Home buyers shouldn't rely too heavily on those popular "100 Best Places" lists when they are looking for the next hot market or a good place to relocate.

It's not that the lists published by several magazines aren't accurate. They are, said Bert Sperling, who devised the methodology and collected and analyzed the data for all 17 years of Money's Best Places to Live features. But the criteria on which evaluations are based isn't as consistent as it could be.

The reports "would have more value without the changes," the quality of life analyst recently told a gathering of more than 100 reporters who cover residential and commercial real estate on a regular basis. "But their main purpose isn't to provide value, it's to sell magazines."

Besides Money, Sperling has done studies for Self ("Best Cities for Women"), Newsweek ("Great College Towns"), Seventeen ("This Town Rocks! Best Cities for Teens"), and SmartMoney ("Best Places to Buy a Second Home"). He also has done a number of similar studies for corporate advertising campaigns for such firms as Korbel Champagne ("Most Romantic Cities") and Chevrolet ("Safest Cities").

In almost all of his annual reports, some places fall off the list. But that "doesn't mean here today, gone tomorrow," the analyst said at the National Association of Real Estate Editors Annual Journalism Conference in Salt Lake City.

To keep the studies fresh, sponsors often change their criteria or the weighting to give different import to various categories, he explained.

"One year, education is important. Another year it's crime rates or a low unemployment rate. It depends on what is on their readers' minds. But just because a location drops off the list doesn't mean it is no longer desirable."

Sperling, who keeps track of 3,000 cities and is in the process of developing his own sprawl index, said publishers like to run the lists more for the publicity they generate for their magazines than as a public service to their readers. "They're popular because the press mentions the magazine's name in their stories" about the lists, he said.

Nevertheless, the mere mention on a "best places" list is important for the cities that are named.

"Anytime a national publication" lists Salt Lake City, for example, "the number of 800 calls increases dramatically," reported Spencer Kenard of the Utah Travel Council. "People say, 'Let's go check out that place.'"

But that phenomenon also occurs whenever pretty pictures are flashed on the television screen during a newscast, Kenard added. "When the Olympic scandal broke, our calls went up three-fold because viewers saw some great pictures."

And when a city or town doesn't make a "Best Places" list? They're on the horn to Sperling almost immediately to find out why and what they can do to improve their positions the following year.

For more articles by Lew Sichelman, please press here.