03/09/2026
OPINION: Every week we’re bombarded with numbers that tell us how the financial world is doing. House prices are up or down. Shares gained. A company flourished.
But those figures leave out some of the most important information: the houses that didn’t sell, the investment that failed, the company that disappeared. Yet their absence can make markets, policies and even our own lives look healthier than they are.
Economists call this ‘selection neglect’, or the tendency to assume the information we can see as if it were the whole picture, when much of reality has already been filtered out.
“How did the things that sold perform?” is not the same as “How did this market perform?”, and the gap between the two is widest precisely in markets like housing, where sellers can simply refuse to sell at prices they don’t like.
Think about a cooling housing market. Sellers rarely respond by immediately cutting their asking price. Instead, many simply withdraw the property and wait.
Because the house never sells, it never appears in the official sale-price statistics. The only properties recorded are the ones that successfully sold. As a result, the median sale price can look surprisingly stable, when demand is weakening.
Failure carries information, but our statistics are built to exclude it. A market could be considerably weaker than any published number suggest, because the failed sales have disappeared.
There is no app that strips out this filter. But there are habits worth developing, and it costs nothing: don’t just look at the outcomes you can see. Ask what conditions were necessary for those outcomes to appear in the data in the first place. Which people, properties, businesses, investments, wines, or experiences are missing because they failed, withdrew, disappeared, or were never recorded?
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Dr Gertjan Verdickt is a senior lecturer in accounting and finance, School of Business.
This article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.
Excerpt from an article first published on Newsroom: https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/08/28/what-the-housing-market-statistics-hide-from-home-buyers/
