Silicon Valley Real Estate Investor

via California’s Home Inventory Shrinks to a 5-Year Low, by Jim Carlton, on Wall Street Journal Website, published 1/23/10.
SAN FRANCISCO—California’s inventory of unsold, previously owned homes shrank to a five-year low in December, in another sign that the state may be coming out of its worst housing slump in decades.
The supply of unsold single-family homes [...]

Part 3 – Looking beyond the trend

Once you as a data analyst have determined a trend (and I’m assuming for purposes of this article that this is a real trend and not wishful interpretation of “noise”), that’s when it really gets interesting.

It’s often not enough just to say that a key indicator is going up or down. Rather than use that as a conclusion, it is important to use that a starting point for a series of other questions that will help you understand better the matter at hand. Some of these questions might include: …

Part 2 – Understanding how to interpret Margin of Error

Different sampling choices and methods yield results with different margins of error. This is like saying that the actual answer could be higher or lower by a certain (also calculatable) amount.

For example …

Part 1 – Understanding Seasonally Adjusted Data

If you’ve ever read market reports, economic data, housing statistics, etc, you’ve probably experienced that strange sense of wondering whether the numbers in front of you are really all that meaningful or significant. Sure, they may seem impressive, but, is up really up, and is a trend really a trend? Are we really seeing what we think we’re seeing? Do our figures represent the whole picture, or are they distracting us from another truth? As one Aaron Levenstein once said, “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”

ForeclosureRadar.com recently released its revamped California Foreclosure Report.

This is a must-read for the California real estate investor. The short report draws some interesting conclusions about foreclosure filing rates (123% over last year), inventory levels, discounting, and other statistics.

Browsing through real estate statistics, In a report released by the California Association of Realtors, two cities in Silicon Valley, Cupertino and Mountain View, made the list of the 10 cities with the highest median home prices in California during August. The top 10 were:

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Saratoga, $1.33 million.
Palos Verdes, $1.17 million
Newport Beach, $1 million
Los Gatos, [...]

The answer: not much! … at least according to Coldwell Banker’s recently-released Home Price Comparison Index (press release, data chart).
That is to say, Palo Alto, California and Salinas, Ecuador came in at opposite ends of the spectrum in this annual comparison of average prices for similar 2,200-square foot, 4 bed, 2.5 bath homes across the [...]

Both foreclosure activity and Notices of Default dropped sharply in Silicon Valley last month, but no one is ready to call it a trend because the underlying causes are still there – negative equity and delinquent payments.

I found an interesting article out on cyberspace today.

On the one hand, we want to believe that the market is recovering, evidenced by the fact that in select locations we are seeing bidding wars reminiscent of the good old days.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t be making data trends out of anecdotes. This high level of activity is concentrated on the lower end, but at the same time we know that things are generally sluggish at the high end.

Here are some take-aways: …