NAR Rant - Stop The Misinformation Campaign

Let me preface this by saying I understand the NAR (National Association of Realtors) is founded by agents and their job is to take care of their memborship, and I do believe they have provided some excellent benefits in securing partnerships with companies and securing discounts for its membership. BUT, I also believe that they're a huge part of why agent's have such a bad reputation.

Now, I've had a problem with the misinformation campaign the NAR has been putting out for years, and the well informed public realizes that their numbers are "slightly" skewed to favor agents. The rub for me is the NAR has never stopped saying that it's a great time to buy. Not once did they say, "The market is priced too high and buyers should beware." Gathering statistics to put in a previous blog I decided to read the

NAR's "Economic and Market Watch Report," ( can be found at http://www.armls.com/httparmls.html ). Now this is a local report for Maricopa County. Just for fun I'd thought I'd go back and check how well they predicted the market shift.

I went back to Q3 of 2006 which was the beginning of the downward slide. June '06 had the highest median home value of $264,800. The NAR rated the market as a 5 on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being a "strong seller's market." I just thought Whoops, they missed it just like a lot of the experts did. I was sure they'd correct themselves for Q4.

Q4 2006 - They called it a 4 on the scale, so at least they down graded, but median home prices had now dropped nearly $15,000. They predicted that Q1 2007 prices would increase.

So here's were my huge issue comes. Every single quarter the NAR forecasted that home prices were going to go up the following quarter. As of the last report Q3 2008 (Q4 not released yet), median home prices has fallen 43%, and yet they keep forecasting a rise in prices and keep telling the public to buy now.

Look, I'm a proud member of the NAR and have been for nealy 10 years, and I plead to my brethren to please stop feeding BS to the public, tell them what's really going on, tell them we're probably not going to pull out of this in the next 12 months, and then COUNCIL them on their options and give them choices with THEIR best interest in mind.