Real Estate Statistics - How Many are Reading?

Just this morning, I posted this entry on Sacramento area's stats and received, I believe the right response from most readers. I think a different mentality exists when you talk numbers than when you talk in words.

Which I think is both bad and good. We all know of course that talking in numbers and showing numbers to someone who is wanting to list their home makes them think more objectively, but I wonder how much manipulation numbers can withstand before they become an outright lie, something that is very easily done in words.

As an example, I was at one of those sites that show Sacramento area real estate stats and every other graph on the page was the big spike in inventory that took up the entire area of the graph with no reference points at all to any other time in history. Like I was trying to stress in the article on sacramentorealestategal, it's not lying as much as it creates the effect in the reader of sheer panic. And because it is a graph, it takes on the aura of absolute truth.

So I had to follow up with just the facts

I think sometimes people are better off knowing just the basic numbers. Any time we try to explain, we inject opinion into it, warranted or not.