Garbage In, Garbage Out - Stick With New Home Data For Accurate Real Estate Analysis!

NOVATO, Calif, Dec. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The long running debate amongst market researchers as to whether new home sales data collected by the U.S. government or existing home statistics as provided by The National Association of Realtors (NAR) provide the most reliable information on the housing market was finally decided this week. The NAR had to substantially revise downward, five years of existing home sales by 14.3% due to data collection errors; a data series the NAR website states is "the premier measurement of the residential real estate market."

"This research failure is equal in magnitude to the agency rating debacle of 2008. It casts a dark cloud over all real estate studies and indices that use existing home sales data. It leaves The Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI) as one of the few reliable gauges of the housing market since it exclusively uses new home data in its calculations," says Ken Winans, award-winning market researcher and President of Winans International.

Historically, data on new home activity has been the most timely and accurate of real estate statistics. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, there have been reliable studies done on new home prices since 1830, and the U.S. Census Bureau has been providing accurate data on housing since 1962.

Wall Street has long struggled with how to index and analyze the housing market.

In 2005, Winans International tackled the problem by developing The Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI) with a patent-pending approach to rescale and combine several well know studies of U.S. new home prices into a continuous dataset without the time lag, scaling and price gapping problems found in other housing indexes.

In 2011, Winans International developed a new, international housing index, called Winans-Taylor International Real Estate Index (symbol: WTIREI), by gathering 37 years of new home data from 36 countries and developing an approach to effectively combine these global studies of new home prices into single dataset.

For more information on Winans International research, go to www.globalfinancialdata.com or www.winansintl.com

SOURCE Winans International