I find this interesting as someone who has been talking to real estate agents and property managers for several weeks now, albeit in a likely biased urban area. What I am hearing and seeing is an immense difficulty of leasing agents and private lessors finding tenants (far more move outs and record vacancy), which is leading to a persistent decline in lease rates and increase of ancillary financial benefits (e.g., free parking) … in the urban areas, while the farther away and cheaper less urban areas are seeing a slight uptick. I am also hearing real estate agents describe how people are taking up the opportunity of the low mortgage rates, but also that the distribution seems to be away from cities or urban populations.
If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.
I did the same, while also using historical knowledge of events and things like architecture and relative spread of cultural or fashion clues. I would love to detail how I pegged basically all the images, but that is not something that can be discussed here for reasons I will not elaborate on.
It's actually an interesting point that is directly related to the subject research. How can you get an accurate picture when things cannot be discussed freely … you simply can't.
I encourage everyone to diversify your channels for for discussion and knowledge, be it distributed forums or even things like using some of the browsers and/or plugins that allow for open discussion on top of what is permitted by the heavy handed types (to put it it extremely lightly) among us.
I am not sure if it is an accident, but there is clearly something wrong with the display/visualization of their results.
In 2 out of the 5 cases; I picked the year far more accurate than the avg., but the visualization of the dots on the timeline implied that the avg. was far more accurate than my guess.
For example; when my guess was off by one year and the avg was off by 4 and 6 years, the dot for the avg was right next to the actual date line, while the dot representing my guess was almost twice the diameter of the dot away from the actual date line.
It gives quite the false impression and is also quite an interesting example of distortion of reality and people's perceptions, even if not intentional. I theorize that most people do not look detailed enough or do the simple math to confirm that the visual representation is accurate; thereby leaving them an impression of accuracy and inaccuracy, depending on the results.
If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.