Excellent seminar this afternoon by Lawrence Yun, Senior Economist from NAR's research department concerning handling data and media communications.  The short story at this meeting was an economists reaction to recent media scare stories, ala the 60 Minutes story or the AP story "Largest home sales decline in 17 years. Now, for us at the local level we always hope NAR responds on the national level but we'd love to be able to respond on the local level.

Yun's presentation essentially flowed through the charts and statistics that reporters use to draft a negative story on real estate. Following each bad headline Yun re-framed the materials to show the truth about the marketplace. For example, a national story about the cooling of national sales of existing homes Yun demonstrated that the data was not seasonally adjusted or an indication of the month's supply of housing.

A second example was about affordability of homes, or more simply, that incomes were not keeping pace with prices. Yun looked at the relationship of mortgage obligations to income. For those who sell in popular retirement areas (e.g. southern California, Arizona, Florida) the figures need to note that retirees are reporting their incomes rather than their true net worth. For a retiree who is receiving Social Security and pension, the income lines on their papers is going to be low, while their net assets and funds available for the purchase of a home is rather high.

Lastly, an interesting discussion took place in the room concerning the loss of jobs in an area and the recent reports of a "housing bubble."  Yun's argument, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicates that the US is not seeing a loss in jobs (excepting Detroit, Buffalo and maybe Cleveland). First and foremost we need to emphasize the job gains in our market area.

The short story here is a need to closely look at the quality of the data being used to promulgate these stories and refute the arguments using much more realistic and truthful arguments.