Those who missed David Lareah’s (pronounced LI-AR, as in LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!) pronouncement, should check out MSNBC’s catch on it.
The graph:
Is accompanied by this classic quote
“With fingers and toes crossed, it appears that we have hit bottom in the existing-home market,” he said.
Take a moment if you’d like to take that all in.
Stifle the laughter if needed.
Oh, man, where do you start with this one?
Is this the stabilization he’s referring to?
I’m not a professional statistician, but I’m pretty sure that’s a blip, not a long-term trend.
If this is the best the NAR can muster, I think they need to replace Mr. Lereah. You’re telling me with all of the information that the NAR has available to it, this is the best spin that they could get? Oh, man is the housing market hosed if it’s that bad.
Lest you think I’m the only one who has called out Mr. Liar’s predictions as outnought fabrications, check out these others:
Rex Nutting from MarketWatch Going Ape on Lereah
A Beat Down by David Gaffen from WSJ Market Beat
“A stable plummet” from Kevin Depew of Minyanville
A blogger Smackdown from Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture
Don’t forget to checkout the David Lereah Watch Blog too.
Sounds like someone’s working extra hard for that 2007 bonus already.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
If You Wait Long Enough, the Market Will Eventually Go Down, but not this year and not last year!
A lot of time, money and effort was put into creating a real estate market crash in 2006- well, it didn’ t happen here in Los Angeles. Frankly, last year was a miserable time for me as a real estate agent thanks to the media and it’s sensationalistic reporting. I still made plenty of money, in fact if I didn’t get married and leave town for a big chunk of time, I would have made exactly what I made in booming 2005. What made it miserable was the atmosphere of false perception the media and people who don’t know how to think independently created. I guess bad news sells better than good news. No one gets excited down at the coffee shop when someone says, everything’s going to be o.k.
One bleary-eyed prospective buyer after another would tell me how they were going to wait for the market to come down some more and would probably wait to buy until next (this) year. Well, in the time that they waiting, in 90% of the Westside, values actually went up. In Santa Monica Condos, an area I specialize in, the median increase was 12.3%. Basically, every month someone waited for the market to go down, it went up. One percent is a lot of money with a median price of about $700,000. That means every month that someone waited they were paying a median average of about $7,000!
Even now, with all the data and statistics, some mediocre agents have been trying to negotiate down the sales prices on my listings by saying, “oh come on, why won’t your seller accept this, the market isn’t exactly hopping?”
The lesson is this– look at the facts and talk to the man on the street to make your decisions, don’t follow media hype or pedestrian conversations. People who are successful in their investment decisions have the ability to estimate risk and move forward independent of the herd of lemmings.
Simon,
By the way you speak of things, I know a few things about you already:
1. You have never spoken to a “man on the street” without being condescending.
2. You wouldn’t know a pedestrian conversation if it stared you in the face.
3. If one did not follow the media hype from ’02 to ’06, noone would have bought a house…
4. Success in investment decisions is first and foremost about timing, you obviously know that. There is no such thing as a “killer app” in investing. All classes go up over time… just different ones at different time.
You’re just whistling past the graveyard with this one.
Chuck
[...] in-your-face optimism in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. I even took a swing at his supposed insanity. One might assume that he is a certifiable moron, or has drunk too much of the Koolaid and is [...]