Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Santa Barbara Realtors 'Refuse' To Share Data
The Santa Barbara News Press ran this report on area home sales. "Home sales across most of Santa Barbara County fell last month, but median prices appear to be holding steady. On the South Coast, which has ranked as the most overpriced home market in the nation this year by at least two research firms, resales for single-family homes were flat in December compared with a year ago, according to data reported to the Santa Barbara MLS. For all of 2005, sales dropped more than 12 percent."
"Since hitting a high of nearly $1.48 million last September, the South Coast median price has retreated and hovered around $1.25 million in the past three months."
The paper dropped this little bombshell in the fourth paragraph. "Over the past several years, the News-Press has obtained sales and median price data for the South Coast from the Santa Barbara Association of Realtors. The group recently told the News-Press that it now refuses to make this data available to the newsroom. Other associations of Realtors across the county willingly continue to share sales and price information with the paper."
A big thanks to the reader who sent this in. I'm still wondering if it's not some kind of mistake.
ReplyDeletePlease! This country is founded on freedom. They want to censor it like some old communist block country. They would be better of taking a training class for a job in another industry. I guess it just got ugly, too ugly to show the public. Look for desperate real estate related industies become more and more blatantly underhanded.
ReplyDeleteAre they exercising the old rule that "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"?
ReplyDeleteWow, Maoism in Santa Barbara!
ReplyDeleteI hope the Realtors® share their precious data with the appraisers.
ReplyDeleteWow, things must have really fallen off a cliff in SB if they are refusing to release these routine figures.
ReplyDeleteMore grist for the mill...
Auction Heaven: Thanks for following up on this. I hope their policy change starts putting the spot light on the overall situation.
ReplyDeleteData supression and modification has been getting out of control. We've already had reports of some papers repeating sales between week to week (or month to month) to pad out stats. I wish I could locate hard evidence of this.
The only hard evidence I have are the realtor solications I get or mostly use to get. I was hammered by several realtors with listings and sales prices. They altered the template so it would just say list price or sold price instead of BOTH. But now they stopped sending me things.
I've only gotten two postcards from the same realtor team lately and they just say 123 Main St SOLD! This team use to send out 123 Main St SOLD for $570K, List $545K. It changed to 123 Main St SOLD for $530K. Now it only says 123 Main St SOLD!
How to Contact 20/20
ReplyDeletehttp://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123566&page=1
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123566&page=1
ReplyDeleteHow to Contact 20/20 with story ideas
Jasunnyout look said...
ReplyDelete"Getting rid of the housing info seems to follow the same logic for getting rid on the M3 info(although we never got a reason from the FEDS). Looks like the future is brewing up a perfect storm not just for housing but many areas of the market."
I couldn't agree more!!!!!
Some of the issues on the horizon:
(1) Enormous U.S. Trade Deficit
(2) Massive Debt(currently default)
(3) Severe Oil supply issues
(4) World-Wide Housing Bubble
(5) New U.S. Fed Chairman
(6) Stock Market Bubble
(7) Derivitives Bubble
(8) Negative US savings rate
(9) Tremendous Consumer Debt
(10)Rising Inflation
(11)Loss of Jobs/Outsourcing
(12)Dollar issues(looming crisis)
(13)Central Bank confidence loss
(14)Corporate Bankruptcies
(15)Pension Crisis (look at PBGC)
(16)Social Security Crisis
(17)Huge personal Bankruptcy #'s
(18)Lack of Gvt fiscal control
(19)Gvt Corruption/special interest
(20)Complete denial of issues
(21)Irrational exuberance
(22)Ignorant/oblivious Americans
(23)I could go on....
Botom Line: I'm sorry to say that I believe the final result, from many of these issues, will make 1929 look like a walk in the park...
http://economicrot.blogspot.com/2005/12/housing-bubble-much-bigger-than.html
I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade here, but "sales and median price data" should be available from the county registrar. Certainly the sales data is, and anyone can calculate the median price from the sales data.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, does anyone really trust data from the realtors? Why do news reporters depend on the salesmen to give them correct numbers in the first instance?
Unless, of course, one believes that the data reported to the county is falsified. But are the salesmen to be trusted to report the data more accurately than the tax collectors?
If the newsmen are counting on the data from the salesmen to be accurate, and are not at least double-checking the data with the county, who is being irresponsible here? Would you expect newsmen to dig deeper than merely parroting numbers provided by their advertisors? I would.
This whole thing smells bad to me.
In the public(M3) and private(supply data) sectors transparency is losing the battle against opacity. Maybe as we gaze into the coal mine we should focus our attention on a different bird. Sorry, that was needlessly wordy :)
ReplyDeleteRead about the Federal Reserve's refusal to publish the M3 here
Oh and here is an interesting quote about the Fed while I'm at it.
"The Federal Reserve System virtually controls the nation's monetary system, yet it is accountable to no one. It has no budget, it is subject to no audit, and no Congressional Committee knows of, or can truly supervise its operations."
Keep in mind that they don't deny that.
bookish betty used to post from Santa Barbara; it's where the (in)famous local liberal Meredith Brace tried to prevent Whites from leaving the schools, only to give up herself in early 2005.
ReplyDeleteHarding Elementary School PTA President Meredith Brace has led a battle for several years to stop her white neighbors from transferring out of the heavily Latino Westside campus.
Now she's joining them, saying she's not willing to make her son the guinea pig any longer.
The Braces are like hundreds of other local families who, over the years, have sought transfers out of neighborhood schools that are filled with mostly poor Latino children.
"I'm gone," said Mrs. Brace, who on Tuesday requested and was granted a transfer for her first-grade son out of Harding and into the more affluent Hope School, within the nearby Hope Elementary District. "I've just got to the point where, 'Sorry guys, I need what's best for my kids and there's a school that's two miles away that offers all those things I want.' ... A liberal whose father is Superior Court Judge George Eskin and stepmother is former Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson, Mrs. Brace had been considered over the years as the Great White Hope for Harding.
Harding is 90 percent Latino, 6 percent white." Read it at http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=86098
Just remember that the real estate industry is not the sole guilty party when it comes to hiding unfavorable numbers.
ReplyDeleteCorporations (e.g., Enron) and the federal government have been doing it for years. We were even led to believe that the federal government had a surplus in the late 1990's. While it is true that the deficit was [i]reduced[/i] in the latter part of the '90's before exploding upward again, there were and still are plenty of off-the-book expenses the federal government "doesn't count" in its books, and the surplus was pretty much an illusion. It's sort of like saying I have a surplus (if I just didn't have to count that pesky rent payment).
These are all just more examples of how the herd desperately keeps twiddling the numbers to support the ongoing prevailing very long-term trend, which in this case is bullish. When trouble really starts setting in, all the creative accounting tweaks that were calibrated for a bullish trend then fail to see signs of a change in trend, and then you have the Federal Reserve talking about how the inverted yield curve is a "conundrum", or you have realtors refusing to release numbers, or you have a company like Enron implode, or some other revelation showing that the trend cheerleaders don't want to deal with the change.
shameonlyingagents.
ReplyDeleteThe best place to track the MLS for free is ZIPREALTY.com
ziprealty updates from the MLS multiple times per day. Realtor.com only does it a few times a week (I heard Wednesday was the main day).
I quit using realtor.com to track real estate because I find that ziprealty is much more accurate, and provides more property info...like the date listed!
SoCalMtgGuy
Another F@CKED Borrower
ajn,
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't happen to be that house on San Simeon Dr., right?
Golden Eagle,
ReplyDeleteLOL! Your comment made my day! Yes, perhaps Katherine Ross is the scared, suspicious home buyer, and all those angry people are realtors and media talking heads and bubble cheerleaders, and Dustin Hoffman is in the role of the bubble buster.
(Actually, I heard when I was young that that final scene was filmed in a town out in the San Gabriel Valley - San Dimas.)
We vacationed in Santa Barbara last summer and thought it was a beautiful town. We admired the homes in the foothills near where we hiked - and wondered what all these people do for a living. Also wondered about the smaller, older homes close to downtown. Overall, it didn't seem to be as active a market as my home market.
The comments on the board about Santa Barbara being like a third world country where one has the wealthy class, and where the middle class is squeezed out, can apply to probably a lot of places in California, at least.
South Bay Beaches Housing Bubble
Beartopia
It's hard to understand Santa Barbara because it has changed so much so many times. My brother in law and his wife live on 2 acres on the coast in Montecito across from the polo grounds. He's an electrician. When I evacuated the East Coast in th early 80s I rode my motorcycle cross country and could pick anywhere I wanted to live. Santa Barbara was my second choice behind Ventura. By 1990 or so the joke was; "Santa Barbara, home to the newly wed and nearly dead." The newly wed then are the middle agers sitting on million dollar nest eggs. The nearly dead, died and the estates were sold to the ultras. Oprah paid $50m for her piece. Nowadays you work for a living you work in SB and commute from VenCo or SLO. There is no functioning middle class left.
ReplyDeleteC.A.R.:
ReplyDeleteC ommunist
A pparatchik
R acketeers