Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

I just saw in the Somerville News an estimate saying that property values in Somerville declined 2% this year:
http://www.thesomervillenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=218. Somebody mentioned that Zillow actually reports a loss of about 8%. This is confusing. The Editor of the Somerville News pointed out that Zillow does not have accurate estimates. In my experience, Zillow is pretty on the mark when it comes to sale prices, they seem to be doing lots of good stats on their datasets. Any idea on how to gather additional information on this? I doubt one can trust the Somerville News, given that it was created by the owners of ERA, one of the Somerville Real Estate agencies (clearly, they would not want to advertise that property values are going down around here).

One funny tidbit. Have you received a pack of coupon last week? I received one, and one of the coupons was an ad for ERA, the Norton Group. It says: "Voted #1 Real Estate Company 2000 to 2007 By the readers of the Somerville News"! Now, when many of the readers are ERA employees or relatives of ERA employees, that is a bit of a conflict of interest, isn't it? :)

Comments

media bias

[cos]

You may be responding to something other than what you think you're responding to, then.

I certainly wasn't thinking of movies.

Ownership does create a very strong bias; I'm not sure whether "intentional" vs. "unintentional" is a meaningful or useful way to evaluate it. I suspect it's not really useful.

I don't really like the term "MSM", though "traditional media" is a fairly useful term for the same thing.

One common feature of traditional media is their subscription to the philosophy of "objectivity", which as practiced by American media generally means: for each issue, break it down into two opposing sides. Report what each side says. I actually find that to be a serious distortion in many cases, so I'm very happy to have some "not objective" media to get a better understanding from. But that one's also different from the ownership bias.

Re: media bias

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Great point, cos. I'm really tired even of NPR because of this "objectivity" BS. In some cases, one side if obviously wrong and it should be declared so. What is the point of inviting their spin people and waste everybody's time? More importantly, it distorts rationality.

Re: media bias

[cos]

When one side is obviously wrong, at least that's easy to see if you've got some knowledge, or sometimes even if not. But merely looking at things as if they can all be turned into two sides makes much bigger and weirder distortions, because most issues really have lots of different "sides", and their relationships to each other are rarely all "opposition". This kind of coverage distorts people into looking at things in terms of two sides - even if they can tell when one is obviously wrong.

Re: media bias

[jamesnorton.livejournal.com]

wonderful conversation on this topic - i enjoyed it.