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| Are You Interested in Creating Better Housing Intelligence Together? |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 04.08.2008 | |
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Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) Housing is an industry plagued with an inability to share a common view of some very important concepts. If we can’t even agree on the facts, how could our leaders possibly debate strategies and policies? Furthermore, if you are an analyst like me you must also be antagonized by the fact that some of the most basic data we need to produce the best analysis for our stakeholders is limited, lacking or held for a king’s ransom by property data barons who do not understand the disservice they provide to this industry, country and the world economy. How many of you know what the existing home sales were in your market last year? How about your zip code? If you think defining home sales is difficult, try defining new home sales. The Commerce Department reports national new home sales monthly, but good luck getting reliable counts in most of the markets where we all focus our attention. For example, two reputable sources track new home sales in Atlanta. To get their data you must have individual licenses, each costing ten figures. And neither source will sell to consultants to use their data for clients. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of these old school companies and their lock on housing data. I know “we,” as in all of us independent researchers united, could do better. And Atlanta is lucky. Try getting new home sales numbers for Athens, GA, Chattanooga, TN, Hilton Head, SC, Panama City, FL, or Lexington, KY – just to name a few of the markets I’ve had to figure out how to analyze. This problem applies to the vast majority of markets around the country. Can you measure the inventory of new homes? What about the days on market of the total listings? How do you track home prices? Can you do it at a level lower than counties? There are now SIX different home price index products available or soon to be released. Four indices offer some valuable improvements over the widely used and “easy” to access median existing home price data from NAR and OFHEO’s somewhat limited repeat sales index. The alternative indices that are being marketed today offer more comprehensive and granular views of changes happening in home prices. But guess what? They all are chasing Wall Street and the largest mortgage companies as their licensing is close to or more than six figures for a single year. Furthermore, they restrict usage to “internal use only.” Can any of you afford this? I’ve spent the last several years of my life finding the best possible data for tracking and measuring housing. It’s been a maddening and less than satisfying experience. Today we offer reports through www.HousingIntelligence.com that include as much valuable intelligence as we’ve been able to cost-effectively license, but I’m not satisfied with what we have. I won’t be satisfied until we can much more thoroughly cover critical metrics such as the following:
The good news is that I’ve found ways to produce reliable measures of the above. The bad news is that my means to tackle doing this consistently across the country are limited. So I am reaching out to you, my fellow housing market researchers. This is a plea to all of you who want better housing intelligence. Together we might be able to do what none of us can do alone. Please think of www.HousingIntelligence.com and our company, BlueSmoke, as a service bureau for housing intelligence rather than one of many market research consultants competing for market reviews and feasibility studies. I’d rather help other researchers have the best data and analysis than chase consulting projects to compete with other independent shops. I’m convinced that by working together we’ll all be better off.  Wherever you may be based, if you join with us and are an independent researcher, we will refer work to you that comes across our transom. Together we’ll produce analysis from the best data we can find and local market insights you can provide, so it will be hard for “old school” companies to match what we can do together.Likewise, if you are responsible for housing intelligence inside a developer, builder, investment fund, broker or other company, we can humbly produce the reports, inputs and models you need. You can focus on doing the analysis rather than gathering the data. I’m convinced that with enough of us, we can get at least one of these home price index providers to come up with a better model for licensing and access that will enable us to have better home price data. Just being able to quantify how many of us there are and how many are interested in better data would go a long way to convincing a few of the more forward thinking companies. Likewise, we can fix the new home sales and inventory issues on a market by market basis by building up our own databases of comprehensive detailed permitting and home sales data. Out of the gate I can offer our powerful and comprehensive way of quantitatively defining new home demand based on consumer segmentation models. We’re already providing our demand and consumer group information to other researchers across the country. We’d be happy to add you to the fold. Let’s make an impact on this industry! If you are interested in networking with us and fellow housing market researchers around the county, I invite you to join our “Housing Intelligence Professionals” group at LinkedIn. We’ll use this group to network, to collaborate on our data efforts, and to share opportunities. You don’t have to buy any of our data to join the network. I’m just using our name so we can have a cool name and logo. I don’t know where this will head, but I do know that together we can produce some amazing things that I dare say none of us are capable of doing on our own. Are you “HIP” to that? 
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