Prof Piggington – The Home Game

[kewp]

Here’s some fun data analysis you can do at home!

Step 1:

Take two empty jars. Label one “Bull”, label the other “Bear”.

Step 2:

Each morning check the following url:

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/search?areaID=8&subAreaID=0&query=reduced&catAbbreviation=rfs

Check the “Found” result (currently 235) and record it.

Step 3:

Each day the “Found” number increases or stays the same, put a penny in the “Bear” jar. Each day it decreases, put a penny in the “Bull” jar.

(Optional Step 4:)

Buy a house in a few years with all the pennies you’ve saved.

[powayseller]

For those of us not following craigslist, can you post what you’re seeing?

[kewp]

Just thought of the idea today. 239 at the moment. If I have time I’ll see if I can get a script to tally it automatically.

Edit: The following one-liner should output the results on a standard linux box (which unfortunately I don’t have anywhere public at the moment).

echo $(date +%F) $(wget -q -O – http://tinyurl.com/zk3x8 | egrep -o ‘Found: [0-9]* ‘ | uniq)

results in…

2006-06-27 Found: 242

[carlislematthew]

Link doesn’t work for me. Are you sure it’s right?

I like the idea BTW – I’m a bit of a computer type myself and have set up a few websites here and there. I’m thinking this might be an interesting one to monitor!

[kewp]

Something is broken on their end, all the searches are failing.

[yooklid]

Ammend the rule.

When you have 100 pennies in the BEAR jar amend the BULL jar with the word “Shit”

[powayseller]

What does 242 mean? 242 houses for sale, 242 reduced prices, 242 rentals? What???

What are you seeing on craigslist, and what does it mean?

[kewp]

Sorry, should have made that clear in the first post (which I can’t seem to figure out how to edit).

It simply means that 242 (oops, fixed, 260 now!) of the realestate listings on the San Diego craiglist have the word ‘reduced’ in them. Which seems to be the hot keyword for folks trying to move properties fast.

This purely for fun and unscientific, yet I still find the rate at which these are increasing is somewhat alarming.

[powayseller]

Thanks – will you be tracking this over time?

zillow lets you search by “reduced”, and they are at 30% of properties are reduced.

As far as editing, you cannot edit a new topic you created, and can edit a post as long as someone else has not hit “reply” on your post.

[barnaby33]

As a lazy mans way to do this, just goto this link and bookmark it.

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/search?areaID=8&subAreaID=0&query=reduced&catAbbreviation=rfs&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max

It will tell you right up top how many there are.

Josh

[kewp]

I setup a script to track this daily, I’ll post the results in a month (if they flatter my bias). 🙂

[rankandfile]

This is like the theory that there’s an increase in missing dog and cat ads in newspapers just before an earthquake hits.

[kewp]

Whoops, looks like Craig clears out old listings around midnite each night. 11pm is a good time to track the daily peak.

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