Roberta Murphy, a broker with the Murphy Group, a Windermere Exclusive Properties real estate agency in Carlsbad, created a blog to reach out to clients.

Rising rents, slowing sales, fluctuating inventory and increases in foreclosures are recent indicators of the health of the real estate market, but for the average buyer, deciphering these statistics and trends can be confusing.

Brokers, real estate agents and builders used to hold the key to decoding the myths and facts of the market bubble and market booms. But now, bloggers are offering an alternative voice in a turbulent real estate market.

Rich Toscano, a financial adviser with Pacific Capital Associates in San Diego, is one of many bloggers providing analysis and opinions online. Toscano is the creator of Professor Piggington’s Econo-Almanac for the Landed Poor, his Victorian-era mad science themed blog site at piggington.com, which offers statistical analyses of the Southern California housing market.

“People like data,” he said. “Anything with a graph, chart or an explanation of factually, verifiable data is interesting to a lot of people.”

Blogs such as Toscano’s are steadily emerging as a media tool for the real estate industry. A recent national survey conducted by the Global Research Center and sponsored by the Blogging Systems Group reported that 68 percent of real estate agents said they would be focusing on blogs as a marketing tool in 2007.

“Real estate blogs are an excellent way for real estate professionals to establish or expand their Internet presence,” said Richard Nacht, chief executive officer of Blogging Systems, a developer of community blog networks, in a release. “The Internet is now the number one place where home buyers and sellers go for real estate information. If realtors aren’t found online, there’s a good chance they won’t be found at all.”

A recent report from the California Association of Realtors found that 63 percent of home buyers found their Realtor through an Internet search. CAR also found that a typical buyer is now an Internet buyer. It reported that the number of home buyers who used the Internet as an integral part of the home buying process increased significantly in the past six years from 28 percent of all buyers in 2000 to 70 percent in 2006.

Seizing Control

In addition, CAR reported that a significant percentage of buyers indicated that the Internet helped them better understand the home buying process and put them in more control of that process.

On Toscano’s blog, he touches on topics such as population change, job growth and other economic factors.

He started in early May 2004 because he was convinced that the San Diego market was experiencing a substantial housing bubble, a conclusion he claims had many thinking he was mad, but he offered proof in the form of his graphs and charts. Toscano uses these tools to fill in the gaps and answer questions.

Toscano started his blog as a means of sharing analysis in a graphical format to friends and family. In the past three years, his online following has grown exponentially.

“I found a lot of people were interested in the topic,” he said. “I started getting a lot of traffic by people asking more questions, really good questions and challenging questions, and it has sort of evolved accordingly.”