Survivorship Bias

[David C.]

Many people are familiar with 'survivorship bias' when it comes to mutual fund investing, the basics are this:  a fund company may start many funds over its lifetime with different strategies.  The ones that do poorly fail to attract enough money to stay open, or are closed when failure is acknowledged.  Those closed funds are rarely included when the fund company, or mutual funds in general are evaluated.  So the same fund company, if they started 10 funds, 3 of them managed an average 15% return, and 7 of them managed 1% returns, but they closed 5 of those 7.  They are left with 5 funds, 3 with 15% and 2 with 1%, and then they come up with 'average performance' using only those 5.

I'm curious about 'survivorship bias' in real estate investing.  Specifically, can we analyze the data on the bigger pockets message boards to get any idea about it?  The amount of users on here seems to keep growing, so: are we nearing 'big data'? where the data does not have to be perfect to come to some conclusions?

Can the guys who run the site mine the old 'new member posts' to see how many realestate hopefuls actually stick around and post?  How about 'my first flip' posts, how many people announce the start of their first project on here, but then never come back?

The successful people on here have strong track records, but I'm afraid at times that it is guru-esque: the failures disappear, so we're only left with the successes.  How many lives are being destroyed by the perception that 'its easy' or 'all it takes is hard work' or 'house prices are low and interest rates are low, you can't go wrong' or 'real estate is way better than the stock market' ?

Anecdotal stories of success are only told by the winners, so following this post with a lot of personal stories of your own successes does not add to the discussion.  Where's the data?  A similar post by Dave Krulac about most real estate investors only owning a single property hinted to there being a disconnect between the perception that there are many people out there building small real estate empires vs. maybe the truth that there are many people out there building tiny real estate investments that they overpaid for and run poorly.

Just pondering if we have enough data on these boards to come up with anything that fosters discussion.