BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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click
here.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
The housing market is hot! No,
it's cold! The Wicked
Good Conference has picked
up something I missed completely. The Globe today reports that
home sales last month soared
through the roof; the Herald says they cratered
through the floor.
"Shoddy reporting or what?" asks
Beso at the WGC.
Actually not, at least by my quick
read of the two stories. The problem is that the papers relied on
different experts. The Globe led with Wayne Ayers, chief
economist at FleetBoston Financial Corporation. The Herald
leaned mainly on Karl Case, an economics professor at Wellesley
College.
The Globe also bases its
optimism on a comparison of September's sales figures with those of
September 2002. The Herald's gloomy assessment comes from
comparing September's sales to the August numbers.
The question is, don't economists
agree on which is the more valid comparison? Why are Ayers and Case
so far apart in their assessments? And whom is the reader to
trust?
The Herald provides a clue
at the bottom of its report, noting the improvement over September
2002 and quoting Massachusetts Association of Realtors president
Peter Casey as saying, "It's a very, very positive market for both
buyers and sellers."
That leads me to suspect that the
optimistic view is the more valid.
posted at 4:15 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
