During his tenure as Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors (NAR), David Lereah published the infamously titled “Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust.” Since parting way with NAR and Move Inc., however, Mr. Lereah has had an epiphany: not only has the boom busted, but it’s going to get worse.
∙ It’s Going to Get Worse [Newsweek]
oh man! i believed this guy too! i went out and bought a few homes because he told me the market would never turn. i thought real estate would go up in price for the rest of my life. man, i’m having a tough time. a similar thing happened to me when i bought about $50K worth of tech stocks before the boom. my financial adviser told me they were a sure bet. so, i don’t have a stock portfolio and my houses are worthless; what am i to do?
Oh ya, no BS from this guy!
“He, like other prognosticators (including Greenspan), points to his lack of understanding of the profound effects that subprime lending was having on housing markets.”
WTF? Im in retail and even a dumb-ass like ME could see what effect it was having!!!! My God, what credibility gap? I despair, I really do.
BWAAAAAAAHahahahahahaha … BWAAAAAAAHahahahahahaha!!!
I don’t have the attention span to read the whole article, because I’m an incredible idiot – he does point out that SF is immune in there, right? I guess it doesn’t matter much if he neglected to mention it. It’s probablly one of those things that goes without saying.
What an opportunistic schmuck…and now a turncoat stating the obvious. How worthless.
Good thing for the NAR that they managed to clone him before he became a liability.
Now they have Lawrence Yun to tell us that:
“As anticipated, we continue to look for a soft first half of the year, for both housing and the economy, before notable improvements in the second half,”
1 – The story was the same thing last year (therefore the “anticipated” part is a bit unlikely)
2 – For the NAR, the turnaround is always 6 months away, year after year after year.
From last year:
4/3/08
——
“Problems in the subprime mortgage market will become more apparent over time, and they will modestly depress the overall level of improvement in existing-home sales we expect as the year progresses,”
http://www.realtor.org/press_room/news_releases/2007/phs_feb07_show_effects_of_weather
5/1/07:
——-
“Home sales will be relatively sluggish in the second quarter, but a modest uptrend should resume during the second half of this year.”
http://www.realtor.org/press_room/news_releases/2007/phs_mar07_pending_home_sales
‘nuf said
Yes, don’t bother to read the entire article and digest the information.
Note that the closing summary is – “So even if this slump remains far from over, David Lereah still thinks it may be a smart time to buy.”
Gotta love a guy that puts his money where his mouth is.
This guy has always been wrong…..
New campaign from NAR “David Lereah said “Don’t buy”. So, this a good time to buy..” and ofcourse on top it “Interest rates are too low and there are many homes to choose from..”
Wow. Well, a fellow’s gotta make a buck. Cash is king in a recession after all. LOL. Shameful.
I was more interested in the link to the new Barney Frank-authored bill that passed Sunday. Wonder what will happen there.
I believe Smarty was being sarcastic.
Lereah became a laughingstock as NAR’s “economist,” joined Move Inc. just in time for it to run into the ground, and now is a consultant to the RE industry. What a country.
Fluj. Heard on NPR this morning that Bush will not sign the Frank bill. Cant believe I would ever say this: I agree with Bush!
Bail out is wrong. Market needs to find the bottom on its own and not have it propped up by taxpayers.
“Gotta Make a Buck” should replace “the Voice of Real Estate” as NAR’s motto.
David–sell now or be priced in forever!
It’s actually quite disturbing to see that guy getting some neutral to positive press. Good to know people in the media. I love the quote – “He didn’t pick the title of the book”. Now that is funny!
What’s funny is that Realtor.org has removed the links to Lereah’s most laughable 2005 presentations.
If David Lereah is turning bearish, then I’m jumping ship and becoming a bull.
that guy is almost ALWAYS wrong.
🙂
1. Lereah is making a call that prices are now headed lower, so this is probably a good contrarian indicator that it is indeed a good time to buy.
2. Socketsite continues its practice of cherry picking bearish “news” (if Lereah quotes can actually be considered news). Two articles yesterday in the WSJ were passed over in favor of this piece.
In one of the WSJ articles, none other than Karl Case (of Case/Shiller, whose graphs are plastered here every month) says, “It is really remarkable how much where we are today looks like the bottom we’ve had in the last three cycles. Every time we’ve gone below a million starts, the market has cleared at that moment. It’s bottom-fishing time, I think. There’s got to be bargains in Florida, Arizona and Nevada.”
Nobody said that this site has to be balanced. I give it credit for the counter-industry spin. We’ve suffered through that for years in the MSM… But this site seems to ‘talk its book’ too. Everyone is guilty of it but the readership should consider this if they are really trying to make real estate decisions.
I am not a realtor. I do own a place in the city. I’m not saying that it’s a good or bad time to buy. Feel free to pile on…
I don’t understand the point of being “anonymous” or “anon” in an already anonymous forum, but whatever.
Yeah Britt, Bush is probably goint to veto the Frank bill. In fact he has probably veto’d everything Barney Frank has ever authored. In this case I can definitely see why he would do it. Any conservative would. And Bush wants the conservatives back in lieu of McCain. I’m sort of inclined to agree too, even though if made law it could benefit me personally.
Socketsite is a solidly nonpartisan RE site. The opinions of the posters are just that, and opinions /= editorial policy (just as post count /=authority).
Socketsite and its internet brethren deserve a tremendous amount of credit for breaking trad. media’s information monopoly. I’ve been in the RE business (no, not selling it) through multiple downturns and this is the first that’s been detailed statistically in real time for the public with a record of the supposed “experts” available for judgment. Without S-Site and the more critical blogs, these “experts” might still be taken seriously http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20051215-9999-1b15outlook.html
Partisan and bias are not the same thing.
So you’re saying Socketsite is biased?
BTW,
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/partisan
or were you thinking of parmigian?
…. and thesauruses are not dictionaries
From Webster: 1: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance
And bias, 3 a: bent, tendency b: an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice c: an instance of such prejudice d (1): deviation of the expected value of a statistical estimate from the quantity it estimates (2): systematic error introduced into sampling or testing by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over others
Socket is biased and still you’re willing to give them credit by posting there?
I guess it’s not as boring as TheFrontSteps with its constant SFAR cheer. They could take the SFARMLS and repost it word by word, no-one would see the difference.
S.S. is biased, sure. “Biased” does not mean “not valuable to fluj.”
If you are incapable of perceiving bias in the way SS frames its news clippings then you …. oh you know what? I’m not going to categorize what you are or aren’t if you can’t do that. Everyone can.
Sure, the frontsteps has a 180 degree different sort of bias. Big deal. It’s also another good site. Your characterization of how the front steps could take the SFARMLS and repost it in fact betrays your own bias.
Here is a pretty sad story. While my cleaner is mopping up on a REO property I’ve purchased, she came upon this book in a closet somewhere. I’m sure the previous owner would like to have a few words with David for providing false hope.
I’ll avoid defining “synonym.” At least my statement regarding post count and authority got by.
Bias is a funny thing,
In alio pediculum, in te ricinum non vides
One of the funniest things about this clown is that his book, that magnum opus titled, “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?: The Boom Will Not Bust and Why Property Values Will Continue to Climb Through the End of the Decade – And How to Profit From Them” is now on sale at Amazon for 35 cents per copy, used:
http://www.amazon.com/Are-Missing-Real-Estate-Boom/dp/0385514344/ref=sr_1_1/102-3136646-6372952?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210192022&sr=1-1
Luckily all bubbles are local. Hey, what’s another word for thesaurus?
whatever. you start with a thesaurus and then you wonder if I know what a synonym is. And you feel the need to use Latin for some reason.
It’s plain what it is. Bias can be milder than partisan. Partisan cannot be milder than bias. They are not the same, and that is what I said.
Authors do not, in fact, always pick the title of their own book. My wife has a novel coming out next year from Penguin, and they modified the title she had proposed. They showed us two minor variations on the cover, but the decision there was also up to the publisher. The title, like the jacket and the blurbs, are all considered part of the marketing package and may be controlled by the publisher unless the author has lots of pull.
TheFrontSteps bores me very deeply. Maybe I’m biased. I’d never buy a newspaper with only good news in it. It’s called a Chronicle RE advertising supplement.
About bias vs. partisan, a very interesting argument.
On the web, I think you can’t really be biased without being a bit partisan. People who post 55%/45% pieces don’t get read or don’t get replied to. They just go somewhere else where they can make better use of their time.
The extreme views in the MBs is the reason why Yahoo News stopped the regular Message Boards a few years back. Only the most extreme and vocal survived and that made for very improductive cockfights.
The extreme views in the MBs is the reason why Yahoo News stopped the regular Message Boards a few years back. Only the most extreme and vocal survived and that made for very improductive cockfights.
Such is free speech. They replaced it with Yahoo Answers, which is a watered down, Disneyfied version of the Internet, mostly inhabited by young teens. Not an improvement, in my book.