bostonbubble.com

[grittyduff]

I am reading about the spokesman for the NAR. His name is David Lereah. Some of his comments are real whoppers concerning current home price declines. Is he for real or is he a made up person? Seriously.

[anonymous32]

David Lereah is the spokesman for the National Associaton of Realtors. As such, his primary motivation is to look after the interests of his constituency, the realtors. Realtors make money by being middlemen in house sales transactions. Plain and simple. Understanding Lereah's motivation, it becomes much easier (even transparent) to understand his comments. His latest comments were that seller's need to start dropping their prices. In plain English, these would sound something more like "My realtor friends are starting to get worried. Sales volume is dropping. It was good to get 6% of an overinflated sales price in the past. It is better these days to get 6% of any sales number rather than 0% of a sale that never happens. So sellers, please drop your prices so that my realtors can still keep making at least some money on these transactions." To compliment this interpretation, I would also mention that I got talking over a beer to a real estate agent in my golf league. He told me that the only money he is making these days is off of foreclosures.

[admin]

grittyduff,

I've always assumed that David Lereah is a real person and the thought that he could be a fictional creation never crossed my mind. I suppose you can never really know that somebody is "real", but if he weren't, that would seem highly unusual. The simplest explanation for his unique (to put it nicely) perspective is that he works for the National Association of Realtors and is paid to filter and massage the data to say what the NAR wants it to say.

It is unfortunate that he is frequently quoted by the media as a credible expert given his bias and especially given the inaccuracy of his past statements. There is a blog dedicated to him at http://davidlereahwatch.blogspot.com/ which does attempt to hold him accountable for his unrealistic statements of the past.

There is also a brief Wikipedia article on Lereah at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lereah

- admin