NAR housing stats: When good news isn’t so good

I’ve written before about how the National Association of Realtors isn’t necessarily to be trusted to give an accurate picture of the nation’s housing slump. This isn’t a surprise: The association exists to serve real estate agents. Its main goal is to make sure that agents sell more homes.

It makes sense, then, that the association would try to make even the worst news more palatable to the homebuying public.

Here’s what I mean. Check out this story on Realtor.org, the National Association of Realtor’s site designed specifically for real estate agents. You’ll notice that the headline mentions the unavoidable truth that housing sales declined in 2007 across the country. But it also prominently mentions that 2007 saw the fifth-most home sales in history.

That second fact is undeniably true. But the real important news is that the sales of existing homes fell 12.8 percent from 2006 to 2007.

That’s the real news for people trying to sell now. The fifth-highest year for sales? That doesn’t mean much when 2007 was so much worse than 2006 and 2005.