Today was my mother’s PDI for her new condo. For those of you who aren’t in the industry, a PDI is a “pre-delivery inspection” that happens about a week or two before you take occupancy of a new home. It’s basically a time for you to identify all the mistakes that the construction team has made and have them (hopefully) correct them before you actually move in.

But for someone like my mother who is making the move from a house that she’s lived in for decades, a PDI is actually something much more significant: It’s the first time she saw her new “home.” And a home is something much different than just a house or a condo – it has emotional significance.

It’s going to be an adjustment for her. One of the first things she did was open up the oven to see if she could fit her Christmas turkey in it. But in the end, I have no doubt that she’s going to love her new home. As I’ve mentioned before, people often overestimate the potential risks of change. But never be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

I was reading Fred Wilson’s AVC.com blog this morning (as I do every morning), and I thought his post on trust was a really important one. He was talking about it in the context of building successful web applications, but I don’t think it’s only applicable to internet businesses.

As marketer Seth Godin wrote on his blog earlier this year, the most important questions are not:

Is my price low enough?

Is it reliable enough?

Do I offer enough features?

Am I on the right social media channels?

Is the website cool enough?

Am I promising enough?

No, the most important question in marketing something to someone who hasn’t purchased it before is,

“Do they trust me enough to believe my promises?”

Without that, you have nothing.

I thought this was such an awesome, yet simple, post that I actually circulated it to a bunch of people in the office after I read it. Because whether you’re marketing widgets, marketing private cloud storage, marketing to investors, or marketing new condominiums, that question of trust is paramount.

And it’s for that reason that I think social media and mediums such as blogging have become so important. Customers want to feel like they trust you before they buy your product. The best brands know this and forge “relationships” with their customers. And with the tools at our disposal today, it’s become a lot easier for companies to do that.

Last week a friend of mine sent me a really fascinating article from The Economist talking about the role of foreign investors in Vancouver’s housing market. If you subscribe to The Economist, you can click here to read the article. If you don’t subscribe, you’ll have to rely solely on what I’m about to say.

In case you weren’t aware, Vancouver is an incredibly expensive city when it comes to real estate. The average price for a single-family detached house is now around C$1 million. By some measures, that makes it the most expensive housing market in North America. Here’s a chart that looks at house prices as they relate to household income:

According to The Economist, the median household income in Vancouver is $68,970. This places them 23rd out of 28 in terms of Canada’s major cities. So how is it that homes are, on average, selling for $1 million? The locals don’t seem to be able to afford them.

Well, it’s a well known fact that Chinese buyers continue to be an integral part of Vancouver’s housing market. In fact, up until this year, Canada offered a fast track option for citizenship applications if you brought at least $800,000 into the country.

So we know that foreign buyers are having an impact. It’s a phenomenon we’re seeing in many other cities around the world, such as London. But to what extent is hard to measure–which has forced analysts to get creative.

To try and figure out what percentage of homes are going to foreign buyers, analysts have been looking at macro data, filing through sales records, and even monitoring utility bills to see which homes might be sitting empty.

What they found is that there’s a fairly significant correlation between economic activity in China, and Vancouver’s housing market. When the Chinese economy does well, so do Vancouver homes. Interesting. Still, that doesn’t quantify impact.

When analysts looked for utility bills that would suggest an empty home, they found that only about 8% of high end downtown condos were likely sitting empty. That’s a relatively small amount. It could be vacancy rate.

But when they looked for “mainland Chinese-sounding names” on sales records, they found that for homes priced $3M and up, almost ¾ of the buyers could be from mainland China. Now that’s a significant number!

I found this all rather fascinating and I thought you all might as well. It yet again reminds me of how much opacity there is in real estate markets. We’re all craving better data. Why else would people be scouring utility bills?