This post comes to us from BrokerageU:

As a real estate professional, you pride yourself in not only knowing the community you serve from the inside out, but also the homes for sale you have listed in the area. In addition, you might also have a passing interest in keeping up with the overall health of the U.S. economy and national housing market trends, but it's equally important that you provide your current and potential clients with trustworthy and accurate access to this information.

While maintaining your blog, it's obviously important to highlight every day tips that home owners and prospective home buyers can utilize to make the housing market work for them, no matter what shape it happens to be in. But it's also wise to sprinkle in some housing data and analysis from trusted, reputable sources to give your readers an inside look at the inner workings of the national housing market, and hopefully lead them to take away some positives that could help them in their search to buy or sell a home.

A few of these trusted, reputable sources that report on national and regional housing market trends and data, include:

• The National Association of REALTORS® - Billed as "The Voice for Real Estate," NAR releases monthly data that breaks down home sales on not just a national level, but on a regional level, as well.

• Freddie Mac - The government entity puts out a weekly report analyzing the latest mortgage rate trends. These weekly rate averages are compared against not only the week prior's, but the year before's as well, giving the reader plenty of context as to where mortgage rates are, and an idea as to where they might be heading.
• U.S. Census Bureau - The pulse of the national economy is very much entwined in the health of the housing market, which is why the monthly report from the Census Bureau, which covers everything from employment figures to housing data, is very relevant to new home buyers and sellers.

Reporting on the housing market: Do's and Don'ts

You obviously don't want to spend the precious space on your blog reporting on news that could potentially dissuade a potential client from buying or selling a house. Yet you also don't want to betray the trust of your readers by falsely or misrepresenting housing industry news. That is why it is so crucial to look at the latest housing market trends from a perched location, overseeing every aspect and picking out what is positive and highlighting it.

The housing market is a great machine with many moving parts, from median prices to sales to mortgage rate averages. A strong understanding of these moving parts will lead to you singling out and accentuating the positive takeaways. For example, at first glance and to the untrained eye, rising home prices might be a negative to potential buyers. But if the rising prices are the direct result of a hot market and high competition among bidders, and mortgage rates are trending downward, this news can easily be framed as a positive for those interested in buying a new home.

It isn't your job to report the news, but being open and informative with your clients and keeping them abreast of the latest industry trends can go a long way in cultivating a relationship built on trust.