Thursday, January 8, 2009

Another forcast of doom




I'm not sure who this outfit is but the LA times real estate blog used them as a source. Housing predictor.com ranks Riverside as the 2nd worst market for 2009 and expects a 23.9% decline in value. Now I don't agree with their findings. While we may see a 25% decline, I think LA will be higher than the IE this year and I think several other markets will be too. I'm sure we will be in the top ten. But my guess is we will be closer to the bottom of the top ten.

Now, riddle me this Batman, Why do these forecasts bother to go all the way to tenths of a percent with their estimates?? Just round it off, for Pete's sake. It's a freaking guess. It's like having someone ask "when will the real estate market bottom out" and answering with " June 19th 2011 at 4:11 PM".

3 comments:

Renee' said...

LOL - speaking from Accounting as my profession - an Accountant MUST have did the spreadsheet to come up with the %'s - they probably got the numbers based on a report that they ran from a pivot table in excel - thus the EXACT %'s...no doubt.

BerthaJean said...

The engineer in you is showing up. Not everyone learns the difference between precision and accuracy like us engineers. Most people think more decimals = more correct. What can you do...

Empire Realty said...

I use to work for a consulting firm and when we would put a bid together we would estimate to the nearest ten grand and then we would put on the bid a number down to the dollar, i.e. $152,542.

It made it look better more scientific than what we were really doing, SWAG.

Take care!
RJH