Dr. Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, is quoted in the June 19, 2009 edition of the Associated Press
Real estate investing gets online boost
Associated Press
Alex Veiga
...Looking to make money off investors looking to make money, several Web sites are now vying to be the go-to portals for real estate prospectors. Among them are LoopNet.com, InvestorLoft.com and the newest contender, SmartZip.com, which launches next week in a trial stage...
...By placing properties with common characteristics together and analyzing how their prices have changed over the years, their future appreciation becomes predictable, Glassanos says. Not everyone may be convinced of SmartZip's projections, however.
Computer modeling in real estate can be useful, but they can miss the impact of singular trends, like the widespread availability of subprime loans during the last housing boom, which fueled skyrocketing prices, says Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the University of Southern California.
She notes that modeling stock performance, which benefits from daily sales price data, is far different than doing the same for home prices, because individual homes change hands about every seven years on average. The site should have better luck with projecting rents, for which there's more current data available. "Predicting an individual home price is a daunting task, to do it accurately, much less to project that price into the future," Conway says. "Nobody has a crystal ball..."
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