“‘We’re in a real estate recession,’ said David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, who surprised many this week when he announced he would leave the Chicago-based trade group on May 19. ‘I’m projecting the first [nationwide] price drop since the Great Depression,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have negative home prices in 2007.’”
“‘He promotes housing,’ said Washington economist Dean Baker. ‘Certainly, people who were making decisions to move, they either heard David directly or from someone who heard from David that home prices will never fall, don’t worry, the market will stay strong. So they paid too much for a house.’”
“Lereah, in an interview Wednesday, shrugged off the criticism. ‘I feel confident I did a very good job forecasting and reflected what was happening in the marketplace,’ he said.”
It’s hard for me to have a whole lot of contempt for Lereah.
After all, he was just doing his job — which was NOT to give a fair and unbiased assessment of the RE market. His job was to be the mouthpiece for a group of people who sell houses for a living, and to maximize these people’s profits by getting Americans to buy and sell as many houses as possible at the highest possible price.
And you know what? He did a pretty good job.
For someone whose paycheck was signed by a group of house-sellers, what else would you have expected him to do? What would have been a desirable outcome? So he says prices are too high back in 2003, then he gets fired and the NAR puts someone more accommodative in, so now what?
It just goes to show Beware of Snakeoil Salesmans. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. Do your OWN homework. Crosscheck even your real estate agent as they want to get paid as well, no matter how or who is doing the paying.
No comments:
Post a Comment