Week 4:The search narrows

1.     This week while I researched my topic I learned that the current budding crisis in the housing market is new home construction. Finding this answered my research question. Now I know what people are looking at in the new construction industry. With this knowledge I will be able to focus my research to few specific questions. How does this article relate to the California building outlook? What are the steps that new home builders need to take to address this issue?

2.     The strategy that was most helpful was to recall information that I can about throughout the week in this topic. I had read several articles talking about this topic and chose the source that provided me with the most current data.

3.     The difficulty I had was determining which article gave me the most useful data. I chose this article because of the many charts and graphs that were available to me. I had to do a brief analysis of large amounts of information to decide what would be the right choice.

4.     This week I was able to answer a lot of ongoing questions. This article gives me more ideas on what I need to research in the future to narrow my searches. From now on I hope that I am able to be more efficient when gather data. I know what I need to answer rather than just gathering general information on the topic.

Week 3!

1.      What knowledge did you gain about your topic as a result of the books you looked at this week? 9 points

2.      What new search strategies were particularly helpful for you in locating books?  Be specific and refer to the notes you took on your search path. 9 points

3.      What difficulties or frustrations did you experience when searching for books? 9 points

4.      What are you hoping to find out as you continue researching your topic? 8 points

1.     I learned that housing markets can be very volatile. While much research and speculation goes into trying to predict housing markets even some experts get things wrong. The 2008 housing market went largely unnoticed before its collapse. Government policy plays a large role in the health of housing markets. Good policies in the housing market can grew entire economies while poor decisions can prove disastrous.

2.     My topic is fairly specific and information needs to be very current. I had a difficult time finding books that worked for what I needed. When I searched for more generic terms I was able to get results. Then by searching for the last ten years I was able to find a couple results that I could use.

3.     Getting a book published takes a lot of time. This made it hard for me to find results that specifically discussed the future of the California housing market. I wish I was able to find something detailing California specifically but I had to settle on an overview of the housing market. This turned out to be beneficial information that I didn’t know I needed.

4.     I hope as I continue to research that I am able to find specific subtopics that I can research. I will do some more reading into the text book that I found for this week’s assignment. This should be able to point me in new directions

First Week of Research

During this week’s research learned that there are many people out their collection data on the topic of new construction. This industry drives several other type of business. The health of the housing market is important to people that invest in the stock markets as well as a way to track the growth of the economy. The search strategies that I used was first to find current publications. Projection for a year ago are no longer valuable because many things have changed. My article referenced the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates low. This makes getting loans for building new homes cheaper and more attractive to consumers. One other thing that I wanted to find was data that showed all sectors of the new construction industry. I need to be able to compare different type of construction and different regions to formulate a proper outlook on new single family home construction in California. Next I will begin researching more factors involved in why the industry is expected to grow. I think that different policy decisions as well as availability of previous homes will affect projection’s

Hello all, this is my very first class at Brandman University. I have an Associate’s Degree from the College of Southern Nevada and I am pursuing a Bachelor’s in Business Administration. My current employment is with a custom home builder where I work as the Project Manager. I hope once completing this degree I will be able to move on to high level management somewhere else or a fall back plan is to get into teaching.

I would like to research market trends in new construction. I want to be able to find when people are building new houses and what to expect in the future. This would help me in my career because I want to know the future stability of the local markets. Then if I find they are expected to be poor in this area I can think of where the company or myself should focus our efforts.

I have always had a difficult time finding relevant information. It is easy to recognize what source is credible or what type of bias they may have to certain things. It takes my quite a bit of sorting to get to what I need. This wastes a lot of valuable time.