More on David Lereah leaving NAR

Brad Inman, the publisher of Inman News, a real estate industry publication/web site posted a bit about David Lereah leaving NAR to head to Move.com. In it Mr. Inman gives a pretty luke-warm farewell to Mr. Lereah and covers some of Mr. Lereah’s time as the Chief Economist at the National Association of Realtors.

The National Assn. of Realtors lost a good man David Lereah this week, though he is staying close to home by moving to Move. Lereah did not get it all right, but who did? If you listened to his words closely, he sent out warnings but he also got caught up in the exuberance.

While I respect Mr. Inman a great deal, I have a problem with this statement. First, I don’t think Mr. Lereah, based on his predictions and estimates on the housing market, can be depicted as anything but at best a Pollyanna, at worst a criminal defrauding millions of Americans. Neither of these two thoughts put David Lereah in my "good man" category. Second, as the Chief Economist he should be able to avoid the exuberance. Economists are not cheerleaders, they are not salesmen, they are not PR people. An economist should be using objective analysis to make sound predictions based on fact – not based on hope.

I believe that NAR and Mr. Lereah bear a large burden in the number of people that they have defrauded by pumping the media full of rosy forecasts, blaming poor numbers on things like "the weather" and as recently as last month promoting "now is a good time to buy" in their advertising campaigns.

I hope that history points to Mr. Lereah as one of the culprits in a situation that could cost millions of Americans their homes – all because he wanted to keep a small, wealthy, ~~cartel~~ trade group of commission-based sales people happy about the dues they have to pay to belong.