Meaningless Averages

When real estate professionals get together, you know that numbers and statistics will come up. At a meeting in Scottsdale, John Featherston, President and CEO of RISMedia,Inc., said that 500,000 – that's more than 1/3 - of the 1.3 million Realtors® have never done even one transaction! Small wonder that the old 80/20 rule – 80% of the transactions done by 20% of the agents – is now more like 93/7.

This is a good example of why averages are useless. And it applies to realtors, housing prices, time on market, weather, you name it. The go-getters will go and get, and they are the 7% at the top of the heap. The people who "got into real estate" in the last couple of years to make a quick buck are still sitting around waiting for those big checks. Soon they'll move on to some other "easy money" job and skew the averages on that one, too.

Averages make great headlines but they are meaningless. If one person weighs 300 pounds and another weighs 100, they have an average weight of 200 pounds...but so what? If one house in a town sells for $80,000 and another sells for $800,000, the average price is $440,000 - but that doesn't mean the owner of the $80,000 house will get more, or the other guy less. It doesn't change their individual situations, and in real estate and life, it's the individual who counts and who makes a difference.

So glad I'm not average!