There is no better time to find talent than today, so we are making a big addition to our management team, adding Carl Reichardt Jr. as our new Managing Director of Research. Carl will help translate all of the great research we already do into great decisions for each of our clients, and make sure we continue to identify and analyze new housing trends so our clients stay many steps ahead of the competition. For those of you who only receive these free emails, feel free to contact Holly to learn about all additional insight you could get as a client.

Since our client webinar last January, we have been defending our realism, which was viewed as optimism by most of our clients, whether they are builders, developers, product manufacturers, private equity investors or public markets investors. We called for home prices to fall slightly (we projected a 3% decline in Case Shiller in our 3/11 US Housing Analysis and Forecast report), a tough three years selling homes, and a construction recovery that is exactly the time for patient money (5-10 year money) to invest wisely. Most money is not that patient, so the challenge for each of our clients continues to be when to increase their investments.

In 2002, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta of the Oakland A's figured out how to find baseball players who were undervalued by relying on quantitative research that disproved rules of thumb that scouts had been using for years. In 2011, we saw many of our clients doing the same.