Am I an expert? I don't know but am I worse than anyone else?

Every week there are blogs and news articles about housing and house prices. Prices are rising, prices are dropping, mortgage rates are their lowest ever, mortgages are harder to get etc.

Am I an expert? I don't know but am I worse than anyone else? Many people are getting paid lots of money to make predictions and the press is very willing to listen and make them out to be experts. But are they right? Seth Godin in several blogs recently has talked about making predictions and seeing how accurate you are over a period of time.

Professor Philip Tetlock  from the University of California , Berkeley, tested 284 "experts" in political science, economics, history and journalism in a staggering 82,000 predictions. Tetlock concluded that their predictions were no more accurate than uninformed guesses.

Last week it was announced we were officially in a double dip for housing prices according to the expert Case Schiller Report. But this report looks at certain markets only and in a specific way. If you take the same numbers from other markets or look at them differently you may get a different answer.

CoreLogic released its own home price index for April (also a three-month average). CoreLogic's index shows that home prices increased 0.7 percent between March and April - the first increase in the index since the homebuyer tax credit expired in mid-2010.

CoreLogic does not adjust their numbers seasonally, whilst Case Schiller does, which is more accurate, it all depends what you want the date to say and being consistent. But it does show that national numbers don't always tell the whole story and that when you hear these stories they don't necessarily apply to your local market either.

Locally, on the Main Line the market varies from county to county, township to township, zip code to zip code and from one development to another. Chester county has seen inventory rise to an 11 1/2 month absorption rate, this means that if no more homes came on the market it will take that long at today's rate of sales to sell every home. Of course we know this will never happen and some of those homes will not sell for one reason or another. We have seen inventory rising in Tredyffrin Easttown School district over the past month and a half as more homes come on the market than are selling, however, some price points are low on inventory and those homes correctly priced in this bracket will generally sell quickly.

Am I an expert, I don't know, as Seth Godin has suggested I am making some predictions and seeing how right I am, but I do have the information available to help you make the right decisions for you about real estate.