We promised after our meeting and blog announcement on Saturday the 2nd that we’d come back and explain a bit more about what and exactly what we’re updating early in our Market Fundamental Rating System. 

As we explained on Saturday, we typically have reset the parameters that we use to calculate the Market Fundamental scores for markets around the first of the year.  We started doing that as a matter of convention; the time frame does not hold any special measure of significance other than the historical precedent of “a new start with the new year”. 

Some years we have tweaked the system very little, and some years – particularly early on – we did a fair amount of tweaking as we refined our system.   Our main goal was to reset ranking criteria as needed to match and reflect changes in the market place of import. 

Needless to say the realms of real estate, job growth, and unemployment (to name a few) have seen dramatic changes during 2008.  As we’ve monitored our database through this year in particular, we’ve been particularly impressed with the impacts that the rapidly changing job growth and unemployment numbers have had not only on the economy, but our ranking systems as well. 

Given the critical impact of job growth on the development and nourishment of emerging real estate markets, we elected to accelerate our revision of scoring criteria for both annualized job growth rates as well as unemployment rates.  Our data team is plowing through the revisions currently and we’ve been quite surprised at the difference it has made in scoring.  We’ve been scoring job growth and unemployment based on the status of the economy in mid to late December of 2007, and obviously things have changed a great deal since then. 

As we said on Saturday, our goal is to be as accurate and detailed as we can in helping you make better decisions on market strength and potential. 

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