South Bay Homes and Real Estate

“Liars can figure and…

…figures can lie!” With these words I opened our annual corporate planning meetings for many years. Smart, well-trained and ambitious marketers from each division would vie for corporate dollars

to fund their pet acquisitions or expansions. The caution was a reminder that numbers can be manipulated to support whatever argument you are making and to let the numbers guide your thinking, not the other way around.

Nowhere has the phrase been more apropos than in the current South Bay Real Estate downturn. Just for fun, I just tried to “torture numbers” to confess to contradictory results. For instance - home prices on the Palos Verdes Peninsula have already stopped declining and are heading upward -  for homes over $2.5MM, sales in Q3 2008 averaged 11% more per s.f. and took 22% less time to sell. Conversely, homes prices on the Palos Verdes Peninsula continued their decline in Q3 - homes with 3BR dropping a full 6% from prior year and taking 21% longer to sell than just 12 months ago . See what I mean?

How about Torrance? Sales have increased by 9% Q3 ‘08 vs. Q3 ‘07, but the slide continues as prices are off by 17% and Notices of Default have tripled in 90505 in that same period!

So let the numbers guide your thinking and don’t be fooled! That’s called “street smarts”.