whatever happened to “Supply” & Demand? carping at Halstead #s quarterly
“inventory” still mis-defined
I will pick on Halstead (whose latest quarterly market report from Halstead is out this week) a bit because (a) they are first, (b) they left some easy targets in front of me, and (c) it is easier to notice the problems than to digest quickly the rich content. I started with some of the loft data yesterday. With luck, I will get to more of the rich content as digested, in bite-sized pieces as well. And to Miller Samuel next week….
It really burns me that Halstead continues to report and compare only “new” listings as "Inventory". The market over-hang is not only from new listings but from all available properties for sale.
What makes it worse is that they obviously know this. Their very fancy, very expensive and very heavy "Homes” book — the one that fell out of my NY Times home delivery this week — refers to the number of apartments for sale downtown at the end of Q2 06 as being slightly less than at Q2 05. They didn’t provide details, but clearly they were making a (positive) point about (real) “inventory”.
Yet the web report about "Inventory" still talks exclusively about the number of new units offered for sale in a quarter. Burn, burn, burn.
Compared to the prior quarterly report (addressed by me here), Halstead has shown some improvement I think, but not for the loft segment. (They added a very-flawed Days on Market table and a sale vs. asking price table.)
© Sandy Mattingly 2006
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