Cheapest Homes in 40 Years? Not Even Close

Written By: Barry Ritholtz  |  Posted: Thursday, May 19th, 2011

            I have been wanting to discuss a horrifically misleading article found in Businessweek for a week now: Americans Shun Cheapest Homes in 40 Years as Ownership Fades.

            It is an object lesson in how an industry spokesgroup, engaging in biased analysis, used poor econometric models to create misleading data. That led to others making bad assumptions based on that data, which in turn leads to an unsupported conclusions. To wit, that home prices are now cheap (they are not) and home ownership is being shunned (it is not). Thus, the end result is a misleading Bloomberg.com article on residential Real Estate that is unfortunately based on these terribly flawed NAR metrics.

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