Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Correction: 8.1% of Birmingham homes for sale

Our friend, real estate agent Maureen Francis, writes:

Last night, I was watching the Birmingham City Commission meeting on Comcast, and Mayor Tom McDaniel misquoted a statistic that was wrong in the first place. He stated that "10% of Birmingham homes are in foreclosure." He was quickly corrected, or quickly corrected himself, and changed his statement to "10% of the homes in Birmingham are for sale." Neither statement is correct.

I am assuming his source of information is a factually incorrect post on the Birmingham Buzz, which claimed that 11% of Birmingham is for sale based on statistics found on Realtor.com.

Some real estate brokerages in Birmingham use two multiple listing services, MiRealSource and Realcomp. If a home is entered into both MLSs, then it appears twice on Realtor.com, thus falsely inflating the number of homes on the market. Realcomp is clearly the MLS service provider-of-choice for Birmingham brokerages, and if one wants correct market statistics, Realcomp should be the source of information.

I checked Realcomp this morning, and found that there are 727 homes and condos for sale in Birmingham. Realcomp's public record data, which is a different database than the MLS information, shows 8,938 households in Birmingham. So the correct percentage of homes for sale in Birmingham would be roughly 8.1%, not 11%.

Thanks, Maureen! We stand corrected.