As you know, the pace of change occurring in our country’s economic/financial system has been monumental during the past 6 months. In analyzing real estate trends, it’s nice to be able to look at the most recent data to gain insight on how these huge forces impact values locally. The challenge is having enough data to see a trend and allowing enough time for the forces at play to affect prices (there is undoubtedly a lag).
We looked at median values for Condos/Co-ops/TICs/Lofts in the Inner Mission. In order to incorporate recent economic forces, we compared the past six months performance to that of years past. Beginning on September 21, 2008 and running through March 20, 2009, we calculated the median value for the neighborhood and then compared the results to the same time period going back 11 years.
It's time to "analyze this"...
Could we have limited our results to less than 6 months? Actually yes, we wanted to. Three months history would be more reliable. However the challenge was that there were not enough sales (data points) to create a reliable trend. We see the magic number of sales to create a reliable median value trend to be somewhere around 25.
Could we have gone back more than 11 years? We did, but we found that the early years had very little data (less than 20 sales during this time frame per year) and thus they were left out. And of course pre-1995, MLS has no recorded sales as it was not the glorious database it is today… it was a huge periodical publication.
What we’re left with in this particular study is a 6-month analysis going back 11 years. Here are the results for the Inner Mission: Read the rest of this entry ?
