Patterns

What's a Real Estate Institute president to do? A 20 year low in house sales, housing finance regressing nearly as far, and prices showing the worst falls in the country. What's the solution to such a problem when your members are leaving the industry and queuing up to sell flat screens again? Distraction! Talk the unquantifiable data outside the date range of the stinky figures you've just released, of course. 




Dealing with an inattentive media is always a bonus. They don't ask questions, just repeat your choice quotes.  Sometimes dealing with such sleepwalkers can be frustrating, being so desperate to write their own nonsense angle they can derail your own narrative, as The Mercury's Meryl Naidoo proves when referencing figures from the September quarter...

INTEREST rate cuts have failed to rally homebuyers in Tasmania as sales plummeted across the state.

Now I had to take my socks off to do it, but I think the September quarter ends at the end of, well, September. And that interest cut(s) I believe it happened in November. November comes after September, I think. Hang on I'll check my toes again.

But onto REIT prez, Adrian, or for the purposes of coolness, A Kelly...  

...he predicted the figures would improve in the next quarter.

"Most Tasmanian agents are now reporting a substantial increase in sales over the past six to eight weeks and we expect this trend to continue into the new year," he said.

Impossible to fault the man for his game. It's the end of November and we're getting September quarter figures from the REIT now. The December quarter doesn't end until the end of, hang on socks off again, yep, December. And when will the REIT pop off with those figures - late February 2012.

Even with a non alcoholic festive season, I'd be hard pressed to remember anything I read back on November 29, 2011. But being pathological, I'll seemingly hunt these things down again and again and again.

So what was A Kelly saying back in early September when he felt the need to correct some scary sounding RP Data stats...

"From what I have seen and from speaking to our members, there has been an increase in sales and buyer activity over the last three to four weeks," he said.

"So the RP Data figures do not paint an accurate picture of what is happening here."

Sounds pretty exciting. It really sets the mood, that September quarter must be a hot piece of action. I can't wait to pull the panties off this hot little number, when she's ready, of course.

Market data released yesterday by the Real Estate Institute of Tasmania...

She's ready, so let's start loosening that belt...

shows there was a 3.2 per cent reduction in house sales for the September quarter on the previous quarter and a 4.8 per cent drop in sales for the year.

Oh it's a dude!

Institute president Adrian Kelly said the median house price had fallen 3.2 per cent to $295,100 for the quarter.

And it's got really hairy balls!

I don't know who I should be most disappointed in, myself? I'm back for one blog post and I've already resorted to a tranny joke. Certainly not A Kelly, asking a real estate agent not to spruik is akin to asking a chimpanzee not to throw faecal matter in your direction. Meryl Naidoo and The Mercury should be the recipients of any and all Sandilands like fury here.

Not understanding November comes after September, that can be forgiven. Some kid at the local primary school can show you what a calendar is. But to continue giving the REIT unfettered access to a wide audience to trumpet their horse shit stories only shows you up as a bunch of lazy buffoons. It takes five seconds to type Adrian Kelly into The Mercury's search function and even less time to find and click on the last time he talked about how awesome his unquantifiable past few weeks were.

Any chance you could read his quotes back to him? Maybe ask how his released figures never reached the zenith of the awesomeness he predicted back in the middle of that quarter?

There's always February.