| Available Home Price Indices and Resources Are Flawed |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 05.02.2008 | |
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Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) Chris Plummer wrote a great piece for MarketWatch yesterday entitled, “Home-price data has its flaws; Market anomalies painting skewed picture, index producers acknowledge.” While I wish he would have picked up on my hypothesis that foreclosures are making Case-Shiller’s indices paint a more negative picture than really exists, I couldn’t have agreed more with the points made in the article. The article was more oriented towards consumers than housing professionals, but its conclusion was spot on: “If homeowners want to determine their property’s value, it’s never been more critical to take the measure of recent sales by home-price level in their town or city neighborhood.”
To make proper conclusions about nearly anything housing related, you must be able to understand the neighborhood level context, and by neighborhood I mean at least as granular as the zip code, but ideally more lower like census tract or block group or actual subdivision. And at that granular level you need to know: • What has sold and for what price? • Who lives there and who is moving there? • What can you learn about the type of customers and what they are buying? • What’s the current inventory? • What are the relevant trends? So to do this, we must go beyond admitting that just home price data are flawed—almost all existing housing information resources are flawed. The current state of this site included.  While no one covers as many metrics on as many markets as we do today, I created this site to provide intelligence of the caliber needed to make smart housing and residential investment decisions. And to really do that, we need to provide much more.We need granular home sales and home price data. By granular I mean down to the neighborhood. We need to be able to slice and dice home sales and home prices by existing vs. new, size of home, features of home, and type of home. We need to track home builders and their market share, price per square foot and more. We need to track permits and existing inventory. We need to track real consumer-driven demand, not the demand most people settle for (what sold last year). We need to track more real time information on listings—like total listings, average listing price, days on market, and trends. I will let you in on a secret. We can do all of the above. I’ve been seeking this holy grail for two years now. Each day I feel like I get three steps ahead, but sometimes I feel like I get shoved five steps back by the small-minded monopolies that control much of the above source data. But I swear to you, this vision will be built regardless of the data Goliaths who stand in our way. Right now I am raising investment capital so I can properly license all necessary data and complete the development to make this a reality. We know how to do it, so it’s only a matter of time. If you are interested in investing or simply want to put your name on an interest list for access to this kind of housing intelligence, please contact us and let us know of your interest. And stay tuned, as we will make progress quickly. 
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