From the Silo: U.K. Property Prices

Still in the silo folks… the upcoming release of Blytic.com is on its way but for now linger over the two primary U.K. home prices indices.

Looks like quite a bounce this spring!

Obviously, it will take some time to discern the trend and to determine if the U.K. housing markets are reaching a durable period of stabilization.

Keep tracking these series through Blytic to stay on top of their every move.

In the Silo

The next release of Blytic.com is planned for the end of November and will include HUGE improvements in usability and some really novel and exciting features.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for allowing this blog to go cold while we are heads down… there has been a lot of interest in the initial release of Blytic.com and we are doing are level best to make the next release something that will really demonstrate the full concept and potential.

For now though, look for various data series to be highlighted like the following… the M2 Money Stock series… looks to be growing far more slowly in 2009 though that is coming on the heels of a pretty substantial move up in 2008.

Now with Commercial Property Data!

Seems these days everyone is focused on the housing front… hardly a day goes by without another data-point on prices, sales or foreclosures or any of a number of routine personal interest stories concerning the ups and downs of the housing market.

BUT… there is more to the national real estate scene than just the residential market.

Commercial real estate (CRE) is an exceedingly important sector of the economy and especially important to assess and follow during times like these when business and personal consumption activity has been so dramatically impacted by recession.

Luckily, we need not gather our own data and number crunch in order to gain oversight over the trends in the national and regional commercial property markets… MITs Center for Real Estate, Moody’s and Real Estate Analytics, LLC have done all the heavy lifting for us!

Using a “same property round-trip” methodology (very similar to the S&P/Case-Shiller repeat sale methodology used for the residential market) MIT/Moody’s/Real distill out of real property transactions the trends in pricing across several property product types both nationally and regionally.

Currently, we have added the monthly national series as well as the quarterly national and top 10 MSA series for Apartment, Office, Industrial and Retail property types.

The following Blytics present several interesting views of the MIT/Moody’s/REAL data.

Powered By G-Search!

Finally we have a solid search mechanism that gives you what you expect... quick and relevant search results.

How did we accomplish this incredible feat? … Did we use Microsoft’s new Search Server 2008? Did we integrate with Google Site Search?... Nope.

This blogger whipped up an algorithm for us that he calls “transitive meta-matching with reverse integrated lexical mapping” or TM2RILM (pronounced TM-squared-Rilm)

That’s about as much as we know about it though looking through the source we see a line that reads as follows:

PageStrength = (((rank * weight * -1/(state7 + diff) ) / 0) ^ 3.1415) + 1

We are not sure exactly what that calculation is doing but all we can think is “Look out Google!”

Now the best part of this approach s that this search mechanism is completely tunable and over the coming weeks and months we will be enhancing the search experience particularly as we add simply tremendous numbers of new data series.

Enjoy!

Radar for Housing!

The folks over at Radar Logic have graciously consented to allowing Blytic.com to re-publish their public housing data series and for that, we are grateful.

Radar Logic produces 35 home price indices that are calculated and published daily effectively creating the country’s only daily spot market for residential real estate.

Having followed these indices for some time we can tell you that they are not only accurate but they reflect with great precision and clarity the effect seasonality has on residential home pricing as well as the subtle variations in seasonality from region to region.

Currently, our filter is importing only the 25-MSA Composite index but in short order we will have the entire dataset (roughly 30 regions with 3 daily aggregates per region or roughly 90 indices) available so be sure to check back soon for some radar over your own housing market!

Below, check out the 25-MSA Composite showing all three aggragate series (1, 7 1nd 28 days) along with the year-over-year change.

More Data Is Good Data

Today, we added a new and quite large dataset!... the entire collection of Home Price Indices (HPI) provided by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

Using mortgage data supplied by the big government sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) FHFA formulates these indices using a repeat sale methodology similar to the one used to derive the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.

Where this data excels is in coverage.

There are 684 home price indices in this dataset covering hundreds of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and all the census divisions some with both seasonally adjusted series.

A potentially weak point though is that this data is derived from GSE data, by definition, it only covers homes that could be purchased with a “conforming loan” (no Jumbos) and, for most series, data associated to refinance activity is included so there are points where the S&P/Case-Shiller data and FAFH don’t align well.

To at least minimally address this FHFA offers “purchase only” versions of many of the indices which, as the name implies, drops the refinance data from the source data prior to calculating the index.

To access just the purchase only data use purchase only as your search terms.

To access you areas local price index, find the MSA you are interested in and then use its official name as the search terms.

For example, for Baltimore County, MD use: Baltimore County, MD

Two New Views Added!

Today we’ve added two new views this morning that are very useful in keeping on top of the latest data as well as the latest Blytics.

The first view is called the “The Week in Charts” which simply shows you the last seven days of data series sorted by date with the latest at the top.

Our data ingestion process is running around the clock so poking in on this view from time to time will keep you both informed of the data available as well as up to date.

The second view is called “Blytics of The Moment” which gives you a constant flow of the most recent ten (10) Blytics authored in the system.

As we continue to gain author analysts (…users) peruse this view to stay on top of what is being discussed.

As always, let us know what you think!