Monday, June 4, 2012

Charting Vancouver's Latest Numbers -- Wah?

I put the latest REBGV numbers into my spreadsheet, tidied up my graphs (which looked a bit droppish) and I was going to post them. Then I noticed something odd. My graphs showed a decline, year on year. REBGV showed an increase. Thinking that was something I should investigate before posting, I discovered that a whole series of numbers from the old releases (which were all changed when the HPI methodology was changed) appear to have different numbers for 2011 than I did (at least 2011, that's all I've checked so far). This is even stranger as my spreadsheet has all the right sales and listing numbers and all the numbers I enter in a row off the release, so hard to imagine getting all of some right and all of the others wrong.

Being a diligent person, I saved that old data and began pasting in anew, putting in the currently published data, which shows an increase year to year by having last year's numbers lower. Well, fine. Then I took a look at the older HPI releases (these are the ones you get to by going here). And those Benchmark numbers do not match the ones in the press releases which don't match the ones I entered previously. So, now I have three numbers. On the more recent releases, the HPI link and the news release link numbers do match.

Mass confusion. Cats and dogs living together. But, I think it all comes down to this, below.

These are snapshots from the stats packages. (Kindly provided by Mike Stewart, a Vancouver Realtor)

This is April 2012.
 

This is May 2012.


The benchmark price for all residential for Greater Vancouver in May is $625,100 and in April it was $683,800 which is a decline of $58,700 or 8.6%. What does the column say for 1 month Change %? A 6 tenths of a percent (0.6%) increase.

Same on the benchmark for Detached. I calculate a $97,300 or 9.1% plummet. The chart says it's 4 tenths of a percent (0.4%) increase.

So. I think I have to spend a bit more time with these numbers before I post any final graphs that alarming. Not that I don't think rising inventories and falling sales is going to knock the market down. I just can't see it knocking it quite like this.

Added: The difference in the Benchmark numbers and the % Changes probably has something to do with this:
BENCHMARK PRICE:
Estimated sale price of a benchmark property. Benchmarks represent a typical property within each market.
PRICE INDEX:
Index numbers estimate the percentage change in price on typical and constant quality properties over time. All figures are based on past sales.
In January 2005, the index = 100

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