Washington DC - Bucking The Trend Or Just Bucked Up?

So if you are watching Hardtack, you can't help but notice something odd in Washington DC. Specifically we suddenly had about 7,000 single family homes disappear from the MLS. This has made for a huge dip in the inventory numbers and a skew in all other statistics that depend on it. What is going on?



First of all, the chances that this is an actual sale of that many properties in a single week is near zero. Now it could happen, but chances are very very slim. It would mean a massive surge of buying north of 1,000 houses a day in the DC area. More likely causes would be:

1) Some of the inventory was never there. The MLS's had some properties that were taken off the market without selling, but stayed in the MLS until the performed a massive purge, and the inventory numbers we have now reflect the actual reality.

2) The MLS's have changed zip codes. The US Census bureau and the Postal guys are constantly adding new zip codes to better deal with statistical sampling and mail handling. A high population zip code that we were tracking may have been split in two, with a new zip code we are not tracking. This could also explain the drop.

3) Bug in Hardtack. We are pretty sure we did not introduce any bugs in the data miners, but it is possible.

In short, we see it - it worries us, we are looking into what really happened and how to fix it. It may happen to other regions as well before long. We sure hope not