MyHome.ie My Goodness

Ross O’Carroll Kelly warned it would be a problem and so it has come to pass.

Myhome.ie has blamed the confusion over postcodes for Terenure for a series of embarrassing errors in its recent analysis of house prices in 2014.
Everybody who works with figures or statistics is prone to error. But the knowledge of that universal truth is why all statistical exercises should be checked and re-checked. Indeed it's desirable that as many sets of eyeballs as possible should verify the data. (The same truth applies to journalism which is why the erosion of the role of sub-editors is so worrying)
Anyway, it was surprising to recently identify serious errors in a report on the property market published by MyHome.ie. The cynic in me ensured my first instinct was to think here is another estate agency talking up the property market but we'll have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
As I was clarifying the matter with MyHome.ie in September, they revealed that they had just asked The Irish Times (which ironically owns the MyHome.ie website) to print a clarification in the newspaper's property section where they admitted they had got their figures wrong about the volume of sales in the Terenure area.
It appears the same issue led to the mistake outlined below.
But Dublin's most famous fictional Southsider warned long ago that the reclassification of Terenure from the postal district of Dublin 6 to the Dublin 6W would cause problems. MyHome.ie admitted that properties in Dublin 6W were double counted in their half-year analysis of 2014 figures from the Residential Property Price Register.
According to the press release issued by MyHome.ie on September 10, it shows figures for all half-year sales (January-June) in Co Dublin between 2010 and 2014.

The interesting figures are the final row marked "Total" which, for example,claims 5,240 properties were sold in the capital in the first six months of this year.
Similarly, MyHome.ie provides figures on the value of those sales.

Again, the final row contains figures for the value of Dublin residential property market sales for Q1-Q2 of each year with sales of €1.83bn in the first half of 2014.
However, a relatively simple analysis of the Residential Property Price Register for the first six months of each year reveals quite a different set of figures and shows that MyHome.ie have overestimated the growth in the Dublin property market by a sizeable amount.

The differences are highlighted in the table below and they reveal that MyHome.ie's figures exaggerated the true number of sales in Dublin by 200-300 in most years and their related value by more than €100m in a majority of years.

As you can see, the cumulative errors overestimated sales in Dublin over a five-year period by almost 1,200 properties and their value by almost €577m
A very helpful PR person on behalf of MyHome.ie explained the miscalculated figures were due to a "data retrieval error."
Which has all left me wondering whether it would be better to live in a phantom property than a ghost estate!