Consumer Reports Flawed Realtor Survey

There has been a lot going around about a recently published consumer reports survey of home buyers and sellers. I take these type of surveys with a grain of salt, but I don’t ignore them, especially when the information provided is so obviously incorrect.

The survey says:

Most people still close the deal. Eighty-six percent of our readers who put their homes on the market made a sale; only 8 percent of would-be sellers eventually gave up and took their homes off the market.

Wrong. No way. I don’t believe it. National sales data completely controverts this bogus figure of 8%. In Austin TX, one of the best markets in the country, in my June stats, you’ll see that 37% of the listings removed from the MLS in June failed to sell. There is no way that only 8% of sellers in a nationwide survey failed to sell their homes.

For crying out loud, over 30% over all homes sold in California through the MLS recently are foreclosures. The former owners of those homes were certainly unable to sell. I don’t know what sort of methodology Consumer Reports used, but they screwed this up. It’s so far fetched a number that, for me personally, it means the rest of the survey can be tossed in the garbage. But before we do that, let’s see what else they got wrong.

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