Tuesday, October 12, 2010

It's all good!



Here's today's breathless piece of drivel. From Simon Johanson of the SMH:
House prices will continue to grow by up to 20 per cent over the next three years despite interest rates hitting a peak of 9.1 per cent, a respected business forecaster said today.

A QBE Housing Outlook 2010-2013 survey compiled by BIS Shrapnel forecasts house-price growth between 9 and 20 per cent in Australian capital cities over the next three years.

How about a little less editorialising. BIS is respected where exactly?

More significantly, QBE, who commissioned the study, owns and runs LMI mortgage insurance. Whoheh!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good old BIS Shrapnel. Always good for a headline.

Who are they, you ask? BIS Shrapnel are a PR company masquerading as an econometric modelling business. They take briefs from clients along the lines of, "do us an economic model showing that the price of bacon is going to double unless the government immediately provides every pig farmer with a new tractor," and they come up with economic models that show just that.

They know that journos are incapable of doing anything other than printing the resulting press release pretty much verbatim. Checking its actual validity would take, you know, time and, like, effort.

I believe that a report like this can cost as little as $50K or so. In advertising terms, they're quite a bargain.