Well, maybe not completely and utterly wrong but he’s a way of the mark. Perhaps he should go to Uni and do Data 101.
Lynn Prentice has damned Keith Ng’s analysis of Labour’s house sale data.
And Keith Ng is completely and utterly wrong on the data. You couldn’t get better data.
You could get much better data. Barfoot and Thompson could gather details of the ethnicity of each property buyer so they would have accurate data that didn’t rely on
The point was that it is the BEST data that is currently available because it is the only data that indicates where the money for residential properties is coming from. Therefore there is no better data.
The data doesn’t do that at all. It does indicate the probable ethnicity of about 40% of the buyers. But it indicates zero percent where the money came from.
The only other statistical data around just shows that the money for the higher total values of property sales isn’t coming from banks. It could be coming from socks as far as we can currently tell.
They could be cash buyers, Lenders may not be banks. But the data shows nothing about where the buyers came from, or where the money came from.
Keith Ng is talking crap – unless he can show a source of data that allows a similar type of analysis about money sources for purchasing residential properties.
It’s not for Ng to provide data that Labour and Prentice lack. He pointed out sever deficiencies in the claims made by Labour. He could do the same about Prentice’s assertions if he could be bothered.
At the earliest that won’t apparently happen until October, which will probably be catastrophic for our economy. By the sounds of Nationals posturing any data and analysis from that will not be public.
And that’s just posturing, based on what data? None.
Prentice is close to being completely and utterly wrong on the data.
UPDATE: And Prentice goes into more depth:
The next stage is to look for causation for high probability correlations.
Labour have pointed out the obvious causation for the huge difference between the percentages of family name segments of the population as a whole and those buying houses during this period. That is what you an many others appear to be having an issue with.
That’s one of the two big mistakes Labour made. “The obvious causation” seems to be a story Labour wanted to tell but seems to have been at best uninformed assumption. And it appears as if it is inaccurate as a number of people have pointed out (and I’l be posting another example tomorrow night).
So far I haven’t seen any alternate explanations that make any sense apart from imported overseas investment money. The money isn’t getting borrowed from local banks. It appears to be large enough to drive the kinds of crazy 25+% per annum house price increases that we have seen since 2011.
He hasn’t looked very far then, or doesn’t want to see anything else. See Chinese locals snap up 23 sections within minutes and Who’s buying Auckland property?
What it seems to identify compared to previous economic research as recent as 2013 is that we are rapidly hitting the point where Auckland house prices are largely caused by overseas investment money buying property from other overseas investors.
It identifies nothing of the sort. Two politicians and a blogger claiming it’s so based on no evidence doesn’t make it so.
At about 40% it is freaking high, but even worse is that it appears to be rising rapidly.
Appears to be rising rapidly? The data doesn’t say that, it is only from one real estate company from three months.
That it has nothing to do with the real economic value of the land or properties themselves to our economy. That means that it will therefore almost certainly cause a nasty economic crash that will reverberate throughout the rest of NZ. Bearing in mind our current fragile economic state, that is something worth actually worrying about, and one that bears considerable real-world consequences.
You notice that what Labour actually asked for was to get some immediate data collection and analysis going on in the area of foreign investment in property? Seems rather mild compared to what I think is actually needed.
The Government has already organised better data collection, starting in October.
Probably because we have people worrying about how statistics data is collected and analysed for reasons that seem to owe more to the thoughts of Lysenko than anything vaguely rational.
Just looks like a whole pile of avoidance behaviour to me. Probably with the kinds of downstream consequences of that exercise of group thinking.
You couldn’t call Prentice’s thoughts ‘group thinking’, unless Twyford, Little and Prentice make up a group.
NOTE: Prentice appears to be in a small minority at The Standard who are prepared to defend what Labour have done and especially how they have done it. There has bee a lot of reasoned condemnation there.