The Forbes.com Web site confuses me. I know they’re trying to have more pages, so each page can have more ads, thus more ad revenue, but as far as navigating it, I always find it frustrating.

But what’s not frustrating is that Forbes’ analysts are high on Louisville real estate. So much so that again this year they rank our fair city quite high—4th in the country, in fact. Just last November, Francesca Levy had Louisville at #17 in her Best Bang-For-The-Buck Cities, which I posted here. So now, just over half a year later, she’s moved us up 13 spots.

1. Pittsburgh, Pa.
2. Indianapolis, Ind.
3. Chattanooga, Tenn.
4. Louisville, Ky.
5. Oklahoma City, Okla.
6. Syracuse, N.Y.
7. Rochester, N.Y.
8. Columbia, S.C.
9. Dayton, Ohio
10. Cincinnati, Ohio

Feel free to read the entire piece, Most Affordable Places to Buy a Home, where you’ll find this paragraph highlighting Louisville.

In the Midwest, neighboring Indiana and Kentucky both boast metros high on the list: Indianapolis, Ind., came in second place, and Louisville, Ky., placed fourth. Homeowners in both cities spend around 20% of their income on the monthly costs of ownership. That’s an added perk to the already low cost of housing–in Indianapolis, 95% of residents can afford a median-priced home, more than anywhere else in the country.

The fine folks at Fixr have updated their Home Improvement graphic with new numbers. I believe it’s interesting to see how the highs of 2007 have been dropping even as home sales have dropped at the same time. This says that most consumers aren’t very optimistic about the direction of our economy.

If you’re a Louisville home owner, feel free to click on our Home Improvement category for all the posts related to improving your Louisville home.

We began this feature on Louisville Homes Blog back in April and will be updating this chart periodically. Putting this data into chart form makes it easier to discern trends against past performance. Enjoy!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Usually, I’m all about charts, maps, graphs… you get the picture. When I read the excerpt from a Web site I visit regularly, I was excited to try it out for my hometown of Louisville, KY.

Trouble is, this might be one of those few times where the picture doesn’t communicate the information very well. Maybe another kind of chart would work better?

All I can tell is that it appears that more people are moving out of Louisville than are moving in. This agrees with census data that says we’ve lost 13,000 people since 1990.

When I became a Realtor in Louisville, I had a standard cell phone but I knew I needed a more powerful communication tool. So I performed some research and eventually purchased a BlackBerry.

This new device was certainly better than my Samsung but it wasn’t incredible. Email was much better, texting was good, but surfing the Web was horrible. It would also crash unpredictably to which tech support gave me the “reboot the phone and try again” routine. Personally, I wondered what all the hype was about. Looking at this survey, it seems a lot of real estate agents have followed this path.

I’m curious to see next year’s survey and how much Android increases. I predict it takes major market share away from BlackBerry with the iPhone inching up as well.

The Smartphone brand holds closely to the OS as you would expect. The phone I own now is a MyTouch from T-Mobile. This phone so much better than my BlackBerry it’s hardly worth discussing. From texting, Web surfing, contact management, calendar integration with Google, and the ability to add new, useful applications, I find it hard to understand why anyone would continue with a BlackBerry. I’m really impressed with my HTC product.

Here are some of the other items of note from the survey. Email remains the top reason for a real estate agent acquiring a smartphone. In fact, email (88.4%) is only slightly behind making a phone call (91.2%) in most used feature. The most used downloadable applications are for social media, with Twitter being the most likely winner in that war.

83.5% of all respondents are either Satisfied or Extremely Satisfied with their smartphone with iPhone owners leading the way in this category.

For the record, the saddest result in the survey is that 17.5% have no interest in getting a smartphone despite the high level of satisfaction among smartphone owners. Just goes to show that new technology is not for everyone.

In Louisville-Jefferson County, home prices, including distressed sales, declined by -0.73 percent in March 2010 compared to March 2009. This compares to February’s year-over-year HPI, which was 0.87 percent.** Excluding distressed transactions, year-over-year HPI for March is 1.87 percent [editor: that's an increase], compared to February which was 0.37 percent.

CoreLogic is projecting the 12-month forecast for Louisville-Jefferson County home prices, including distressed sales, will be 1.63 percent.

Putting data into chart form almost always communicates better than simply reading the data. For example, looking at the chart above that shows the total number of homes sold by year in Louisville, KY.

It’s clear that 2008 and 2009 have been tremendously down years, when compared to the previous five. But look back to the levels of the late 90′s and early 00′s and they are right in line. Interesting.

Ivan Turgenev would have been proud. He originally authored, “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.”

In Louisville-Jefferson County, home prices, including distressed sales, increased by 0.87 percent in February 2010 compared to February 2009. This compares to January’s year-over-year HPI, which was -0.10 percent.** Excluding distressed transactions, year-over-year HPI for February is 0.37 percent, compared to January which was 0.92 percent.

First American CoreLogic is projecting the 12-month forecast for Louisville-Jefferson County home prices, including distressed sales, will be 1.66 percent.

The housing market increased 0.87 compared to the national average of 0.30. The 12-month forecast for all of Kentucky is 0.9% compared to a prediction of -3.4% for the nation. So you can see that Louisville real estate is, at this point, outperforming the country.

Below is the entire chart if you’d like to see each state’s performance and forecast. More can also be found in their white paper titled, Measuring the Effect of the Housing Stimulus Programs on Future House Prices (PDF).

February HPI State and National Ranking:

Source: First American CoreLogic, LoanPerformance HPI as of February 2010.

The National Association of Realtors said Monday its seasonally adjusted index of sales agreements rose 8.2 percent from January to a February reading of 97.6. January’s reading was revised slightly downward to 90.2.

A lot of this is due to the tax incentives that are due to expire on April 30, 2010, but still it’s positive news. What will be more telling is the numbers for May and how they compare to the last two years.

This second piece of news isn’t as bright in regards to home prices in Louisville. According to this report by Fiserv, Louisville home prices dropped -2.3%. The more interesting prediction is that they believe that prices will continue to drop in Louisville until the 4th Quarter of 2010 but will return to previous levels by the 4th Quarter of 2012. See the image below to see how Louisville compares to other Metro areas.

As you can see, Louisville’s housing market is outperforming every city on this list. That’s impressive.