I’ve been wondering for some time why David Lereah was not taken to task more for his reporting methods by the mainstream media. I must confess I was very pleased when Rachel Beck decided to do so with an AP article in this morning’s Washington Post, [online] with a quote from yours truly:
Bloggers have been quick to pounce on the National Association of Realtors for spinning its assessment of housing conditions.
For instance, last summer NAR chief economist David Lereah said that new home sales were "stabilizing." But that turned out to be untrue, a result of the trade group relying too heavily on economic data and underestimating how psychological factors were affecting home purchasing, said NAR spokesman Walter Molony.
It still hasn’t perfected its game. This week, blogger Debi Averett of Phoenix-based HousingDoom.com, noted that the NAR’s pending home sales report says that the data should be compared on a year-over-year basis, not month to month.
But the first number that the NAR plays up is the Pending Home Sales Index’s 4.1 percent decline in January from the month before. It then says the index was down 8.9 percent from a year ago. The NAR also highlighted that the January reading was the highest since last August and "more importantly" there has been a narrowing trend from year-ago levels since last July.
"When the year-over-year and month-over-month don’t suit the spin, apparently showing that things are not looking as bad as they did six months ago is the expedient alternative," Averett said on her blog, which discusses issues in the declining real-estate market.
NAR’s Lereah, when asked for comment, said the trade group would consider raising the year-over-year figures in its next report. He noted that its existing home sales report leads with monthly sales, and that will eventually become the basis for the pending sales report after more years of data are collected.
