How to avoid analysis paralysis

With so much data available to property market investors, it’s no wonder that the more we dive into the numbers, the greater our confusion can become. John Lindeman explains which stats can help you make informed decisions and which you can safely ignore.

We often see blogs, podcasts and free reports claiming to reveal the next hot spots or areas about to boom when all they do is offer a list of last year’s best performers.

Their authors assure you that suburbs with a long history of strong capital growth have the best potential because their consistent performance is likely to continue.

At the same time, others will tell you the exact opposite, insisting that buying in areas with long histories of little or no growth makes better sense, because they’re next in line and even overdue for good growth.  

Past performance does not predict future performance

It’s no wonder that investors get confused, when past performance stats are used by experts to give you two totally different predictions. Not only do they contradict each other, but they also don’t make sense. Just because a suburb has experienced high past price growth, doesn’t mean it will keep going. In fact, it is very likely that prices will soon be, or have already been pushed up to the point where buyers must start looking elsewhere and the growth is about to end.

But, neither does this mean that those suburbs with long histories of below average growth are lining up in the boom queue. They may have massive stock overhangs, depressed local economies or falling populations with further price declines ahead.

The housing market puzzle has two pieces

Past performance doesn’t help us to make accurate predictions because the housing market is a puzzle which has two pieces – supply and demand. Looking at the past only reveals part of the picture, and we need to look forward as well.  

Housing supply is all about properties. We measure supply in any area by the number of houses, units, townhouses, duplexes and apartments that are on the market from new property developments plus those listed for sale or available to rent compared to past sales and rentals.

Housing demand, on the other hand, is all about people. It’s the number of renters, first home buyers, upgraders or downsizers about to move into an area compared to the number of renters, first home buyers, upgraders or downsizers who are planning to move out. From this you can see while supply looks backwards, demand looks forwards.   

By comparing the current supply of properties in any area to the expected demand for them, we can obtain a clear and complete picture of the state of the property market in that area. We can then make accurate forecasts about potential price and rent changes.

Analysts who only rely on past performance data such as sales and prices to predict the future are trying to solve the puzzle with only a small piece of the total picture and that’s why their forecasts so often turn out to be wrong.

Property market predictions you can trust

Leading property market expert, John Lindeman invented Australia’s only patented Housing Market Prediction Solution, which is a database that ensures investors can avoid the perils of analysis paralysis and make the best possible buy, hold or sell decisions.

This massive data storehouse gathers real time housing market performance data for properties in every suburb.

The patented Housing Market Prediction Solution merges this supply data with highly accurate demand algorithms estimating population growth and movement trends plus forecast buying or renting intentions down to suburb level.

The solution then produces highly accurate property market predictions to identify suburbs with the best growth and cash flow potential, which we reveal in our predictive reports and share with the students of our educational programs.

Past performance you can rely on

Since they were developed by John Lindeman the algorithms employed in the patented Housing Market Prediction Solution have produced a consistent past predictive accuracy rate of over ninety per cent in terms of forecasting both the direction and intensity of price and rent changes for houses and units in Australia’s 15,000 suburbs and towns.

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