Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say. ~William W. WattThe above quotations exemplify the difficulty of the appraisal profession. We all rely upon statistics of one kind or another. Numerous programs purport to offer easy solutions to analyzing a property. The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice generally requires the appraiser to know what a program (such as an Automated Valuation Model [AVM]) is doing in order to implement within his/her assignment. A key aspect of such knowledge is knowledge of the data which the model will use. ADS allows the individual subscriber to create special or custom formats for download of data that can then be imported into a spreadsheet and/or AVM.Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." ~Mark Twain, autobiography, 1904 (but, as yet no actual record of this under Disraeli's authorship)
When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind. ~ Lord Kelvin (British physicist)
One simple way that subscribers can use data obtained through a custom
download is to develop one or more graph. On the linked pages are
examples of data retreived from the data base that has been input into
a spreadsheet and then used to develop graphs. The pages represent
sales of retail properties, sales
of office properties, sales of
industrial properties, and
sales of muli-family properties
from Tulsa County. Unlike these general graphs, graphs of selected data
more relevant to one's analysis can provide visual impact to one's presentation
and support of one's conclusions.