Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Magic Math at the NAR




More spin from Mr. Yun and the NAR.

The National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday that sales of existing homes fell 8 percent in September, the largest decline to show up in records dating to 1999. The seasonally adjusted annual sales rate of 5.04 million existing homes was also the slowest pace on record.

This is an amazing bit of mathematical magic that the NAR has performed to arrive at the 8% number. As you can see below the actual decline is either 23% or 29% depending on whether you are comparing sales to last month or last year

Sept 2007: 409,000 sales

Sept 2006: 529,000 sales, that would be a decline of 23% year to year.

Sept 2007: 409,000 sales

August 2007: 575,000 sales, that’s a decline of 29% month to month

Straining my little mind to it's fullest I still can’t see how they arrived at 8%??
If you remember from a few posts ago I listed the local numbers from Sept versus Aug
Riverside -22%
San Berdu -31%
San Diego -31%
Orange -28%
Los Angeles -35%

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You need to strip out multifamily sales

golfer_X said...

I don't think that includes multifamily sales. Those numbers are from NAR for "home sales" which I think are just SFR and condos. You can find all the numbers here.

http://www.realtor.org/Research.nsf/files/EHSreport.pdf/$FILE/EHSreport.pdf