Monday, November 27, 2023

Lies, Damned Lies, and Averages as Applied by Bots

According to the Mercury News, the average sale price of “the top seven most expensive homes” in Palo Alto during the week of Nov 13 was $1371 per sq. ft.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/23/the-top-seven-most-expensive-home-sales-in-palo-alto-reported-the-week-of-nov-13/

Offhand, this sounds like absolute bullshit. To the data!

Firstly, there is a caveat that the sales may not have occurred during the period in question, merely that the deeds were recorded recently.

Second, the lowest priced sale mentioned, is a condo on Newell Street which sold for approximately 707K. Despite the mixing of single family and condo data, which I believe is a deliberate distortion, this is a condo in East Palo Alto, not Palo Alto. This is like calling a Leaf a Tesla simply because both are electric vehicles. Data points 5 and 6 are also located in East Palo Alto, which, despite it charms, does not share the same award-winning school districts, downtown commercial district and Caltrain accessibility of the city of Palo Alto.

The average of the 3 properties sold in East Palo Alto is 921K, or $726 a sq. ft.

The average of the 2 single family homes sold in East Palo Alto is 1.001 million, or $750 a sq. ft.

The cheapest property listed in Palo Alto is a condo which sold for $1,070,000, 10K more than the most expensive home sold for in East Palo Alto.

The average of the 4 properties sold in Palo Alto is 2.805 million, $1754 a sq. ft.

The average of the 3 single family homes sold in Palo Alto was 3.383, or $1880 a sq. ft.

The benefits of blending these two distinct datasets because both contain the words Palo Alto is, to me, questionable, at best.

The good news for Mercury News, given the author is a bot, is that the value of the article is probably worth close to what they paid to generate its contents.

https://www.mercurynews.com/author/bay-area-home-report/

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