methodology for New + Sold in The Last Seven Days

In America, agents get this stuff by just a few clicks on a Multiple Listing Service data base that is (a) essentially complete and (b) pretty much accurate. But we ain’t in Kansas and we don’t have a true MLS in Manhattan. I will do the best I can with what I have, and hope to repeat it often enough that it will be useful.

following JM’s lead
I will try to follow the lead of Jonathan Miller of Radar Logic, who provides the Manhattan market data that I consider the best – in part because he is more transparent about methodology and data than the other Manhattan market reports available.

I will report on (1) new listings and (2) closed sales for Manhattan other than Harlem or further north. I need to use some number as the low-end price point, so I selected $500k. I will group data by listing price (not clearing price), by the millions. I think it potentially interesting to break down data by neighborhood, so I will use the neighborhood boundaries used by the inter-firm data-base that I use most often, OLR.

dicey definitional problem
I am catching all listings carried in OLR as “lofts”, which I think is dependent on the listing agent checking the “loft” box when they enter the listing. I know this will be under-inclusive because not all agents check the “loft” box even on listings that we would all agree are lofts. I suspect this will be somewhat over-inclusive for the same reason: some agents will identify an apartment as a “loft” that – to a loft-snob like myself – is really only “loft-like”.

I think that the benefit of standardized data is worth this compromise (not to mention that the data searches are much simpler if I don’t have to second-guess what the listing agents have done).

I will be noting the new developments in which new listings and closings occur, for which I am counting on my ability to recognize the addresses to determine what is a new development and what is the first sale (sponsor sale in new construction or conversion). If I miss a few along the way, sue me.

major data gap
I wish I could also track the lofts that go into contract, to provide a more current sense of market activity than using closing data. But the way OLR reports data, every time an agent updates the status of a listing (which we are supposed to do weekly), it shows up on a Last-7-Days-restricted search, regardless of when the contract was signed.

At this point it is too cumbersome for me to parse the data for contracts on a real-time data. If the systems get easier or I get smarter, that may change. Particularly in a market that may be changing, signed contracts would be great data to have on a weekly basis.

Lemme know what you think.

© Sandy Mattingly 2007