Wednesday, December 8, 2010
One index, one standard?
FTA In Depth: Putting a price on the housing market
The UK's obsession with property has spurned a plethora of house prices indices, each claiming to be a definitive account of the nation's housing market. But with each giving widely differing pictures of the state of the housing market, consumer groups are questioning their validity. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) appears to agree. It is investigating what it called the "coherence and comparability" of house price indices after a number of people confessed being confused by the data.
Posted by jack c @ 10:19 AM (1369 views)
9 thoughts on “One index, one standard?”
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rantnrave says:
Don’t the FT have a history of involvement with the Acadametrics report? In which case, this is just a shameless piece of self promotion!
sibley's b'stard child says:
No-one likes a pedant but it should be: “The UK’s obsession with property has spawned a plethora of house prices indices…”
Tut tut FT.
Still, interesting read if only for Martin Ellis’ allusion to the media’s manipulation of the indices.
letthemfall says:
Any analysis that does not release the data has to be viewed with some circumspection, especially when its producers are hardly disinterested in the results.
flashman says:
They more or less all converge if you sufficiently lower the resolution. There is bound to a confusing amount of divergence between sources if we look at the reports on a month by month basis.
rantnrave says:
There is definitely value in having different measures – to the informed, they are tracking different things. More variety also brings about less chance of the overall trend being fudged. Imagine if all we had to go by for news information was the Daily Express!
Besides which, having several sets of data releases at different times of the month gives us something to overanalyse on this site…
flashman says:
I should also add that the presence of multiple sources (considering their eventual convergence when we pan out a bit), are likely to provide a more reliable picture than a reliance on only one source
flashman says:
It looks like I converged with rantnrave (10:55)
rantnrave says:
Great minds and all that…
mark wadsworth says:
What Flash says.
Now that we have over analysed all these to death, the one that is most reliable (and goes back to 1952) is Nationwide, they have an awesome database that does it inflation linked, by region, by type of house, by type of purchaser etc.