The Business Journal of Phoenix is first with the news of November's overall appreciation numbers:

[T]he median home price is back on the rise. After a decline in October to $259,900, the price returned to the record level of $263,000 set in September.

The Business Journal is a boring old just-the-facts kind of paper, so we'll have to wait for the Arizona Republic to discover a cloud wrapped around the silver lining. We already know from the Bloodhound Market-Basket of Homes that the price news that actually matters is relatively good. And for reasons unknown, the seemingly unfounded claim By Dr. Jay Butler of ASU that some huge proportion of currently offered homes are investor-owned does not appear in this report. It will be interesting to see how the Republic handles this, too.

That fact that the news is very good--prices are holding and we've set a record pace for the year--calls even greater attention to the amazing number of doom and gloom stories that have appeared lately. The Federal Reserve Bank raised its interest rates again yesterday, so presumably we can look forward to more misinformation about how this relates to mortgage rates. Sellers are having to wait quite a bit longer to reap their windfalls of 50%-100%, so maybe that will be the flavor-of-the-month outrageous tragedy to turn good news into bad.

It's all one, really. Either you can see the sky with your own eyes or you are doomed to take someone's word about it. I don't look for clouds to whine about in the clear Arizona skies, but I don't encourage anyone to trust my testimony, either. I work from facts and reasonable--meaning pessimistic--inferences based on those facts. I'm happy enough to tell you what I think, but I can't think for you. In any case, I am not a Pollyanna. I don't care for the despair-mongering and sky-is-falling predictions that appear in the public prints, but only because these are contrary to the actual, uncontested evidence of experience in the Phoenix-area market.

So here's some really good news from RealEstateJournal.com: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is about to start a Real Estate Futures market. Futures markets are much better predictors of future market activity than supposedly objective researchers like Dr. Jay Butler of ASU. The reason is simple: People are much less likely to be thoughtless when they have a large financial stake in their decisions.

Also from RealEstateJournal.com comes "The 10 Hottest Trends In the U.S. Housing Market." What's interesting to me about this article is what it portends about future long-term appreciation in the Valley of the Sun. I want to work from evidence in my own market, not gut feelings, not allegedly 'national' trends, and I do not ever want to treat real estate like a short-term securities investment.

So consider these trends cited by the Journal:

• Land-use regulations
• Creative loans
• Foreign investment
• Families owning two or more homes

These four trends, assuming they have enduring strength, will tend to drive up demand--and hence sales prices--for Valley real estate. Add to that our steady in-migration and our emergence as a choice destination for California second- and retirement-home buyers, and our long term prospects look very good to me.

If some declaimer-of-gloom, or just an habitual contrarian, wants to disagree with me, that's fine. But I want to hear facts and reasonable inferences based on facts, not gut-feelings, shaggy-dog stories or assertions of a predestinate fate. After all, we have the Business section Arizona Republic for that kind of nonsense.