Estimates So Broad You Could Drive a Truck Through Them [Editor’s Note: The views expressed here are solely those of Ross Kaplan, and do not represent Edina Realty, Berkshire Hathaway, or any other entity referenced.] RealAVM: $859,828 RealAVM Range: $662,068 to $1,057,588 Confidence Score: 66 Forecast Standard Deviation: 23 –Excerpt, MLS If you only...Read More
New Investing Stat: “Who’s Made the Most Money for the Most People?” [Editor’s Note: The views expressed here are solely those of Ross Kaplan, and do not represent Edina Realty, Berkshire Hathaway, or any other entity referenced.] Statistics geeks realized a long time ago that an individual athlete’s numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story....Read More
“Sellers Who Don’t Have to Sell,” or Picking Up Their Marbles & Going Staying Home It’s always nice to discuss housing market statistics with a fellow quant — which is why it was nice chatting with fellow Edina Realty agent (and now technology consultant) Aaron Dickinson earlier this week. His/my take on housing prices following The...Read More
Balancing Home Search “False Negatives” vs. “False Positives” When setting up searches for prospective Buyers, the goal is to find “the Goldilocks” happy medium: sufficiently narrow criteria that the resulting list is manageable . . . but not so narrow that the search returns only a handful of listings. Or none. In practice, for most Buyers, the...Read More
Making 1.7% Look Bigger Than It Is So, which chart — top or bottom — is projecting a stronger 2015 for U.S. home prices? Top one, right? Nope. Fun With Numbers Both charts project 2015 home prices increasing (a rather paltry) 1.7%, from $241,000 to $245,000 — which in fact is the blended consensus from...Read More
Bird Watching (of a Sort) It’s hardly scientific, but if you want a quick-and-dirty, statistics-free take on the Twin Cities real estate market, do what I did over the weekend: count construction cranes. Including Downtown Minneapolis, Uptown, and Lake Calhoun (what’s going on at the Calhoun Beach Club??), I counted easily a dozen such multi-story contraptions....Read More
