Square footage is the most common driver of a comparables approach to market valuation of real estate. For example #SF x average comparable sale price per square foot = market value assessment. There are other methods of valuation, but this is most common. It's also laden with complexity. 

Jonathan Stempel of Reuters wrote yesterday that Berkshire Hathaway's "oracle" Warren Buffett sees the housing crisis as mostly behind us, as do we at our firm. Writes Stempel:

The inestimable Dawn Kopecki of Bloomberg posts this headline yesterday about some possible White House moves to ban some foreclosures -- at least for people under review for permanent loan modification. Right now, foreclosures are still allowed even while homeowners are under review for a loan modification program. Apparently the action under consideration at The White House would now allow foreclosure during that period. This would help. It would help homeowners acting in good faith to keep their homes - and it would help communities who suffer high foreclosure rates, which affect, at least for now, property values.

Okay so reading this blog is like getting the news 6 weeks early. Granted, I thought it would make the news at the end of September, and here it is in today's Times:

Okay so new home sales numbers weren't reported to be up last week. So? First of all, the housing market is local in nature. If all politics is local as Tip O'Neill said, then real estate and housing is darn near skin-tight.

Reuters and their James Pethokoukis reports this morning from New Delhi that the CEO of gigantic PC chip maker Intel is forecasting significantly improved growth in corporate PC spending in 2010, which would be great news for the local north Houston tech market, including huge local PC and tech employer HP.

Cars who pass busses with children aboard them, drivers who talk on cell phones through school speed zones, they deserve tickets and fines wrapped up in string - these are a few of my "favorite" things...

The Houston Chronicle reports of the spring opening of the 3rd YMCA of The Woodlands in the (still) new Village of Creekside Park, the first Village of The Woodlands on the south side of Spring Creek, which formally lands it in Harris County as opposed to the rest of The Woodlands in Montgomery County.

The website alexa.com tracks various statistics regarding web traffic across the Internet worldwide. Its methods are sometimes questioned - full disclosure - they use a large sample of people who download their "toolbar" is how I understand they get their sample. Nonetheless it's a commonly referenced source for Internet traffic statistics.