The questions keep coming …

“Are we in a recession?” “Aren’t we expected to make a lowball offer?” “Will we get our money back if we sell in two years?” “Won’t we make $100000 on this flip in just two months like they do on TV?”

Okay, so maybe I haven’t gotten that last question - at least not phrased like that - but everything else is verbatim. Plenty of mixed signals floating around about the real estate market, and it’s understandable that people have questions.

Making matters worse, Scott Rogers posted links to posts entitled “The Recession That Never Was Is Now Over“, and “Is Housing Slump At A Bottom?“. I point these out not because I think Scott shouldn’t have posted them, I just think that both posts make strong arguments to at least make you consider that perhaps times they are a changin’. For instance, the post “Is Housing Slump At A Bottom” makes the argument that new housing starts slumped below the one million mark in March. Historically, every time that’s happened in the last 50 years, it’s been at the bottom of a recession. It’s hard to argue with history - as a friend of mine says, “hindsight is 40/40″. Yea, she’s like me, she was never good with numbers.

I do think there are concerns that need to be addressed. Dependence on foreign oil, uncertainty overseas, among other things, compounded by a constant barrage of negativity and fear in the mainstream consciousness, have people scared. These things need to be addressed in order to begin an upswing in confidence, IMO.

One thing I DON’T understand is how we hear about massive layoffs in industries like auto and manufacturing, yet GDP is up. Wouldn’t conventional wisdom say that by laying off in massive quantities, and exporting goods and jobs out of the country, that GDP would go DOWN? In the last three years, Volvo has announced layoffs of 1000, 650 and 1100 personnel in their Dublin, VA factory, for instance - incidentally, it’s the largest truck manufacturing facility in the world. I’ve got to imagine that production in the plant slowed down accordingly, not increased … I didn’t do well in Economics, for sure, but what am I missing here?

Admittedly, our National Association has been taken a beating of late for its adjusting and re-adjusting (and re-re-adjusting) of its 2007 homes sales forecasts. That, along with the seeming “It’s Always Sunny in Real Estate” spin that many critics read into the latest iteration of its public awareness initiative, have gotten us to the point that many in the press and the RE.net are questioning NAR’s credibility, both as a distiller of housing industry economic data and a truth teller when it comes to what’s really in consumers’ best interests in today’s real estate markets.

While NAR (or VAR either, for that matter) is not above criticism, there are always (at least) two sides to every story. There are even multiple facets to the same story. And there are certainly multiple ways of collecting and analyzing data, and multiple, sometimes contradictory, conclusions that can be drawn from that analysis. I’ll not belabor the point, except to say this: In particular, I believe that NAR’s Chief Economist Lawrence Yun has gotten a bad rap for what some see as his too-rosy forecasts and well-spun public comments about the health of the real estate economy.

Thankfully, he now has a new platform for explaining himself and the inner workings of NAR’s econometrics, and it’s worth a read. It’s not a blog (yet), but NAR has begun to post commentaries by Yun at realtor.org behind the “research” tab. In particular, his recent post on some of the reasons for divergent home price trends is a spin-free, must-read.

I’m glad Lawrence is finding his voice. He’s a fresh, thoughtful, truth-telling asset to NAR. Would that more in the media (and, yes, the real estate blogosphere) were as thoughtful.

Now if they’d just turn his commentaries into a blog, we could all comment….

(I’m told Lawrence’s commentaries will be posted with some frequency at http://www.realtor.org/research, in case you want to bookmark it.)