Real estate agents and brokers often make the case that real estate is local, particularly when talking about the need to differentiate sales activity and prices and other aspects of the local housing market from the national scene.

The topic came up when I did a Q&A with Virgil Wells, the president of the Tacoma-Pierce County Association of Realtors, in today’s paper. When I asked him whether there’s merit in concerns real estate consumers might have after seeing the collapse of Bear Stearns and a fluctuating stock market, here’s what he had to say:

“No, not at all. All real estate is local. We’re very fortunate in the Pacific Northwest, because we have a strong economy, and we have extremely affordable mortgage rates, and we have, in most areas of Pierce County, affordable housing. So our market will not change because of national stock market news.”

What do you think? Can the housing sector in one area be insulated from what happens outside it? Or, in an increasingly global economy, does Pierce County’s housing market share in the economic reverberations that can come from any number of sources, from Bear Stearns to Bank of America to Ben Bernanke.