What does the downward revision by NAR to existing home sales really mean
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) today revised downward existing home sales by 14.3 percent from 2007 through 2010. Two unfortunate results will probably be the loss of a little credibility for NAR along with screaming headlines in the media that the housing downturn was even worse than previously reported.
The revision was due to both growth of local MLS systems coverage area causing multiple sales to be reported and declining sales by FSBO's which are not reported to the MLS. The NAR uses a modeling program to estimate existing home sales and that diverged over time. But for readers of this blog who count on the monthly Charleston real estate market report, those statistics are not affected by the NAR downward revision since sales are based on reported sales to the Charleston MLS by its members, not estimates.
Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist for the NAR explained, “From a consumer’s perspective, only the local market information matters and there are no changes to local multiple listing service (MLS) data or local supply-and-demand balance, or to local home prices,”
And there is a little bit of good news from today's existing home sales report with sales in November 4 percent higher than October and 12.2 percent higher than November of last year.
Photo (adapted) courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons by opensourceway