Most consider President’s Day weekend as the official start of the spring housing season.

There is, therefore, no more crucial time than now to have reliable data at our disposal for home sales, prices and inventories.

How else do buyers, sellers and investors know how to proceed? Unfortunately, the housing crash itself has undermined the veracity of those readings.

With the boom and the bust came the attention. Housing brought our economy down, and in doing so, boosted itself to the headlines. As with any big story, a cottage industry sprang up around it. Data providers came out of the woodwork, and as online sale and foreclosure web sites proliferated, so too did their ability to add to that data pool. The result is double edged: On the downside, some data providers are less-than accurate, but on the upside, their sheer numbers provide a system of checks and balances, tempering the most outrageous assertions.

So it seems sort of appropriate that today, as a new controversy swarms around potential errors in home sales figures from the National Association of Realtors, the exalted and much-contested SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index is released.

It reports that home prices are dangerously close to an official double dip. Other data providers have been asserting recently that SP/Case-Shiller is too bullish (and of course too bearish).

Page 1 of 3 | Next Page
Show Entire Article

Warren Buffett: ‘My Trigger Finger is Itchy’ for Major Acquisitions

Obama says government shutdown imperils economy

Suddenly, a Rise in Piracys Price

Week Ahead: Oil Will Steer Stocks, but Jobs Report and Bernanke on Tap

Nintendo 3-D Handheld Goes on Sale in Japan

More Top Stories

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/41719022?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS