Jonathan Miller: Smart Guy

You really should be reading his blog The Matrix.

His post on the hidden truth of home prices speaks volumes about the real estate industry on both a national and local level. Jonathan effectively points out in this post all of the flaws in the various reportings of numbers across the industry. Furthermore, he shows specifically how each group’s interest plays a part in their respective reports. This is no surprise as all industries use statistics to portray the story they want you to hear. I can’t help but put another plug in here for transparency of information as this would move us much closer to more accurate and meaningful reports that would become useful tools making important decisions about real estate. Multiple reports using multiple and different data sets are doing nothing for the market but confusing everyone… including me!

In addition to the variety of market reports, Jonathan also points out that the media sometimes interprets the data incorrectly as they did in this instance. It’s nice to see that Jonathan caught this and that both his report and the REBNY report showed an increase in median sales from same quarter last year. But, and this is a huge BUT, the discrepancy is still 6%… that’s almost a 100% difference in numbers. I’m frustrated!