Hi Everyone,
My name is Lawrence, and I am a research associate at the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at UC Riverside. We are currently running a prediction market that I thought you would be interested in. The market is to attempt to predict the direction of the Real Estate market using web traffic to popular Real Estate websites. I’ve pasted our boilerplate description below. You can check it out at http://www.elabexchange.com. Oh, and if you make the most accurate predictions you could win a $25 gift card.

Cheers,
Lawrence

With home loan interest rates at historic lows, and the government doing almost everything in its power to encourage lending, the real estate market appears to be moving in a slightly positive direction. The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that new housing starts for February 2009 were up 22% over January 2009 (though still significantly down compared to February 2008). Recent news stories report that February sales in the Inland Empire of California, Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Gulf Coast of Florida – areas hit hardest by the housing slump – are up by nearly 80% over February of last year.

Spring is the traditional home buying season and many real estate professionals are predicting a significant “spring bounce.” Predict the Spring increase or decrease in traffic to 5 popular websites people use to find potential properties. Will traffic to these websites be a marker for the real estate recovery? YOU be the judge!!