What Data Is The Most Valuable?

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Charlie MacPherson
China, ME · Member since 2014 · 3k+ posts · 4k+ votes
6y
Done - and a note of caution on comps. 

Without deep local knowledge, it's not possible to deliver anything better than the random dart throw of Zillow - and those are often so far off as to be laughable.

In the Boston area with an average sale price of $765K, being within 20% of the true market value 79.3% of the time means that the predicted error is $153,000 or less, except for 20.7% of the time where the error will be MORE than $153,000.  Not only is that a useless number, it's dangerous when people rely on it.

This is something that we Realtors have to struggle to overcome.  We talk with sellers who have an inflated view of their home's value because "the Zestimate said $XXX,XXX", but we know it's not.  Investors who rely on these numbers can get hurt too.

I still run comps manually.  It takes me 30-60 minutes to do them, but when I tell a seller what their home will sell for, I'm almost always well within 5% of the actual sale price.

The bottom line on comps is that no data is better than bad data.




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  • Robert TinkerPro Member
    Rental Property Investor · Round Rock, TX · Member since 2019 · 251 posts · 159 votes
    6y

    @Dave Meyer Done

    0Reply
  • Matthew ChalfantPro Member
    Investor · Charleston, SC · Member since 2018 · 42 posts · 24 votes
    6y

    @Brock Mogensen touched on this a bit and I want to take it further. We can over analyze all of the microscopic factors that a system like Zillow cannot account for. However, what if you presented other hard fast data on areas: population growth, average wage, top five employers in an area, number of Starbucks or Chick-fil-As opened in the past 5 years, dollar amount of infrastructure projects like new roads, ratings of schools, and other non real estate specific numbers. These numbers do not get too far into the weeds instead, it is a 50000 foot view of a potentially healthy or on the rise market. All of these facts are available and able to be proven. However, the value for members comes in the convenience of compiling the information.   


      

    0Reply
  • Account Closed
    Member since 2019 · 42 posts · 33 votes
    6y

    Why not just start providing webinars on the 'basics' of data in 2020... like where to get it free from the county/city/state....how to clean/wrangle it quickly and join it with other data... most property data (parcel/sales/tax/owner info) is either free, or next to free through an Open Data request to your city/county/state, or by typing 'GIS Parcel Open Data' with your county name into Google and just grabbing the entire county parcel file. After that, the https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... monumental ruling on web scraping comes into play.... Where you can basically scrape 'anything' like MLS listing data now, as long as it's public-facing on the internet. Do you have a fav spot for rental comps data? Scrape it. Or automate the steps to scrape it with Python.

    Jupyter Notebooks are easy to learn how (and FREE) to start scraping with (I had a couple of small courses in the last 90 days on Jupyter Notebooks, and have been scraping on the average 30,000 rows of data from different sites, daily at times). Selenium is a good choice for scraping too. But once you get scraping down.... after that, an individual can start looking at courses like https://www.udemy.com/course/m...

    You don't have to be a data scientist or anything, these are all basic tools. 10-15 hours to get the basics that you need for scraping with Python and Jupyter, and any amount of time that you put towards 'upping' your game with Machine Learning. I will say the above link for machine learning will more than get you started to where you can load an entire county Parcel data set into a Jupyter Notebook, and start running models. You can also load data directly into QGIS from a PostgreSQL install and run ML on the fly for a quick peek when you need to as well to visualize the data on a map.


    All of the tools I am mentioning here (PostgresSQL, Jupyter, Python, QGIS) are Open Source, free, and widely supported through updates

    1Reply
  • Franky Aikens
    Wholesaler · Philadelphia, PA · Member since 2016 · 124 posts · 81 votes
    6y

    Population migration trends. How many are moving in versus moving out?

    2Reply
  • Calvin Kwon
    Member since 2019 · 15 posts · 3 votes
    6y

    @Dave Meyer, I've been putting together a list of data that might be relevant to real estate investing to create a tool for myself. But given that I have limited REI experience, I was looking to get feedback from real investors on what they find relevant.. and discovered your thread!

    I would like to help where I can. I am a geospatial engineer with a company called Esri. Commercial real estate firms like CBRE and others already leverage our tools to create their proprietary market research services. I already have a good idea of where some of these data is managed at federal/state/local level and have access to curated datasets that is freely available online. I was toying with the idea of using the same tools + publicly available to create a real estate data exploration/analysis tools for myself, but if BP is looking to do something with this, I would love to explore where I can contribute so that the wider community could benefit from it.

    Let me know if there is an opportunity to help - I would love to hear your vision for this service and could also prepare a demo to pilot how the data could be explored on the web. 

    0Reply
  • Rafaella Almeida
    Rental Property Investor · Southington, CT · Member since 2019 · 23 posts · 6 votes
    6y

    @Charlie MacPherson I like your comment. I always struggle with it. Sometimes it is like the house is worth what people are willing to pay. Some people are willing to pay more than others. Could I ask you how I could do my own comparable?

    0Reply
  • Helen Zhang
    Austin, TX · Member since 2016 · 160 posts · 39 votes
    6y

    @Rafaella Almeida could you please clarify 1/2/3 as 1 is the most important or 3 is the most important? you might want to clarify that somewhere to prevent getting inaccurate survey data. 

    0Reply
  • Rafaella Almeida
    Rental Property Investor · Southington, CT · Member since 2019 · 23 posts · 6 votes
    6y

    @Helen Zhang to me 1 is the most important and 3 the least.

    0Reply
  • Helen Zhang
    Austin, TX · Member since 2016 · 160 posts · 39 votes
    6y

    @Dave Meyer could you please clarify 1/2/3 as 1 is the most important or 3 is the most important? you might want to clarify that somewhere to prevent getting inaccurate survey data.

    0Reply
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