The Importance Of Accurate Home Price Data And The Danger Of Bad Data

You don't have to be a data nerd to make smart decisions when buying or selling a St Louis home but your St Louis REALTOR better be!

If you are in the market to buy or sell a St Louis home or condominium, you will need good, accurate, timely and relevant market data to make good decisions and avoid making a bad decision or bad investment.  Therefore, it's critical that you  be represented by a real estate agent that has, and knows, this type of information, such as the agents at MORE, REALTORS! 

Otherwise, without this information or, worse yet, with bad information, home buyers and sellers can make some really bad decisions. There is a lot of "bad" data out there and it can hurt you! Prior to the internet, it was very hard to get much data on home prices, sales and even finding homes listed for sale.  Today, largely a result of the internet, things are much different.  There is plenty of data and information available to home buyers and sellers today and it's easy to find. The hard part today isn't getting the data and information, it's getting good, accurate and relevant data and information. 

You don't have to spend much time online, whether on social media sites, real estate websites or even "news" sites, to discover all sorts of inaccurate, incomplete, dated, useless and conflicting data and information.  For example, it is common for there to be reports published  and shared about St Louis home prices, St Louis home sales and related information that, while the source means well and the data is believed to be accurate, it often is not!

So, where can you find good, accurate and relevant information and data on the St Louis real estate market?

We are glad you asked!  You are actually at one of the best sources for St Louis home prices, home sales and other relevant data and information, St Louis Real Estate Search!  We have spent years trying to figure out the best way to get the best, most timely and most relevant data for the St Louis housing market and feel we have accomplished that goal. After trying data and reports from several companies that aggregate data to generate reports for the St Louis housing market, each time running into issues with the data, either inaccurate data, incomplete or missing data, etc we gave up on that.

This led to our firm, MORE, REALTORS, developing our only proprietary software which would compile St Louis housing data from the best sources and report it in ways that would be timely, relevant and useful to our agents and clients.

An example of bad data and then how we presented the REAL story on St Louis home prices... At the time we created this web page, there had just been a report published in St Louis, and shared by many real estate agents, that said home prices declined the month before over 3 percent from the year before.  Needless to say, this caused much concern among St Louis home buyers and sellers.  However, as our data and analysis showed, the information was wrong. Not only had St Louis home prices not fallen by over 3 percent, they had actually increased in the prior year and, when the proper analysis was done of that particular month versus the year before, even then there was not a decline.

See the difference in data?  Why was the data report different than our data and reality? In this particular case we believed the inaccurate reports had erred in two ways:  First, the pricing data used was a combination of home prices and condo prices, which would be fine if that is what you said it was, but it was being described as "home" prices.  Next, the data was based upon the median price homes sold for without regard for the size.  Our data represented strictly home sales with condos excluded and was based upon price per foot which is more accurate.  

Check out the examples below.

For example, in the situation described above, we used the charts below (which are for the city and county of St Louis combined since that was the focus of the report we are referring to above), generated by the software developed by MORE, REALTORS which revealed that homes sold in the month being reported on were actually smaller in size than those sold the same month a year prior.  So, with smaller houses come smaller prices, even without a true decline in value.  In addition, as is often done by the media and even the real estate industry, St Louis home prices for just one month was being examined while we suggest looking at a 12 month period such as the table below shows.  

St Louis City and County Home Prices and Sales - Past 24 Months - CHART

This chart is an example of a chart we created to track the median price homes sold for, as well as the median price per foot homes sold for.  We would use a chart like this one in our analysis of home prices (with the focus on price per foot) for a given area, neighborhood, city, etc.

To get a much better picture of the St Louis real estate market and, specifically, home prices, we would look at a 12-month period using a chart like the one below. Like the chart above, it reflects data for homes sold in the city and county of St Louis but shows data for the most recent 12 month period compared with the prior 12 month period, giving home buyers and sellers a much more accurate look at the market.  In the example above, about the report of home prices decreasing over 3%, our table below at the time actually showed an increase of well over 5% for the period, painting a much different, as well as more accurate, picture of the market.

St Louis City and County Home Prices and Sales Table

Finally, we don't just stop there, we even drill down just a bit further and remove "distressed sales" (foreclosures, bank-owned real estate and short-sales) from the data so we can get an even more accurate depiction of the actual retail market and home prices without the impact of distressed sales.  The chart below is an example of a chart we would use for that and for our example above, helped show an even more accurate picture of the market.  Our chart revealed that once distressed sale data was removed, from a price per foot perspective, home prices had, in fact, not declined over 5% in the prior month from a year ago as reported but were actually at the exact same price point!

St Louis City and County Home Prices and Sales -NO DISTRESSED SALES- Past 24 Months - CHART

In the example given, think about how different your opinion would be, as well as your decision whether to buy or sell, or what offer to make or accept, if you didn't have the accurate and relevant data, as we showed here!  

A buyer basing decisions on the wrong data is probably going to be disappointed by missing out on homes by making too low of offers and a seller that may base a pricing decision on the wrong data is going to end up selling too low and leaving money on the table.