Thousand Oaks Mortgage Watching San Diego Numbers

July 2nd, 2009

An apparent glitch in San Diego home sales figures reported by the nonprofit Sandicor to the California Association of Realtors vastly overestimated the number of sales going back several months.

For instance, instead of Sandicor’s reported 89.1 percent increase in year-over-year existing home sales in May, the increase was actually 6.5 percent. Instead of a 63 percent increase year-over-year home sales in April, the increase was actually 20 percent.

Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, said the group plans to issue revised numbers July 27. The revisions will go as far back as spring 2008.

Kleinhenz said the glitch appears to have started when Sandicor changed vendors. It wasn’t identified until last week, when an East Coast real estate analyst, Thomas Lawler, pointed out in a newsletter the discrepancies between the California association’s numbers and those reported by MDA Dataquick of La Jolla, as well as his own numbers.

Kleinzhenz said one of the reasons the glitch may have gone undetected for so long is that in some California markets, there were more than 100 percent gains.

“An 89 percent gain in sales doesn’t seem all that implausible because over the last several months many areas had huge gains in sales — from 50 percent to 100 percent, and some areas had 200 percent gains year-over-year,” Kleinhenz said. “Eighty-nine percent looks like a large number compared to 6.5 percent, but it’s not all that implausible. It fit into the ballpark of what we were seeing.”

Calls to Sandicor have not been returned, but Kleinhenz said it appeared Sandicor was mixing closed escrows and pending home sales in some reports.

“It’s not a consistent error. And some points in time the information may have included the pendings, and at other times did not. We’ll have to go back and revise the entire series,” he said.

He said the MLS is more designed for listing information rather than tracking it.
“It’s kind of an art to figure out how to pull right the line-by-line information that can be used in our reports,” Kleinhenz said.

http://www.sdbj.com/industry_article.asp?aID=2593277.7499353.1801332.1033856.760259.546&aID2=138555

— Ned Randolph

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