Remember the Chamber of Commerce and local realtors insulting our intelligence the week before last when they tried to justify calling for a moratorium on development regulations by, among other things, saying that the decline in zoning board cases was due to the "difficulty in doing business here" and conveniently forgetting that we’re in an epic credit crunch?  Well, today brings us a whole new case of what I’ll call "Realtor Reality."  From today’s Winston-Salem Journal article titled July Home Sales Fall:

In Forsyth County, the housing market is not as bad as some parts of
the country, said Julie Poplin, the president of the Winston-Salem
Regional Association of Realtors.

She said that comparing July 2008 to July 2007 is skewed because last year was an abnormally good year for the local market.

"We are getting back to a more normal marketplace," she said. "We’re
flat, but that’s not a bad thing. The good news is that we are having
sales, and that’s great."

At Allen Tate Realtors where Poplin is a broker, Poplin said that
brokers are active but having a lot of trepidation because of news
reports about overall woes in the housing market. But they are busy and
finding creative ways to market homes.

"They are really working hard for every deal," she said.

Poplin advises sellers to have their houses competitively priced and be ready to move.

"But if you are a buyer, you need to take advantage of these
interest rates before they go up, and they will be going up," she said.

I tell you what, they must be serving some mighty fine happy juice over there at Allen Tate.  I mean what she’s saying is akin to saying, "Well you just totaled your car and had both your legs and one arm amputated, but we’ve seen cases similar to this where people have lost all their extremities and gone blind and deaf too, so in the grand scheme of things you’re not doing too bad."

If you want to be more honest about local real estate you should say this: "Well, in the Triad we’ve suffered through agonizing economic times while the rest of the country experienced unbelievable growth, thus we never had a real estate bubble.  Heck, we didn’t even have a real estate burp so you could say that we didn’t have as far to fall. Yet we’ve fallen anyway.  Yeah for us!"

Her statement that 2007 was an abnormally good year for the local market has me curious as to what her frame of reference is.  Abnormally good compared to the last five years?  Ten years?  Twenty years?  I mean we’ve been bleeding jobs around here for over a decade, and when the rest of the country had houses appreciating at incredible rates each year while ours inched up incrementally.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a report on real estate from 1997-2007 prepared by Donald Jud, who was also interviewed for the story in the Journal (and I’d guess he wouldn’t necessarily agree with Ms. Poplin’s view of the situation). And I quote:

Since the 1st quarter of 1997, existing home prices in the Triad have risen at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, outpacing the consumer price index (CPI) which has increased an average of 2.5 percent annually. The appreciation of housing prices in the Triad has lagged substantially the rise in housing prices nationally. For the nation as a whole, existing home prices have risen at a 7.6 percent annual rate from 1997.1 through the 4th quarter of 2006, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO).

In short our houses appreciated at less than half the rate of the average of the rest of the country.  You don’t want to know how far we lagged behind hot markets like Washington, DC, California, etc.  So if you want to say that 2007 was better than we’d had for the last five or ten years, then well I guess you could be right.  Or not.

If 2007 was such an abnormally good year, how much better was it than 2006?  Let’s see what the report says…seasonally adjusted home values increased 4% so that’s good, but on the other hand the number of homes sold decreased by .1%, the time on market increased by 9.8% and the spread between the list and sales price decreased .8%.  Abnormally good?

Now in her defense maybe she was just referring to July existing home sales so if you go to this page on the Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors statistics page with links to all the monthly reports and compare all the July reports you can see that indeed July 07 had higher sales than July 06 by about 6%, and that 2006 was significantly higher than the previous few years and that July 08’s numbers are back in the range of 05 and before.  Still, that doesn’t mean that 07 was great, just that it and 06 weren’t as crappy as the last decade or more.  And that’s just looking at the number of houses sold, not things like price, time on market and spread.

The best you could say is that we might have gone from really miserable in the early ’00s to kind of miserable in the last couple of years and are now returning to really miserable status.  Not a real comforting thought unless of course you live in Realtor Reality Land.

Disclaimer: I have a few friends who are realtors and brokers.  They are smart people who see through un-tinted glasses and I hereby officially exclude them from the Kool-Aid bunch who live in Realtor Reality Land.