Irvine Housing Blog

Lies…Damn Lies…and statistics…

Where are the $/sqft numbers?
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The market is something I’m watching closely.  Let’s all be patient and wait wait and wait!!!!

I thought MLSs in general frowned on relisting. But I see it all the time. What’s the deal?

I know the SoCal MLS isn’t going to provide DOM on the client reports anymore for some obfuscating reason. But it is *really* misleading to re-list and completely corrupt that data.

Example:
169 West Yale Loop #1, Irvine 92604
MLS S496691 listed 7/12/07.
Previously listed under MLS S480117.

There’s no way this could have sold and been back on the market with the same realtor/pics/price within a week, right?

I profiled this property on June 24th. It had just gone over 90 days on the market. This is an obvious “refresh” listing. Since they didn’t change the price, I don’t know what they expect to turn out differently.

Fingernails on the chalkboard with “skew the median.” Median is the middle value of a data set, (as opposed to the average) so it’s not sensitive to skew.

Granted, skew is not the right term. You understand the concept being illustrated. How else would you describe the effect? Distort? Made to look artificially high?

I think those would be good terms. “Distort”: and “made to look artificially high.”

Just something that says that “Higher dollar sales, which are less representative of aggregate fundamental value for the area have pulled this price index upward, when other more robust trends suggest the opposite.”

Yes, that is a much better explanation

It looks like 92618 increased both in median price (+41%) and sales volume (+10%) over last year.  Doesn’t that refute your argument?

But but those words are not in the Realtor book of adjectives. This book is also known by common folk as a thesaurus. Also many would be missing because they are not adjectives. Oh the confusion! I just don’t understand.

No it wouldn’t refute the data because the data found here is for sale and not sold. If and when they do sell the median price could drop. Maybe not. With only 22 sales it could change things very drastically. All it takes is 12 high end homes to skew the data. If you are an OC Register reader you would have read that John Karevoll of DataQuick has said that the higher end homes have been keeping the median price up.

IrvineRenter is more eloquent and knowledgeable than I am, but I’ll take a shot at answering your criticism, Anon. 

Even in a perfectly stable market, monthly median prices for one zip code fluctuate a lot from month to month, just because the group of properties sold in any one month will be better or worse overall than the group sold in another month.  If you were selling hundreds per month, this fluctuation would be less noticeable, but we’re selling just tens of properties per month in these zip codes.

Some of this fluctuation could be removed by recording the median price per sq foot.  Then a month with mostly bigger properties wouldn’t create a huge increase in the price, or vice versa.

My own view is that the data at this monthly zip code level of detail is too ‘noisy’ to discern trends except when the market is soaring or plummeting.  If I had the data, I’d graph the median price per square foot for each zip code in one price vs month chart that goes back at least 12-24 months.  That way you could see trends and get past the one-month blips.

That sounds like an awesome analysis. I hope someone gets you the sqft data!

Interesting article

Deja Vu All Over Again
http://ocpredicts.blogspot.com/2007/05/deja-vu-all-over-again.html

BTW - what is this Case-Shiller price index thing?  The graph is very interesting (click to enlarge), but there’s no key.  Is there a better URL to go to to understand the graph?