About Us

In 2002, long-time Marin County, California realtor Nate Sumner had a problem. His clients were always asking him, “How hot is the market?” But there was no good answer to that question. Newspapers reported numbers that were sometimes months old, and usually were based on median home sale prices. But that couldn’t give a sense of the amount of activity that was going on in the moment.

So Nate got out his thinking cap (his Ph.D. from Brown University didn’t hurt), used his many years as a realtor and his interest in helping his clients, and came up with a calculation to give ONE NUMBER that would tell anyone just what kind of competition there was RIGHT NOW in an area or a price range. Nate called this number the Market Heat Index^®, and began to share it with clients and other realtors.

After a few years, the Index caught the eye of Ray Brown, who knew a good thing when he saw it. Ray had Nate as a guest on his radio show; then the Index was written up in a few articles. And realtors around the country and even in Canada began to ask for more.

Then Nate REALLY went to work. Data for San Francisco, Napa, Sonoma, Solano and Mendocino was collected beginning in 2006 to accompany the Marin County data from 2002 on, and the company was launched in 2007 to allow Realtors and their clients to use the Index for better tracking of the real estate markets.

So the Market Heat Index^® Company was born.