Chicago Tribune: Realty trade group overreported Chicago home prices

Chicago Tribune reporter Mary Ellen Podmolik has apparently caught the Illinois Association of Realtors publishing misleading information about condo prices in Chicago over the last one to three years. Maybe even longer.

The Illinois Association of Realtors said Monday that the median price it reported for home sales within the city of Chicago was inflated in May and mistakes in its reports may go back more than three years...The state Realtors' group acknowledged the errors after the Tribune, acting on a tip, questioned the accuracy of the May report. The group believes median prices for both condos and detached single-family homes sold within the city contain errors..."It's not just May," said Mary Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Association of Realtors, adding that the mistakes appear to go back at least through January. "We're trying to figure out where the bug occurred. We should have caught it. We pride ourselves on having accurate data. We want to make sure there is 100 percent clean data."

The size of the Realtors' errors is statistically significant, at least based on the May median price for condo sales wtihin the city. In its official report that has now been discredited, the trade group previously said that the median price of an existing condo sold in Chicago in May was $299,000, compared with $271,150 recorded in May 2010. In fact, the median price was $243,000, compared to a year-ago price of $265,000, according to data from Midwest Real Estate Data LLC, the multiple listing service for the Chicago area.

Frugal Ben does not like articles about quantitative information that bury the numbers in text. Here is a table which extracts data from the Tribune article to summarize its conclusions: