Data doesn’t lie - IH50

I must confess.

I am a Newcastle United supporter.

It’s not been an easy season, starting with hope and expectation – ending, bizarrely, with a mix of defeat and despair – plus hope, in the shape of Rafa Benitez.

“Do we always look at the real data?”

It’s a hard thing to give up. It’s a tradition, a habit, it’s what you do at the weekend. You get used to getting up on Saturday morning, putting on your lucky socks, heading into town, a few small sherries at The Strawberry and into the ground for the match.

Could we have predicted relegation? Well the data said yes, and indeed the data after just eight games said so.

So why did the club do nothing until it was too late? I think because they subverted data below hopes and false belief.

After four games, we lost two and drew two – data had us at the foot of the league, poor points and poor goal difference. “We are bedding in a new team, it will come good,” they said.

After eight games, one point and three losses, the worst goal difference in the league, “It’s a new manager getting his team sorted, don’t worry,” they said.

It went on – the data always said we were serious relegation candidates, the club even resorted to “We are too big to be relegated,” and “It’s not on our agenda, it will not happen”.

And then it did.

What’s that got to do with housing? Well, do we always look at the real data? I hear “But we are different,” a lot, without any quantification behind that.

Are we as a sector in danger of relegation if we don’t see the real data, the data that others look at? And especially if we don’t have a solid data set that supports our position of mid-tablers to champions?

The Homes and Communities Agency have just completed their regression analysis and our chairs all got a nice letter off Julian Ashby with some data. It’s “one size fits all” data I grant you, and it could do with better specificity, but how many responded with “But we are different,” and left it at that?

Mark Henderson, chief executive of Home Group