http://nvidia99999.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] nvidia99999.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] davis_square2008-12-07 10:42 pm
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Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

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? :)

[identity profile] icecreamempress.livejournal.com 2008-12-09 08:06 pm (UTC)(link)
In general, newspapers that run a "Best of" contest or poll usually take any businesses owned by the newspaper's controlling partners out of the running to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

I'd recommend that the Somerville News think about following that model in future.

[personal profile] ron_newman 2008-12-09 08:49 pm (UTC)(link)
But then who would win "Best Tow Company" ?