Monday, December 10, 2007

Lying NAR Stats Monday

The NAR says all is well with housing after all. Turns out this whole housing crash thing was overblown. All is well now, go out and buy 8 homes. Except..

They are doing the usual statistical technique of mixing up year over year and month over month. Hooray the index is up from August. But oopsie it is 18% lower than same time period last year, which was itself much worse than the year before. You cannot do that. You cannot compare month to month. It would be like saying the temperature between March and April shot up 15% therefore it proves the earth is warming up. You compare March to March, April to April. You don't compare March to April. Yet this is what the NAR does all the time and for some reason the MSM plays right along.

They are saying August was the worst ever. And October was just a little better than the worst over, and this is good news? Using a weather analogy again...in Georgia there is the drought. If it rains 1/16 of an inch more in December than in November, but 4" less than Dec '06 will the drought be declared over? Of course not. That would be beyond retarded. Yet that is exactly what the NAR is doing.

October was awful. But it was just a teenie bit better than the worst ever. I'm convinced. I'll go spend $750K on a home tomorrow.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My hobby: reading the cool daily slogan on the MetroBrokers.com sign on I75 on my way to work. (Today's: "It's a Great Market!")

Then reading Ed's blog when I get to work.

Who to believe? Who to believe?

Anonymous said...

Nice. My fav was about a month or two ago when it was "BUY SOMETHING". I couldn't believe they would say that. Might as well have read "HELP, I'M STARVING AND NEED A COMMISSION CHECK"