Meet Lawrence Yun, the Managing Director of Quantitative Research at the National Association of REALTORS®. He’s sort of the main spokesman for the NAR. He manages the Statistics and Forecasting Groups of the NAR’s Research Division.
Judging from all the bad rap he gets from housing-bubble bloggers, he must be the most despised spokesperson in America today. There even is a “Lawrence Yun Watch” blog, entirely dedicated to ridiculing whatever Lawrence Yun says-- or sometimes what he fails to say-- regarding the housing market and the state of the US economy. In that blog, there's a graph showing what the blogger claims is a compilation of Yun's lies since he joined the NAR in May, 2007, when he replaced David Lereah, an equally controversial NAR chief economist who was at bloggerheads with bubble bloggers. In Housing Panic, another LawrenceYunWatch sister blog on the net, the title of one particularly venomous post reads like this:
To understand what roils so many bloggers and drives them to the edge, one needs only to take a look at what Dr. Yun writes in Real Estates Insights , one of his association’s many websites. The claims he usually makes, from his reading of the economic reports to his opinions and his forecasts regarding the state of the US economy and the future of housing, flies straight in the face of everything the bubble bloggers stand for and advocate.
For example, his March analysis was titled: “Bringing Out the Buyers”—a highly provocative title that further underlines what his critics have been saying so loudly: L awrence Yun’s main aim is to continue to lure unsuspecting Americans into buying homes, even when buying at this juncture could be a real gamble with their hard-earned savings.
The animosity runs so deep that some bloggers and many post commentators make racist remarks about Yun's looks and Asian background. It is not a far-fetched idea that, perhaps because of that background, many bubble blogs are also leading an active campaign against China's handling of the Tibet crisis, calling on consumers to boycott Chinese products and the largest stores that import heavily from China, like Wal-Mart. Those same bloggers are also actively pushing for a boycott of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.
Yun writes regular columns on real estate market trends, creates NAR's forecasts, and participates in many economic forecasting panels, including Blue Chip and Harvard University Industrial Economist Council. He was recently chosen by USA Today as one of the top ten business forecasters in the US.
Dr. Yun has been quoted on the real estate market and the economy in the mass media, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg TV. Dr. Yun received his undergraduate degree from Purdue University and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park.
It is not known how much dissuasion power there is in the hands of Bloggers who are actively posting articles and comments, warning against "catching a falling guillotine.” But it looks like the daily shove-and-tug exercise between NAR’s Yun and the bubble bloggers will continue as long as L. Yun continues to be the mouthpiece of the NAR.
The question now is: why attack someone whose job is to put a positive spin on those recurring bad housing news in the US? Lawrence Yun is doing his job, and his is no different than that of any of those spokespersons at the White House, the Department of State, and the Pentagon. They all have been hired for a certain talent most other people don’t possess: telling a lie when having to, but without the risk of being caught.
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