WSJ: New Analysis Finds Housing Crash Worse Than Advertised
A downward revision of existing home sales may show the housing slump has been even deeper than originally thought, The Wall Street Journal reported. A new survey suggests the housing crisis was so disruptive to the flow of market information it led the National Association of Realtors (NAR), long considered the leading authority, to overstate sales of previously owned homes by millions of units.
“This is an economic data issue, not a gaming-the-numbers issue,” said Sam Khater, a senior economist at CoreLogic, a real-estate analytics firm that revisited the NAR numbers and says they could be inflated by as much as 20 percent. “Any time you get big shifts in the market, the numbers go haywire for a bit."
NAR, using a sample of overall sales data, reported 4.9 million purchases of previously owned homes in 2010, 5.7 percent fewer than the 5.1 million sold in 2009. CoreLogic, tracking property records in court, found fewer purchases across the board and a bigger year-to-year drop: 3.3 million existing home sales in 2010, 10.8 percent fewer than the 3.7 million sold in 2009.
An NAR economist said the association is studying the CoreLogic numbers “very carefully.”
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