NAR Got It Right & Greg is Correct Too

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

I stand corrected – what I wrote was wrong. I said,

“Some interesting stats (that NAR should have evaluated but doesn’t dare – as it would look like they favored “traditional brokers” over the current crop of leeches)”

2006 NAR President, Tom Stevens did correctly evaluate that data and NAR did a wonderful job of it too. You can see it all here, in an article by Blanche Evans – who is, by far, the most well informed and relevant estate columnist around.

Greg Swann wrote about the extremely nutty Keith at Housing Panic and I laughed out loud when I read it. Greg – in a different post – wrote about Ace Reporter, Catherine Reagor – protesting her lack of relevant data analysis. He closed that post with:

Why are newspapers dying? How about because they refuse to tell the whole truth…?

I don’t believe that Catherine Reagor is refusing to tell the whole truth – I believe that she can not correctly evaluate relative importances or has an editor who has gone WAY out of his or her way (for years) to always make her look bad. Has she ever written anything that you (“you” here would be anyone reading this) thought, thinking to yourself, “Damn, that was good!”. Compare any random droppings from Blanche Evans to Catherine Reagor’s work and you will notice that Blanche tends to compare statistics so that after you read what she wrote, you are better informed – and now know more about the subject. But the quality of their real estate writing really isn’t true for everyone at the Arizona Republic, I’ve enjoyed reading Bob Golfen’s car columns for years – and even if I didn’t like the car he was writing about, I liked reading what he had to say about it. A couple of really bright and decent people in the editorial area there are Richard de Uriate and Doug MacEachern. Also, I don’t believe that the Arizona Republic would have anything to gain by intentionally withholding “the truth” – about any subject.

Giving any statistic without comparing it to SOMETHING RELEVANT tends to make the statement meaningless. Do the reporters writing about the real estate market do this routinely? Ten points if you guess this one corrctly! Then to get stats in, they take the useless (and numbing) gibberish spewed forth from Dr. Jay Butler and print it (often under Catherine Reagor’s byline) like it actually meant something. Is useful information actually available? Yes, and they print that too; R.L. Brown Reports is almost always spot on and Brown’s data can actually be used. What is the difference? Well, Brown doesn’t have a monotone evaluation of importances for all possible data (Jay Butler excels in this area) for starters. Another point for Brown (or Blanche Evans) would be their ability to not only evaluate relative importances but selecting relevant data in the first place (not including tons of added inapplicable data) to comment upon. Of course there are other points of logic that they follow, as well – but, for me, those two really stand out. In short, they UNDERSTAND what they are writing about – just like Bob Golfen does when he is writing about cars. Read a few of Bob’s columns sometime and you can’t help but notice the he is “into cars”. He really likes thinking about them, talking about them and writing about them. It isn’t something he is doing just to get a paycheck (although he does get one) – he gets off getting to drive the cars.

Keith, at Housing Panic is a different matter entirely. True, he can not correctly evaluate data but it may not be for the same reason(s) discussed above. Keith “already knows” the answer. There can be an apparency that he is “looking to find the truth” about something (in this case the housing market) but Keith – like any fanatic (religious or otherwise) has THE correct solution to all possible problems. If we were just dealing with “how to get correct and logical answers” then we could isolate the factors that prevent that: false data and errors in logic. But there is not a goal with people like Keith, for himself or others, to arrive at a better understanding, as he already HAS the correct viewpoint for everyone. What makes his particular brand of nuttyness a bit hard for most people to grasp is there is the apparency that he wants an interchange of ideas – he does not. Keith does not really LOOK at something to see what is there, he looks only at his own prior evaluations on the subject. It makes precisely NO difference what stats are quoted, or who quotes them – his conclusions were reached prior to even having the “communication”. Therefore any attempt at real communication is almost pointless.

Hopefully, I’ve made lots of new friends with this post.