There’s a company called Local Market Monitor, who claims on their website that they have “over twenty years of proven expertise and trend analysis in evaluating residential property values”.
Lately they have been ranking which towns across America have the best chance of having their real estate appreciate in 2011. Except they are apparently conflicted:
In December, their top 5 towns were quoted in msn.com as:
1. San Diego (1%)
2. Oklahoma City
3. Tulsa
4. Cincinnati
5. Lexington
In January they were quoted at forbes.com:
1. San Jose
2. Santa Ana
3. Bethesda
4. Pittsburgh
5. San Diego (2%)
If you are going to say that you feel pretty good about San Diego or any town, that’s one thing. But if you’re ranking them a month apart, do you mind being consistent? The credibility is suspect when people see stuff like this, plus how you can predict the future anyway?
This is what the president said in the Forbes article:
LMM tracks 315 American real estate markets, assessing values and applying Investment Suitability ratings based on multiple factors. For the Forbes lists, LMM President Ingo Winzer and his researchers started with a U.S. Census-defined list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas with populations of 500,000 residents or more. They then analyzed key economic factors that directly affect housing markets: unemployment and job growth rates, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. LMM tracks real estate markets’ valuations based on the theory that markets go through cycles.
Whatever….a consistent message goes a lot further!
Jim,
Have you seen this?
http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-housing-collapse-in-us-history-2011-2
What passes as “expert opinion” these days is suspect. I’d like to see more “experts” with a vast knowledge of their field, common sense and a dose of street smarts.
The #13 slide in that businessinsider article was offensive. Using a photo of a coffin covered with an American flag with a grieving family huddled around has no place in an article about real estate.
Secondly, the MSM insists on incorrectly reporting that qualifying for a mortgage is near impossible – their paragraph:
But even many Americans that do have jobs are finding out that it has become very, very hard to qualify for a home loan.
It’s not very hard, it is the same as it’s always been. You can FHA-finance 96.5% of the purchase price, add as many buyers as needed to get the ratios to work, and have a credit score as low as 580.
Very, very hard? I think not.
But let’s keep America in fear with shoddy reporting. If there is an Egypt-like revolt needed in this country, it’s to over-run the MSM.
From the article that consultant linked to…
“Ben Bernanke and the boys over at the Federal Reserve are doing their best to flood the system with new dollars in order to prop up asset values, but you just can’t create qualified home buyers out of thin air.”
There are plenty of qualified buyers, they just aren’t willing to pay big dollars for less than prime housing stock. Honestly, do these media people never learn? There is always a buyer when the price is right. By trying to prop up asset values, the gov’t is actually making the process worse.
Any “qualified” buyers right now are “qualified” because they don’t make foolish choices with their money, which includes buying overpriced housing.
JtR- Why don’t you ask them why?
Here’s my guess; the MSN article from December had all homes within 1%. That’s a fairly easy margin to go from 5 to 1.
The Forbes article for January probably reflects the fairly rapidly improving national economy.
Could be a sham, everyone knows it’s easy to manipulate numbers when based on multiple factors. Seems like part of an emotional shift in the news more than anything else.
Jim,
I agree the “flag on coffin” was uncalled for and not right.
But, what I think you’re seeing in the MSM is simply a knee jerk reaction in the exact opposite knee jerk direction they were taking in 2006-2009 regarding real estate.
Stupid people/reporters are stupid/reporters for a reason. Unfortunately the MSM loves to give them a loudspeaker to demonstrate it.
Hey, give the MSM a break, they need to rush through these Real Estate puff pieces so they can report on the important stuff like Charlie Sheen and his rehab.
Priorities people, priorities!
There are 3 types of lies, lies, damn lies and statistics (Mark Twain)
Any chance this national article is Right? I guess I will know when bubbleinfo.com is closed down. Homeloansheldon is already off the air now.
Don’t mean to offend anybody, but it seems people here don’t like differing opinions and like to call attention to and ridicule those that disagree with the their thoughts.
IMHO
Don’t mean to offend you Jack, but did you even read the article? All Jim is saying is, get the numbers right, is SD 1 or 5, will the market go up 1% or 2%? Not sure where the “differing opinion” is. If you want to be seen as credible then you first have to have some consistency.
IMHO
Is that ol’ Jack the Stalker?
The report is another re-hash of the same tired assumptions that because there are 12 million in the shadow inventory, mortgages are very very hard to obtain, and unemployment is so bad that obviously the housing collapse is just beginning.
It’s the quality of reporting that people don’t like.
I wish realtors would take the lead and publish pertinent local data to help with the investigation. Without it, all we have is national garbage that has no relevance to individual local markets.
Bubbleinfo.com close down??? Real Estate Bubble, or No Real Estate Bubble, bubbleinfo.com will stand STRONG!
I’m just catching up on JtR’s posts…looks like they changed slide #13 on that link.
BI.com close down? LOL…when boom times return, maybe the website name might have to change, but people will still come here.