Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

Does anyone know what's up with Housing Tracker and Housing Watch statistics?

See:

http://www.housingtracker.net/askingpri ... -Bellevue/

http://housing-watch.com/regionview.asp ... pct=50&g=m

On both sites, a couple of weeks ago, there was a sudden drop in inventory and a sudden rise in prices but it looks completely erroneus. Saw something like that a while ago and it was an error, fixed within a week or so. I know Inventory didn't drop and prices rise. Did something change with how the stats are reported? I'd say these are an error but the confusing thing is that it happened on both (independent) sites.

Thanks,

Jay

Jay
There was a post about HousingTracker.net a while back regarding just your concern. Turns out that the guy who runs the site said a lot of the agencies that were feeding him inventory data are no longer doing so, probably because it is the REAL cause of the real estate downturn.

It is amazing how easy it is come up with conspiracy theories - whenever there is an unusual pattern, there are plenty people sniffing conspiracies. The truth is much more prosaic. The housingtracker site takes its statistics from realtor.com, and NWMLS stopped its feed to realtor.com for reasons totally unrelated to the market situation. So realtor.com has data feeds only from a number of big brokerages that bother to do that, and hence the drop in the numbers. There was a thread on RCG about this about a month ago for those who care to learn about it, but the bottom line is that realtor.com is difficult to work with and not seen to be bringing in much value. There may also be issues with fees for displaying the listings, though I am not sure about that.

Thanks for your replys.

Still, that doesn't explain two issues:

1) Why are the stats off at the other site (unless they also use Realtor.com?

2) Why the big jump in prices to go with the drop in inventory?

Clearly the jump in prices, which corresponds with the artificial drop in inventory, is also erroneous but I'm not sure I can explain how it would result from a dropped Realtor.com inventory feed.

Jay