is a solid provider of residential data. Although targeted toward real estate professionals, the site offers housing analyses and information. Some reports include project sales rankings, builder market share report, net sales by price distribution, geographic sales price per square foot analysis, and average square feet by price distribution.

You'll find plenty of brief analyses covering housing growth rankings, a public builder i.hotnessle ranking, a bevy of economic and U.S. housing market indicators as well.

Some of the current statistics you'll find at the Meyers Group site include housing completions, housing starts, housing vacancies (single-family and multi-family), median prices for a new home, median prices of existing homes, mortgage rates, multi-family permits, new and existing home sales, single-family permits, the housing market index, as well as the new mortgage application index.

Meyers Group site draw back? For access to the more detailed reports, you must be an existing client of the Meyers group. Also report prices are quite steep.

CB Richard Ellis

Surf to www.cbrichardellis.com and you'll be treated to a noteworthy site. At first look, the CB Richard Ellis home page, formerly CB Commercial, doesn't appear to be that impressive. However, one click on the Market Research link will reveal a page that's a vertiable treasure trove of complete, no cost, nonresidential reports -- including both U.S. and global market reports and studies.

On the Market Research page, you"ll discover some significant freebies, saved in the standard Adobe Acrobat format: check out the semi-annual Global Market Watch (real estate trends) and Global Market Rents (office rents and occupancy rates). Scroll down the page and you'll be excited to find U.S. quarterly industrial and office vacancy reports.

CB Richard Ellis site drawback? None at all.

Grubb & Ellis Company

Grubb & Ellis Company site, at www.grubb-ellis.com, provides several reports on commercial property for both local and national markets. You can view the first page of many these reports for free! Click the Research link on the home page. Then click either the local or national links.

Under the local research link, you'll also find metro market trend reports for both the industrial and office sectors for nearly 40 metro areas. And the you can view the first page free of each report, as long as you have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Under the national research link, you can preview their National Real Estate Forecast and bi-annual national market trends for the industrial, office, and retail sectors.

Grubb & Ellis Company site drawback? Much of their information is published infrequently, so the information can be somewhat dated.