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When I was a kid, I was a huge baseball fan, and I played the game, albeit rather poorly, through high school (the highlight of my “athletic career” was throwing a no-hitter at age 16…don’t be impressed…the other team really was that bad).

As a consequence, I read a number of baseball books.  My all-time favorite, hands-down, was “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton.  There is an appendix in that book entitled, “Tell Your Statistics to Shut Up,” in which he basically tries to explain why his weak-looking statistics were not an accurate representation of his skills as a major league pitcher.

And that is EXACTLY what I think *some* Realtors are feeling and saying about the Harris Poll results that are, in my mind, one of the key foundations and motivations for the entire #RTB movement.

SHUT UP.  GO AWAY.  I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT ANYMORE. THOSE NUMBERS ARE WRONG.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the numbers don’t lie.

They are not wrong.

They are correct (within a small degree of what is known as “sampling error;” see more below) for precisely these reasons:

• Statistical sampling is a rigid mathematical process. Click here for a Wikipedia.com crash course.

• Click here for a Wikipedia.com crash course on the Opinion Poll process. Here is an excerpt from this page that talks about sampling error (that is, the small risk that the results are wrong, and the DEGREE to which they can be wrong statistically/mathematically):

Polls based on samples of populations are subject to sampling error which reflects the effects of chance and uncertainty in the sampling process. The uncertainty is often expressed as a margin of error. The margin of error is usually defined as the radius of a confidence interval for a particular statistic from a survey. One example is the percent of people who prefer product A versus product B. When a single, global margin of error is reported for a survey, it refers to the maximum margin of error for all reported percentages using the full sample from the survey. If the statistic is a percentage, this maximum margin of error can be calculated as the radius of the confidence interval for a reported percentage of 50%. Others suggest that a poll with a random sample of 1,000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population. A 3% margin of error means that if the same procedure is used a large number of times, 95% of the time the estimate will be within 3% of the population average. The margin of error can be reduced by using a larger sample, however if a pollster wishes to reduce the margin of error to 1% they would need a sample of around 10,000 people. In practice pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500-1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls.

• Plus, this from Harris Interactive itself: “In theory, with a probability sample of this size, one can say with 95 percent certainty that the overall results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would be if the entire U.S. adult population had been polled with complete accuracy.”

• The polling process relies entirely on the principles outlined in the prior points (as does the auditing process, which is something I did for 10 years before I got into real estate; we made assumptions and drew conclusions about enormous populations of data with relatively small sample sizes which were determined using an analytical tool designed precisely for this purpose; because of my background as a CPA, this issue is near and dear to my accountant/geek side).

The takeaways:

• Even if the Harris Polls were somehow “wrong” (but for 29 straight years? Not likely), they are wrong by very small percentages (that is, 3% or less). So, even if you assume every poll ever conducted was wrong to the maximum extent it was statistically possible TO BE wrong, the results are still weak and disappointing.

• We can try to deny these unfortunate results regarding how the public perceives the real estate industry, OR we can use them as motivation for improvement.

• I am sorry if it feels as if we are beating on this issue. The point isn’t to beat on the issue. The point is to shine a light on the fact that this is not some random “stick your finger in the air” process. There is science behind the Harris Poll results (or any professionally conducted poll, for that matter).

As much as I don’t like these results, they are what they are.  The purpose of #RTB is to turn these poll results around, and to show the public what the real estate profession is capable of accomplishing.

Thank YOU in advance for contributing to this process!  YOU wouldn’t have read this whole post if you didn’t care as much as the rest of the countless wonderful professionals in the real estate industry driving the #RTB conversation forward.

Class dismissed!