Consumer Indexes; Increasing Precision in Housing Affordability Forecasts
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Consumer confidence index does not seem to be correlating well with housing affordability since October 2016.
Testing consumer sentiment index (as an alternative) during the last six months' period, I observed that it was correlating with the current housing market dynamics better than the consumer confidence index.
As a result, I am leaning towards consumer sentiment index (at least for the time being) which could be utilized in an aggregated form with consumer confidence index (such as arithmetic mean) for more realistic and precise housing affordability forecasts.
Murat Mayor, Ph.D.
MAYOR STRATEGY, mayorstrategy.com
