NAR home-sales data is bogus
Now here’s bad news: This week the National Association of Realtors admitted it has been reporting overly optimistic home sales figures for several years.
How can that be? Well, the NAR has been counting contracts to buy a condo or a house as “sales.” So, naturally, it counts people’s intentions to buy a condo as a real, completed deal. As most of my Boston real estate blog readers know it’s not uncommon to have contracts fall through, especially in this economy. Sometimes I feel like I’m a first grade school teacher for Boston real estate…anyway…
The second problem was that the NAR has been counting some home sales twice.
So what does chief economist Lawrence Yun think of of this blunder: Yun emphasized that the revisions will have no impact on consumers because median home price data will not be revised. Huh?
The NAR won’t even admit that their numbers were wrong and had a negative impact on consumers. In a statement the group referred to it as an apparent….statistical…glitch whereby some home sales were counted twice.
Now just for the record, my Boston condo sales stats are not from the NAR, they’re based on LINK and the Warren Group reports which they obtain their data from the Suffolk Registry of Deeds – well, at least that’s what they tell me.
File Under: NAR motto: “Location, location, location” “Revision, revision, revision.”
