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roachboy · 05-20-2006, 08:24 AM

this is not an area that i particularly care about in general--on the other hand, my family is obsessed with it , and so i find myself in conversations about real estate markets from time to time. these are often conversations that find me focussing on other things--the state of my beer at the time, the strange obsessive quality of the talk, etc..

the conversation above mirrors those i sometimes get into with them, however--and because this thread is easier to escape than social situtations with my family, i can pose a question that has bugged me for awhile now: the op presented indices of new housing starts as an index of the state of the housing market as a whole. i have never really understood how this index functions and why new housing starts are isolated from other types of data and presented as if they served to give a coherent picture of the aggregated housing market. can anyone explain why these indices are seperated as they are, and what utility there is in new housing starts as index? it would seem to me that this index is more about the state of the residential construction industry and secondarily about property values. but much activity in real estate is resale of already exisiting stock--where is that information?

second (related to the first): in the absence of a coherent picture of the aggregate, you get above (like in conversations with my family) anecdotal information that gets either a happy face or a sad face tacked onto it as a function of dispositions rather than information. is this the only possibility for this kind of discussion---some kind of tedious sequences of claims that shake out around the question of whether you prefer to see yourself as optimistic or not? if so, why are these conversations interesting?

what i get from ace's posts so far here is basically that in the area in which he operates, things appear to be ok--and that he personally makes out in that situation financially--so either (a) the aggregate must be also hunky dory or (b) aggregated information is meaningless in this context.
these are two different arguments.
both could obtain, but there is no way to tell.

05-20-2006, 08:24 AM	#26 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	this is not an area that i particularly care about in general--on the other hand, my family is obsessed with it , and so i find myself in conversations about real estate markets from time to time. these are often conversations that find me focussing on other things--the state of my beer at the time, the strange obsessive quality of the talk, etc.. the conversation above mirrors those i sometimes get into with them, however--and because this thread is easier to escape than social situtations with my family, i can pose a question that has bugged me for awhile now: the op presented indices of new housing starts as an index of the state of the housing market as a whole. i have never really understood how this index functions and why new housing starts are isolated from other types of data and presented as if they served to give a coherent picture of the aggregated housing market. can anyone explain why these indices are seperated as they are, and what utility there is in new housing starts as index? it would seem to me that this index is more about the state of the residential construction industry and secondarily about property values. but much activity in real estate is resale of already exisiting stock--where is that information? second (related to the first): in the absence of a coherent picture of the aggregate, you get above (like in conversations with my family) anecdotal information that gets either a happy face or a sad face tacked onto it as a function of dispositions rather than information. is this the only possibility for this kind of discussion---some kind of tedious sequences of claims that shake out around the question of whether you prefer to see yourself as optimistic or not? if so, why are these conversations interesting? what i get from ace's posts so far here is basically that in the area in which he operates, things appear to be ok--and that he personally makes out in that situation financially--so either (a) the aggregate must be also hunky dory or (b) aggregated information is meaningless in this context. these are two different arguments. both could obtain, but there is no way to tell. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 05-20-2006 at 08:28 AM..